by Dimitri Lascaris
The Green Party of Canada declares that it “begins with the basic premise that all life on the planet is interconnected.” Yet, the Greens’ newly released electoral platform, consisting of eighty-two pages, says remarkably little about Canada’s relationship with the rest of humanity. A mere two pages of that platform, which appear at the very end, are devoted to that subject.
Continue reading Green Party Foreign Policy – ‘Connected’ to NATO and American Imperialism?
In 2016 and 2017 Socialist Action / Ligue pour l’Action socialiste (Canadian state) contributed to the formation of a new revolutionary political current in the Fourth International. It was based on a text which constituted a sound, principled and absolutely necessary challenge to the F.I. leadership’s abandonment of the historic programme of world Trotskyism. Published in six languages, the document gained support by organizations and individuals around the world. Unfortunately, the Platform for a Revolutionary International obtained few votes at the World Congress held in March 2018.
At the SA/LAS convention in Toronto in May 2018 we pledged to continue our close collaboration with our American comrades in Socialist Action (USA), our very good relations with the Fourth International section in Greece, with the comrades of the Anticapitalist and Revolution (AetR) tendency of the New Anticapitalist Party (NPA) in France, with the Revolutionary Left Anti-capitalists (IZAR) in Spain, with Socialist Democracy in Ireland, with the LUS in Mexico, and with co-thinkers in Italy, Denmark, Germany, Sweden, Hong Kong and other countries. Our efforts to participate in the FI as a sympathizing organization, or even to attain observer status, have seemingly reached a dead end. The decision of the 1995 World Congress to include SA/LAS in all F.I. gatherings has been systematically violated. Farcically, the dormant Gauche socialiste in Quebec, which claims to have ten members, remains the official F.I. section in Canada.
Continue reading SA/LAS in Dialog with the Trotskyist Fraction – F.I.
By Barry Weisleder
Should Justin Trudeau resign because he dressed up in blackface and brownface at age 29, when he was a teacher, and earlier, for mocking people of colour and not apologizing for it — until Time magazine exposed him last week?
Well, consider this.
Should Justin have resigned when he amended the law to offer corrupt corporations a Deferred Prosecution Agreement, and leaned on his former Attorney General to let SNC Lavalin off the hook, and then booted her when she refused?
Should Justin have resigned when he spent billions of dollars to buy a leaky pipeline, and pledged to double-track it, against the wishes of Indigenous people whose unceded lands the line traverses?
Should he resign because his policies, including the carbon tax, don’t touch the monopoly power of huge energy corporations, and make a tragic mockery of the modest goals of the Paris Climate Accord?
Should he resign because he blatantly broke his promise that the 2015 federal election would be last ‘first-past-the-post’ vote, to be replaced by a more democratic system of proportional representation?
Should he resign because social inequality has grown, and precarious employment has surged, with no action by his government to make certain that big corporations, giant banks and the super-rich pay significantly more taxes?
Should he resign because he broke the postal workers’ strike in 2018, still hasn’t paid federal public service workers what they are owed, has done nothing to raise the federal minimum hourly wage, or to implement a long-promised national childcare system, or to stop the gouging of consumers by Big Pharma and Big Telecom?
Should he resign because he increased the budget for the Canadian military by 70 per cent, and condones the sale of highly destructive weapons to the authoritarian, misogynist regime in Saudi Arabian, which uses said weapons to perpetrate genocide in Yemen and repression at home?
Should Justin resign because he is waging a one-sided economic war against the democratically elected government of Venezuela, and because Ottawa is a founding member of the Lima Group (which includes repressive, anti-democratic states like Colombia, Guatemala and Honduras) that seek to starve Venezuelans and overthrow their constitutional government? Or because Justin is a prime ally of the Zionist apartheid state and the Hindu chauvinist regime of Narendra Modi in India?
I’d say it was time for Justin Trudeau to resign a long time ago.
But we should be very clear that it is the rotten capitalist system that must go, and not just the pretentious Trudeau.
Paul Le Blanc, Rob Lyons, Matthew Strauss
Preface
With the one-sentence preface “these ten points indicate where my thinking is now on certain questions,” I initiated a tempest in the little teapot of my FaceBook page, although the storm – such as it was – swept through other sites and beyond the virtual reality of the worldwide web.
What generated the debate were ten fairly succinct points on how I felt revolutionary socialists should respond to socialists running on the ballot-line of the Democratic Party (the most famous so far being Congressional representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) and the related question of the Bernie Sanders campaign. Many had assumed I would express “revolutionary rejection” – and the fact that I expressed something different astonished many.
by Gary Porter
The Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS) is a heavily funded spy agency. With a $500 million (CDN) annual budget, it operates gunslinger-style, spying on Canadians and others it considers a security risk, gathering information from the dozens of innocent people their suspects contact, such as friends, relatives, neighbours and co-workers. This information is fed into a data analysis program where CSIS purports to develop an understanding of the lifestyles and personality profiles of “targets”.
CSIS collects intelligence information and conducts open and covert investigations and operations within Canada and abroad. As a measure of their objectivity, in 2017, several CSIS members accused the organization of having a racist and homophobic workplace culture.
Continue reading CSIS Violates Democratic Rights, says BCCLA
