New Possibilities for Labour Unity

Sixty years have passed since the Canadian Labour Congress and the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) gave its support to the founding of the New Party formalized at its Convention August 3^rd 1961.

The New Democratic Party will hold its virtual convention on April 9-11, 2021.  The virtual Canadian Labour Congress Convention will take place two months later, June 16-18, 2021.

What will be accomplished by delegates at virtual conventions, reliant on new information technologies, is impossible to predict.  That is a heavy responsibility for convention organizers.  Socially aware Canadians will be watching closely.  A well organised fully open pre-convention discussion reaching out to the rank and file is what is needed right now.

Much is at stake for millions of Canadians impacted by the dual calamity of economic depression and pandemic.  They didn’t create such calamities and refuse to be its victims.  Millions of Canadians are looking for alternatives and a way forward to full employment and health.  Wage earners have the right to expect that the NDP and the CLC will move into political action in their interest.  That can happen if the convention delegates insist “this is the time”. 

Everything must be done to enable delegates to do their work.  Nothing must be allowed to impede the adoption of decisions and campaigns supporting the demands of workers, the unemployed, the youth, farmers, small business and all oppressed and racialized Canadians confronting the ruinous affects of economic depression and a pandemic.

NDP-CLC conventions more often than not have been top-down managed events geared to preparations for the next federal election.  The cynical game of photo-op politics will reduce not increase voter support.  Such outworn and discredited convention maneuvering will perpetuate the cynicism of working-class voters fed up with Lib-Cons and who will see no difference in the NDP.

To ignore such realities is willful blindness and electoral opportunism of the worst kind.  

The NDP is the largest social reformist electoral expression of voter rejection of the policies of the parties of big business, the Liberals and Conservatives.  The 3.3-million-member CLC is the voice of organized workers.  Unorganized low paid marginalized workers, especially the youth, look to it with some hope.  Capitalism is not working for them.

The NDP-CLC convention can limit their vision to becoming better managers of the capitalist system or begin to talk about the urgent need to replace it.  The depression and COVID-19 pandemic fully expose the failure of the capitalist system to answer the needs of Canadian wage, salary earners and self-employed, women, youth and children.  Such calamities are viewed by big investor classes as a business opportunity who cynically profiteer out of illness and the impoverishment of millions.

The NDP-CLC leaderships are called upon to go beyond exposure and denunciation of “unfairness” and catch up to the militant extra-Parliamentary struggles already in action and challenging corporate power.

The overarching consideration for any major gathering of reform and labour must be to demand and enunciate a new Canadian foreign policy of peace and nuclear disarmament.  The survival of humanity is at stake.

The threat of a major US-NATO instigated war is once again upon us.  Everyday the reckless and revenge seeking far right is given mass media platforms to promote war on Iran, Russia, China, North Korea and Syria.  Such neurotic voices applaud sanctions against Cuba, Venezuela and applaud Sinophobia.

WW1 and WW2 and all of the major wars since, provide historical evidence that major war is not a single event but a series of events allowed to mature develop into global conflicts.  In the age of nuclear weapons such a calamity would end civilization as we know it.  

The specious argument that there are ideologies and existential threats worse than global annihilation is the preserve of fanaticism and the insane.  It is implausible and reckless to denounce Lib-Con social economic policies at home and support Lib-Con US-NATO war policies abroad.

Sixty years ago, analyzing the significance of the formation of the New Party (NDP), Tim Buck Communist Party leader said this:

“There are sharp differences concerning the aims that the founding convention should set for the New Party, and the differences are expressed already in two distinct and opposing trends.

“The trend which is dominant at present is that headed by the right-wing aiming to make the projected party “new” in name only.  They want to compete with the Liberal and Conservative parties for the popular vote without having to take a stand for repudiation of the basic theory that is supported by both of those parties – expressed in Canadian membership in NORAD and NATO, in permitting U.S. nuclear warheads in Canada, in the over-all policy of “Canada-U.S. integration”; in short, the subordination of Canada’s national interests to those of the United States as part of that country’s preparation for nuclear war.

“The opposing trend expresses, in varying ways and degrees recognition of the necessity for the New Party to rally All Canadians who desire far-reaching social reform, expansion of employment by freeing the Canadian economy from its subordination to U.S. interests, disengagement from the insane drive to war, withdrawal from NORAD and NATO, the banning of nuclear weapons, world disarmament and. In general, policies which correspond with peaceful co-existence.” Quoted from the May June 1961 issue of Marxist Review, Vol. XVIII (179)

Tim Buck had it right in 1961 and the same message is valid in 2021.