Category Archives: Statements

Canada, Environment, First Nations, Statements

Solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en people against Coastal GasLink, the courts, cops, Trudeau and Horgan

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Socialist Action condemns the outright violation by Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and BC’s NDP Premier John Horgan, of the United Nations’ Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) rules in dealing with the indigenous peoples on resource development projects on Indigenous lands in BC. Those rules establish:

1. Self determination for indigenous peoples, including the absolute right to say NO to capitalist resource projects.

2. The right to Indigenous traditional forms of governance.

3. Control over their own lands and resources.

4. Control over waterways, railways, highways and pipelines on indigenous lands.

5. Freedom from state coercion, violence or invasion.

6. Freedom from the removal by force or otherwise of indigenous children.

In spite of their declared support for UNDRIP, Trudeau and Horgan have violated, or threatened to violate every single one of those provisions. Their policies continue the historic policy of intimidation, force, economic deprivation and imprisonment, to rob the wealth of indigenous lands for wealthy white capitalists at the expense of indigenous men, women and children. It is a vicious and utterly dishonourable history and it must stop NOW.

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Canada, International, Statements

Socialist Action Calls for Immediate Release of Bolivian activists

 
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Socialist Action/Ligue pour l’Action Socialiste joins with Bolivian former president Evo Morales, recently ousted in a military coup, and a broad section of public opinion to call for the immediate release of journalist Carlos Conjeo and artist Leonel Jurado, detained by the Bolivian military. Conjeo and Jurado were postering to publicize an event of solidarity with workers at the Senkata oil refinery, nine of whom were killed by the military as they were striking to protest the coup against the legitimate MAS government.
 
Both Conjeo and Jurado have been charged with sedition. These bogus charges are being used as part of the massive repression unleashed by the coup plotters against the workers and indigenous people of Bolivia, a coup backed by the Trudeau government, in alliance with the dictators and right wing authoritarian governments of the so -called Lima Group.
 
Socialist Action/LAS demands the immediate release of Conjeo, Jurado and all the other political prisoners illegally detained by the police and military agents of the illegitimate coup government. Further, SA/LAS refuses to recognize impunity for the crimes committed by the Bolivian coup government, the military and the police, and will fight for the trial and imprisonment of all those who have participated in the killing, torture and unlawful detention of the Bolivian people. Justice will be done.

SA/LAS calls upon all citizens, and the international left, to raise their voices against the imprisonment of Conjeo and Jurado, and further asks that the embassy and consular staff of Bolivia be contacted demanding the immediate release of all political prisoners, the ending of the repression, and the abrogation of the illegally decreed law of impunity.

 
Free the Political Prisoners. Stop the Repression. No Impunity for crimes against Bolivian workers, indigenous people and young people fighting for their democratic rights.
International, Labour, Statements

Statement of Solidarity concerning comrade postal worker in France, Gael Quirante

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Once again the Post Office in France, backed up by the forces of the French state, is attempting to victimize those who fight for workers and their union rights.
 
Gael Quirante, a leader of the Postal Section 92 workers in the Paris region, has just been sentenced to 3 months jail sentence suspended, 5 years probation, and fined almost 2,000 Euros in total, for his actions in leading a successful year-long strike against La Poste management.
 

The decision of the court, which took just 15 minutes to deliberate, after hearing more than 6 hours of legal argument, is designed to discourage labour unionists like Gael who won’t back down, and who refuse to be bullied.

 
This ruling takes on added importance as the mass struggle against the French government’s attacks on workers’ pensions enters its third week and is experiencing a growing wave of support and mobilization. The French state intends to use trials against labour unionists like Gael to try to dampen enthusiasm for the most massive outpouring of workers’ and social justice militancy since 1995.
 
Socialist Action/Ligue pour l’Action Socialiste calls upon all workers and union members to help defend Gael Quirante by contacting the French Embassy or the nearest consular office and demanding the following:
 
No Sentences, No Fines, No Repression against Gael Quirante.  Drop All the Charges Now!
 
Quirante and his lawyer immediately launched an appeal, which stays the sentences and fines until after the new trial.  International solidarity can help put an end to the repression of Gael and to attacks on all unionists victimized for fighting for their rights, and for those of their co-workers.

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Analysis, International, Statements

SA/LAS in Dialog with the Trotskyist Fraction – F.I.

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.

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Canada, First Nations, Statements

The Indian Act in Canada – An Act of White Racism, Legal Status … and Paradox

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by Gary Porter

 

The Gradual Civilization Act, passed by Parliament of the Province of Canada (pre-Confederation) in 1857, sought to assimilate Indian people into Canadian white settler society by encouraging “enfranchisement.” Enfranchisement meant giving up recognition as an Indian and the special relationship of Indians to the government in order to become an ordinary Canadian citizen. The act was a failure — only one person voluntarily enfranchised.

 

The federal government then enacted the Gradual Enfranchisement Act which established the elective band council system that remains in the Indian Act to this day. This was an attack on hereditary chiefs who were much more difficult to deal with because their status was not up for periodic reaffirmation, and it is not subject to white men’s corrupting inducements and acts of intimidation.

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