[R-G] Canada’s “putsch”: Oppose Conservative power-grab! No support to Liberal-NDP coalition!

[Anthony Fenton]

Canada’s “putsch”: Oppose Conservative power-grab! No support to  
Liberal-NDP coalition!
By Keith Jones
3 December 2008
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/dec2008/cana-d03.shtml

Canada’s right-wing, minority Conservative government is preparing to  
cling to power illegally. Led by the neo-conservative ideologue  
Stephen Harper, the Conservatives are threatening to unleash a  
constitutional crisis and incite anti-Quebec chauvinism rather than  
allow the parliamentary opposition parties to form an alternate  
government.

“We will use all legal means to resist this undemocratic seizure of  
power,” declared Harper on Monday, after the opposition parties—the  
Liberals, New Democratic Party (NDP), and Bloc Québécois (BQ)— 
announced an accord to form a Liberal-NDP coalition government  
supported by the BQ.

The Conservatives, who won the votes of barely one in five Canadians  
in the federal election held October 14, are accusing the opposition  
parties of attempting a “putsch” and thwarting the will of the  
electorate.

This is reactionary rot. It is the Conservatives who are acting  
undemocratically, and in manifold ways.

• Under Canada’s parliamentary system, the opposition parties have  
every right to form an alternate government, since they won a majority  
of the seats in the House of Commons in a general election held just  
seven weeks ago.

If one includes the votes of the Green Party, which announced Tuesday  
that it too backs the Liberal-NDP coalition, 61.2 percent of voters  
cast their ballots October 14 for parties supportive of the coalition.

• So as to avoid defeat in a parliamentary non-confidence vote  
scheduled for next Monday, the Conservatives are reportedly preparing  
to prorogue or shut down parliament, which reconvened only on November  
17, until late January,

• The Conservatives have announced that should they lose a non- 
confidence vote, Harper will “advise” the Governor-General to dissolve  
parliament. In effect, the Conservatives are demanding that Canada’s  
unelected head of state deprive the opposition of its constitutional  
right to form a government. And should Governor-General Michaëlle Jean  
not capitulate to their anti-democratic demand, the Conservatives are  
threatening to unleash a wider political and constitutional crisis by  
attacking the democratic legitimacy of the Liberal-NDP coalition.

• With the support of much of the corporate media, the Conservatives  
have launched an aggressive drive to mobilize reactionary forces,  
denouncing the Liberals for aligning with “socialists” and  
“separatists,” references respectively to the NDP and BQ, against  
“Canada’s government.”

To oppose the coming to power of a “socialist-separatist driven  
coalition,” the Conservatives have called “Rallies for Canada” in the  
country’s major cities this coming Saturday. Their not so veiled  
purpose is to intimidate the Governor-General.

In the last parliament the Conservatives repeatedly depended on the  
votes of the BQ to remain in office. Yet, in a transparent attempt to  
whip up anti-Quebec chauvinism, especially in western Canada, the  
Conservatives are implying that the proposed coalition government is  
all but treasonous, because it would put Canada’s government “at the  
mercy of people committed to destroying our confederation.”

• Whatever Governor-General Jean ultimately decides, the very fact  
that the Conservatives are intent on making her demonstrably choose  
Canada’s government has the effect of giving greater legitimacy to,  
and expanding the power, of this reactionary office.

Under Canada’s constitutional monarchy, the monarch’s representative,  
the Governor-General, is almost always legally required to follow the  
“advise” of the Prime Minister—the head of the party or multi-party  
alliance with majority support in parliament—but wields, although this  
is not generally known, virtually unlimited “reserve” powers. Through  
this archaic mechanism, the Canadian ruling class has given itself a  
means of short-circuiting parliamentary democracy in a period of acute  
crisis.

Any use by the Governor-General of these powers establishes a  
reactionary precedent that can and will be invoked against working  
people in future political crises.

• The current crisis was precipitated by the fiscal and economic  
update the government tabled in parliament last Thursday. The update  
was chock full of right-wing and flagrantly anti-democratic measures.  
These included the abolition of a $1.95 per vote, annual subsidy to  
federal political parties—an action universally condemned in the  
corporate media as a brazen Conservative attempt to cripple the  
opposition by bankrupting them. The Conservatives also suspended the  
collective bargaining rights of federal workers, removing their right  
to strike until 2011. Last but not least, under conditions of a  
financial crisis and world recession that threaten working peoples’  
jobs and pensions, the Conservatives spurned calls for increased  
support to the unemployed and expanded public works initiatives,  
choosing instead to slash public spending.

If a putsch is afoot in Ottawa, it is manifestly a right-wing putsch  
being carried out by Harper and his Conservatives.

In opposing the Conservatives’ unconstitutional and anti-democratic  
attempt to retain power, working people must give no political support  
to the proposed Liberal-NDP coalition government.

The Liberals are the Canadian bourgeoisie’s traditional party of  
government. They have repeatedly used their opponents on the right as  
electoral foils, then in office imposed the policy prescriptions of  
the right, be it Trudeau’s three-year wage controls in the 1970s or  
the massive public spending and tax cuts imposed by the Chrétien- 
Martin Liberal government of 1993-2006.

Canada’s social-democratic party, the NDP, is a no less dependable  
prop of capitalist rule. When it has formed provincial governments,  
most notably in Ontario during the recession of the early 1990s, the  
NDP has come into headlong conflict with the working class, including  
slashing social spending, promoting “workfare,” and breaking strikes  
and otherwise attacking workers’ rights.

The BQ’s sister party is the Parti Québécois. When the PQ last held  
office as Quebec’s provincial government (1994-2003), it carried out a  
program of social spending and tax cuts strikingly similar to that of  
its federalist Liberal rivals in Ottawa—a program designed to  
redistribute wealth from working people to the most privileged  
sections of society.

None of the three opposition parties have questioned, let alone  
opposed, the Harper government’s commitment, without any public  
discussion, of tens of billions of dollars to prop up Canada’s big  
banks.

Few details of the coalition agreement have been made public. But it  
is known that the Liberal-NDP government will not “revisit” the  
Afghanistan issue, i.e., that the Canadian Armed Forces will continue  
to play a leading role in the Afghan counterinsurgency war through  
2011. Also, the Liberal-NDP government will implement the  
Conservatives’ five-year, $50 billion-plus program of corporate tax  
cuts.

As for the promised massive economic stimulus package, it will be  
welcomed, no doubt, by the big manufacturers and politically promoted  
as a program to “save jobs.” But Ontario’s Liberal Premier Dalton  
McGuinty has let it be known that any federal-provincial assistance to  
the automakers will be used as a means to extort sweeping new contract  
concessions from autoworkers. The Canadian Auto Workers union, a  
strong ally of McGuinty and an early advocate of a federal NDP-Liberal  
coalition, has already announced its willingness to make further  
changes in workrules, that is, to impose speed-up and job cuts.

To repeat, the working class must oppose the Conservatives’ power- 
grab. The attempt of one of the major parties of the Canadian ruling  
elite, with considerable and quite likely preponderant big business  
support, to overturn long-established parliamentary and constitutional  
forms is a frontal attack on democratic rights.

But in opposing the Conservative’s illegal attempt to block the  
opposition from forming a government, working people should extend no  
political support to the opposition parties or their alternate  
government. Rather the struggle to defend democratic rights and  
workers’ jobs and living standards and against imperialist war is  
entirely dependent on the development of an independent political  
movement of the working class in opposition to the entire bourgeois  
order.

In this respect, there are important parallels with the political and  
constitutional crisis that erupted in the United States over the  
outcome of the 2000 president elections. It was incumbent upon  
socialists to vigorously oppose the attempt of the Republican right,  
supported by the most powerful and rapacious sections of the US  
plutocracy, to steal the election on behalf of George W. Bush; but  
this opposition in no way implied any political support to the  
Democrat Al Gore.

Ultimately Gore and the Democrats capitulated to the right, allowing  
Bush to assume the presidency unopposed after the right-wing majority  
on the US Supreme Court, in flagrant violation of the law and the  
democratic will of the American people, declared him president.