[R-G] Canada’s Liberals support war and social reaction

[Anthony Fenton]

Canada’s Liberals support war and social reaction
By Guy Charron
22 March 2008

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/mar2008/cana-m22.shtml

The Liberals, the Official Opposition in Canada’s parliament, provided  
the minority Conservative government with the votes it needed last  
week to extend the Canadian Armed Forces’ (CAF) lead role in the US- 
NATO counter-insurgency war in Afghanistan to the end of 2011.

In voting with the Conservatives—who have repeatedly touted the  
deployment of 2,500 CAF troops to southern Afghanistan as pivotal in  
asserting “Canadian interests” on the world stage—the Liberals  
repudiated their year-long call for the CAF counter-insurgency mission  
to end, as previously scheduled, in February 2009.

The Liberals have sought to justify their reversal with the claim that  
they forced Stephen Harper’s Conservative government to agree to their  
demand that the current CAF combat mission be transformed, starting  
next year, to one focusing on training the Afghan military and police  
and to providing security for reconstruction projects.

The text of the Liberal-Conservative motion prolonging the CAF  
intervention does incorporate much of the language of an amendment  
that the Liberals proposed last month. But, as has been universally  
conceded by the media, in substance the motion is virtually unchanged  
from that initially tabled by the Conservative government.

Liberal leader Stéphane Dion has explicitly stated that “training”  
will involve CAF forces participating in offensive operations  
alongside Afghan troops, and that the Liberals have no intention of  
“micro-managing” the military — i.e. that they accept the demand of  
the CAF top-brass that, if the military is to defend Afghan  
reconstruction projects, it must have a free hand to mount search-and- 
destroy missions.

The only significant concession the government did make to the  
Liberals was to agree to a stipulation that the CAF deployment to  
southern Afghanistan be wound down beginning in July 2011 and  
terminated by the end of that year. Nothing, however, precludes a  
future government—elections are scheduled for the fall of 2009— 
revisiting the issue and extending or expanding the CAF’s role in the  
Afghan war.

Defence Minister Peter MacKay was ecstatic following passage of the  
Liberal-Conservative motion. It “sends,” said MacKay, “a very strong  
signal of consensus from our country to our troops and shows  
confidence in everything they are doing ... I know that it will be  
well received by our NATO allies ...”

It was the Liberal government of Jean Chrétien that, in the fall of  
2001, ordered the biggest Canadian overseas military operation since  
the Korean War in support of the US invasion of Afghanistan. And it  
was the Liberal government of Paul Martin that first authorized the  
CAF deployment to Kandahar, a center of the insurgency against the US- 
installed government of Hamid Karzai, beginning in August 2005.

But Dion, the surprise winner of the December 2006 contest to succeed  
Martin as Liberal leader, chose in early 2007 to make a calibrated  
appeal to the mass opposition to the CAF mission and the Harper  
government’s attempts to promote militarism, by calling for the CAF to  
pull out of Kandahar in February, 2009. As Dion was at pains to  
explain, in no way did the Liberal stand imply anything other than  
full support for the US-NATO intervention in Afghanistan and the  
puppet government of Hamid Karzai. The Liberals, said Dion, merely  
wanted other NATO countries to bear their “share” of the Afghan  
fighting—proportionately the CAF has suffered the heaviest casualties  
of the NATO forces serving there—and for Canada to concentrate on  
those areas of “nation-building” in which it has “special expertise.”

 From the beginning, Dion’s anti-war posture discomforted many on the  
Liberal frontbench. Last October, John Manley, a former deputy Liberal  
prime minister known to favor a more “muscular” Canadian foreign  
policy, accepted Prime Minister Harper’s offer to chair a “wise  
persons” committee charged with examining Canada’s future role in  
Afghanistan. Predictably, Manley’s committee issued a report that  
strongly urged that the CAF mission be extended well past February  
2009. This then became the occasion for the corporate media, including  
the liberal Toronto Star, to mount a full court press for Dion and the  
Liberals to forge a bi-partisan consensus on Afghanistan with the  
Harper government, which had never made any secret of its support for  
the CAF continuing to play a leading role in the counter-insurgency war.

Liberal support for their ostensible Conservative opponents is by no  
means restricted to the Afghan war.

During the same week that they joined forces with the Conservatives to  
extend the CAF mission in Afghanistan, the Liberals also ensured that  
the government survived a budget vote and a New Democratic Party non- 
confidence motion.

Since last October the Liberals have repeatedly come to the  
Conservatives’ support, ensuring that the minority Harper government  
survived confidence motions, either by abstaining or voting with the  
government, and joining hands with the Conservatives to pass a series  
of reactionary bills. These include an omnibus “laws and order” bill  
and legislation that perpetuates the “national security certificate”  
system under which the government can imprison any non-Canadian  
citizen it designates a threat to national security indefinitely  
without trial, and without the detained person ever having access to  
the evidence against them

The Liberals and the Conservative budget

Dion and much of the press have declared the recent Conservative  
budget a “non-event,” with the Liberal leader maintaining that  
although his party opposes the budget, it is not sufficiently  
offensive as to justify bringing down the government and forcing a  
“costly” election.

In fact the budget was chock full of reactionary measures, in keeping  
with the right-wing fiscal and social policy pursued by both the  
Harper government and the Chrétien and Martin Liberal governments that  
preceded it. Over the past two decades, the federal government has  
dramatically downsized public and social services and systematically  
redistributed income to the rich and big business through tax cuts.

The Conservatives justified their budget’s failure to deal with a  
myriad of social problems with the claim that the “cupboard is bare,”  
even as they committed a $10.2 billion budget surplus from the 2007-8  
fiscal year to paying down the national debt.

Moreover, the 2008 budget must be seen within the context of last  
fall’s “mini-budget,” which outlined a program of cuts in corporate  
and personal income taxes and a reduction in the Goods and Services  
Tax estimated to be worth $60 billion over the next five years.

While the Conservatives’ 2008 budget did not contain any further  
personal or corporate income tax cuts, it created a new tax shelter  
that in the years and decades to come could result in the better-off  
being able to reduce their taxes by billions. Canadians will  
henceforth be able to place at least $5,000 per year in a Tax-Free  
Savings Account, whose future earnings will be tax-free and which can  
be drawn on without penalty at any time.

The third Conservative budget also gave a legal fig-leaf to the  
federal government’s systematic looting of monies collected in the  
name of providing workers with insurance against unemployment. During  
the 1990s, Ottawa siphoned tens of billions from Employment Insurance  
(EI) fund surpluses, so as not to have to increase taxes on business  
and the rich, even while cutting jobless benefits and drastically  
reducing eligibility to them. The 2008 budget writes off the  
government’s debt to the Employment Insurance fund and creates a new  
autonomous government agency to manage future EI premiums

The Conservatives also smuggled into the budget a series of measures  
that strengthen the government’s power over immigration, including  
giving Ottawa the right to reject candidates for immigration who have  
been approved by Immigration Canada.

Last but not least, the budget increases military spending by a  
further $1.5 billion. During the 2006 election campaign, Harper  
announced that he wants to expand Canada’s military to the point that  
the world’s great powers take notice, but the expansion and rearmament  
of the CAF began under the Liberals. In 2003, the CAF budget was less  
than $12 billion, now it is more than $18 billion.

The capitalist press has invariably attributed the Liberals’  
unprecedented support of a Conservative government to their fears of  
an early election under their reputedly uncharismatic and “weak”  
leader, Dion.

Certainly the Liberal Party, which during the 20th century was the  
Canadian bourgeoisie’s preferred party of government, is in crisis.  
But the roots of this crisis are to be found in the strong support of  
the most powerful sections of big business, and indeed of many in the  
Liberal Party, for the Harper Conservatives governments’ agenda of  
militarism and social reaction and in the erosion of the Liberals’  
popular support because of their right-wing record when in government.

Dion was a prominent minister in the Chretien-Martin Liberal  
governments and as such was the principal architect of Ottawa’s new  
hardline strategy against Quebec separatism, which includes the threat  
that a seceding Quebec would be partitioned.

Nonetheless, Dion has come under attack from within his own party for  
trying to distinguish the Liberals from the Conservatives and give his  
party a “progressive” gloss by striking an alliance with Green Party  
leader Elizabeth May.

Dion has responded by attacking the Harper Conservatives for not  
making even bigger tax concessions to big business and for failing to  
appreciate the profit-making opportunities for Canadian capital if it  
plays a leading role in developing so-called “green technology.”