Re-elect Sarah Jama in Hamilton Center!
Why has Premier Ford called an Ontario election 18 months prior to the time specified in law? It is clear he hopes to take advantage of the trade war to portray himself as Captain Canada. In addition, he hopes to divert public anger related to the Greenbelt scandal and rapidly deteriorating housing, transportation, health care, education, environmental conditions, and growing social inequality.
The answer to the tariff war isn’t to give Ford his sought after mandate, or to side with our own capitalists, or rely on limited consumer boycotts; it is to organize unions and communities to demand public ownership, trade diversification, strategic industrialization and further strengthening of labour rights. Strong income supports are immediately needed to ensure that workers and their communities can weather this storm. The situation calls for a Workers’ Agenda, not an orgy of Canadian nationalism.
The Ontario NDP platform correctly identifies many of the key issues in this election, but it is incredibly weak on solutions. The ONDP’s effectiveness as a labour-based party is undermined by the top leadership’s anti-democratic practices (the cancelled provincial convention, exclusion of leftist candidates, expulsion of Sarah Jama from the Caucus, suppression of grassroots organizing and stifling the discussion of the policy platform).
A vote for the NDP is a class vote against the bosses’ parties. Likewise, we advocate union affiliation to the NDP, to strengthen the labour character of the party. Inside the NDP we struggle for socialist policies, internal party democracy, and a Workers’ Agenda including a commitment to mass extra-parliamentary action and democratic methods of engagement.
Socialists oppose the ONDP’s current leadership and their pro capitalist program. We acknowledge that electing the NDP will not lead to socialism. While the NDP as it currently exists cannot be reformed, we will not abandon the NDP as a major political gain for the Canadian working class, nor will we abandon the workers who support it against the ruling class parties.
We fight for a working class program and for workers’ power in all spheres of the class struggle, including within the NDP. We stand with workers in their bureaucratic unions, and in their reformist political party, pointing the way past these limitations — but always with the workers, not preaching to them from the sidelines. The fight for socialist policies in unions and the NDP is critical to the development of a socialist alternative to capitalist rule.
Socialist Action, which is part of Socialist Caucus, calls for critical support for the labour-based NDP without illusions!
Vote NDP — except in Hamilton Center, Re-elect MPP Sarah Jama!
For more information about Socialist Action visit: http://www.socialistaction.ca
For more information about the NDP Socialist Caucus visit: http://www.ndpsocialists.ca