CP of Canada, PEOPLE'S VOICE - Issue of MAY 1-15, 2020

5/11/20 9:22 AM


Canada, Communist Party of Canada En North America Communist and workers' parties



The following articles are from the May 1-15, 2020, issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading socialist newspaper.


May Day 2020: Mass Struggle for A People’s Recovery!
Hands off Venezuela – end the sanctions, stop the aggression and recognize President Maduro now!
Trudeau’s patchwork income deal is insufficient - Demand EI increases and full coverage now!
COVID-19 and the crisis in Ontario’s long-term care
Frontline long-term care workers: understaffed and unprotected
Profit before people? Alberta meat industry debacle shows dangers of capitalist priorities
Doug Ford’s rehabilitation is bad for public health
Lenin at 150: Still revolutionary and relevant
The pandemic hits East Van: it didn't have to be this way
Pandemic brings out far-right responses
"Our victory stems from our daily activism"- Discussion with elected French communist Diana Kdouh
BC Teachers reach tentative collective agreement
Pandemic highlights gender inequality, need for stronger movement and united action
Indigenous leaders, doctors, nurses call to close construction camps
Labour – it’s not just about employed workers!
Roger and Me revisited: Lessons from history, for these difficult times

May Day 2020: Mass Struggle for A People’s Recovery!

This May Day workers around the world are struggling against a double threat. The deepest economic crisis since the "Dirty '30s" is causing huge lay-offs, lost incomes and savings, and waves of evictions, foreclosures, and bankruptcies for small businesses and farms, triggered by a global pandemic COVID-19 virus for which there is as yet no vaccine, and a vast under-supply of medical equipment, supplies, staff and hospitals to stave off sickness and death. The pandemic has compounded the growing menace of unchecked climate change, global inequality and imperialist wars.

Corporations are using the crisis to jack up prices and profits on scarce medical equipment and supplies, while also reorganizing production to make permanent reductions in the labour force when the pandemic has passed.

For capitalists, everything is a commodity. Every crisis is an opportunity to make a profit, to cut costs, to beat or eat the competition, to expand. Today’s victims are the frontline healthcare workers who are dying because PPE is not available; the elderly locked into understaffed and underfunded private for-profit long-term care homes; and workers on the job in unsafe conditions or laid off without EI, sick pay, or even a job.

The role of capitalist governments is to bail out the corporations ‘in need,’ to keep a firm hand on the unemployed and the dispossessed, and to save capitalism through this crisis and the next crisis and the one after that.

The experience of the 2008-09 financial meltdown suggests that today's corporate cries of lost profits are unfounded and opportunistic. Data from Statistics Canada indicate that within 15 months of that collapse, corporate profits in Canada had recovered and passed pre-crisis levels. By 2018, just ten years later, quarterly corporate profit had jumped nearly 100%, reaching historic highs. Over that same decade, average hourly wages increased by only 8% when adjusted for inflation.

And yet during the COVID-19 crisis, government support payments are mostly going to corporate bailouts, with only piecemeal and short-term supports for the over one-third of the workforce now unemployed in Canada, 60% of whom don’t qualify for EI.

The Trump administration in the US is the grossest example, with its decisions to ignore the pandemic’s deadly impact on the American people and push to maintain profits and production at any cost; to maintain the illegal and inhuman economic sanctions which prevent the delivery of medical supplies, drugs and equipment to over 40 countries including Cuba, Venezuela, DPRK, and Iran. Trump has now cut $400 million in funding to the World Health Organization, after launching an unfounded political attack on that organization in the midst of a pandemic that may kill millions without stronger international action.

These are crimes against humanity.

In sharp contrast, the socialist countries have mobilized their capacities to protect the population with social distancing, mass testing and follow-up with contacted people; transforming plants and factories to production of medical supplies, drugs, ventilators, personal protective equipment; and building hospitals in a matter of days. They have developed treatments like the anti-viral Interferon Alfa-2B, jointly developed by Chinese and Cuban scientists, and produced in mass quantities in China and distributed around the world on the basis of need. They have sent teams of doctors and nurses, medical equipment and supplies to help in the fight against COVID-19 and to save lives in Europe, Africa and Latin America.

Shockingly, the Trudeau government has refused to issue visas to the Cuban medical team that was invited to help contain the virus on reserves and Indigenous communities in Canada. This must be reversed. The escalation of Cold War rhetoric and anti-Chinese racism are blatant attempts to shift blame from the failures of capitalist governments.

Not governed by the drive for private profits, the socialist countries put protection of the public as the top priority, along with internationalism and the moral obligation to prevent the pandemic’s global spread. The contrast between capitalism and socialism is stark – people or profits.

Capitalism is all about profits and competition. Dog eat dog. The big fish eat the smaller fish. Corporate power rules.

Socialism is about cooperation, for the health and well-being of the people. For global action against the pandemic, for universal health and healthcare, for science and education, for global security, peace and environmental justice.

Capitalism is for corporations and the wealthy. Socialism is for workers, the unemployed, youth, women, Indigenous and racialized people, immigrants, farmers, fishers and all those who work by hand and brain. Socialism is working class power. Capitalism is corporate power – the power of few over the many, of the exploiters over the exploited.

The labour and people’s movements must not accept the corporate prescription for recovery, which will include permanent mass unemployment, falling wages and living standards and more austerity to pay for the corporate bailouts today. The corporate prescription could also very well include militarism and war as a way for corporations to recover their profits. This was how the capitalist countries pulled themselves out previous depressions and the Great Depression, with massive profits in war production. We are seeing a further rise of ultra-right and fascist ideologies, nationalism and chauvinism, which were on the march even before this crisis.

The labour and people’s movements must build a powerful united struggle for a people’s recovery based on full employment policies, rising wages and living standards, and expanded social programs and public services. Spending on NATO and militarism should be redirected to civilian spending, to fight the pandemic with all the resources we can muster, and to build a strong and expanded healthcare system that includes long-term care, pharmacare, dental, vision and mental health care. These funds should be used for free quality post-secondary education, for free quality public childcare, for good jobs and higher wages, pension and living standards for all. We need to build an economy based on sustainable manufacturing and renewable energy, action on climate change and environmental justice. We need peace and an end to racism, exploitation, and oppression. We need to unite for fundamental social change. For socialism.

The coming depression, and the pandemic that triggered it, changes everything. Seven million unemployed and counting changes everything.

The labour and peoples’ movements are at a crossroads: people before profit, or profit before people.

We’re all in this together, but we won’t all get through this without a mass struggle led by labour and its allies for a people’s recovery.

This May Day, it’s the unity of the labour movement in the fight to defend workers’ jobs and living standards, and oppose imperialist wars and catastrophic climate change, that will make all the difference.

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Hands off Venezuela – end the sanctions, stop the aggression and recognize President Maduro now!

The Communist Party of Canada condemns the recent military buildup by the United States in the Caribbean Sea, as part of its escalating campaign of aggression against the government of Nicolas Maduro. The Party also denounces the Canadian government’s involvement in this aggression and calls for an immediate end to the sanctions and campaign to overthrow President Maduro.

The massive buildup, the largest since the US invasion of Panama in 1989, was announced by US President Donald Trump on April 1, under the pretext of an ongoing “anti-narcotics” operation in the region. In fact, it is a blatant effort to intimidate the Venezuelan people and its legitimate, elected president. The buildup comes in the wake of Trump’s multi-million “dead or alive” bounties on President Maduro and other Venezuelan officials, and the State Department’s “framework for transition” document which calls for Maduro to resign and for anti-Bolivarian forces to lead a transitional government that would oversee new elections. The “framework” specifically threatens to escalate sanctions and other unilateral coercive measures if its demands are not implemented.

In the wake of the stalled campaign to replace Maduro with self-appointed Venezuelan president Juan Guaido, the US and its allies have begun describing the Bolivarian government as “narco-terrorist.” The Communist Party denounces this slander, which is deliberately used to generate support for the military buildup, as well as for the ongoing sanctions and other acts of aggression.

Trump’s rhetoric is undermined by official data from US security and intelligence agencies, which indicate that only a tiny fraction of narcotics passes through Venezuela.

Ivan Duque, the far-right president of Colombia, has pressed the US for increased deployment in the region, claiming that Venezuela is sheltering guerrilla forces and drug traffickers from Colombia. In truth, it is Colombia that is harbouring criminals and conspirators – whether in the form of state-supported death squads that have killed over a thousand left-wing militants since the 2016 peace accord, or by hosting US military operations on its border with Venezuela.

The Canadian government is an active participant in this campaign of aggression and illegal regime change, primarily through its membership in the Lima Group. Immediately following Trump’s announcement of the military buildup, the Lima Group issued a statement in which it explicitly supported the US framework document and implied its support for the US buildup. Perversely, the statement clearly positions a foreign-backed coup as the key component in confronting coronavirus in Venezuela; nowhere does it mention the deadly impact of the illegal sanctions which it supports.

The Communist Party demands that the Canadian government immediately withdraw from the Lima Group and cease all support for the US-led campaign against the Bolivarian government of Nicolas Maduro. Canada must end all sanctions against Venezuela, recognize Maduro as the legitimate president, and restore full diplomatic and trade relations.

The United States and its allies are using the coronavirus crisis as an opportunity to escalate aggressions against countries that are obstacles to imperialism. This includes Venezuela, Cuba, China, Iran and the DPR Korea. The Communist Party urges the labour and progressive movements in Canada to vigilantly oppose these actions and demand a foreign policy based on peace, disarmament, solidarity and international cooperation.

The pandemic must not be used as an opportunity to strengthen imperialism. Rather, this crisis shows the need for peace, democracy and socialism.

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Trudeau’s patchwork income deal is insufficient - Demand EI increases and full coverage now!

Since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic in Canada, the Trudeau government has unveiled a series of temporary programs designed to stabilize working people’s incomes. Details of these measures have only been announced gradually, with many revisions and contradictions, and it has been left to individuals to navigate a confusing and incomplete web of information.

In the process, the government has determinedly avoided the obvious – reform of Employment Insurance (EI) so that it provides a decent income to all unemployed people, including first-time job seekers. Such reform has been urgently needed for many years and is now critical. The massive surge in applications for emergency income benefit is a clear indication of the depth of economic precarity experienced by the working class, a depth that has been deliberately obscured by severe EI eligibility limitations. The pandemic has ripped off the mask, to expose the realities of work in this economy and highlight the needs of working people.

The centrepiece of Trudeau’s income program is the Canadian Emergency Relief Benefit (CERB), which the government claims will provide $2000 per month to workers who are unemployed as a result of the pandemic. The $2000 payment, which only lasts for 16 weeks and ends in October, is insufficient to cover the costs of housing, utilities, food and other necessities in almost any area of the country. In addition, the payments are taxable, so most recipients need to put aside at least 19 percent of the benefit, in order to cover their federal and provincial or territorial income tax.

Furthermore, as details have slowly emerged it is clear that many working people are excluded from the CERB. Students who are beginning to look for summer jobs, workers in the gig economy, and people who have any income whatsoever are among those immediately deemed ineligible. In response to outcry over these exclusions, the government has begun introducing other targeted programs. These include the Canadian Emergency Student Benefit (CESB), which provides a paltry $1250 per month to post-secondary students and recent graduates, payable between May and August. This is equivalent to income from a full-time job paying less than $8.95 per hour – it is wholly insufficient to cover rent and living expenses for students who do not live at home, let alone exorbitant tuition and ancillary fees. Moreover, the CESB is not available to hundreds of thousands of secondary students who rely on summer employment income to pay for their eventual post-secondary education.

This patchwork of temporary measures clearly reveals that working people are an afterthought to this government. It is disgraceful, especially when compared to the billions of dollars that corporations are receiving from the government, that huge sectors of the working class have been excluded from the initial minimal income benefits and have had to fight for even flimsier supports. The CERB and CESB, like other basic income schemes, are a way for the government to ground unemployed workers in a subsistence-level floor. In the process, employers are guaranteed a pool of workers who are desperate to sell their labour power at poverty wages. It is a vicious and cynical program for reproducing capitalism’s “disposable industrial reserve army” of the poor and unemployed.

The Communist Party of Canada has long demanded EI reform so that the program meets the needs of unemployed people, rather than accommodating the profit motives of capitalism. EI was won as the result of determined struggle by unemployed workers during the Great Depression, including through the On-to-Ottawa Trek. Since then, governments have worked to undermine the program, and today fewer than 40 percent of workers who make mandatory contributions are eligible to collect benefits.

Specific immediate measures, which must be made permanent, include:
Expanding EI to include all unemployed workers – insured and uninsured; full-time, part-time, contract and gig economy workers; and first time job seekers.
Removing the waiting period so that EI is accessible immediately.
Making EI non-contributory.
Ending the use of “insurable hours” so that EI is paid for the full duration of unemployment.
Increasing EI payments to 90% of previous earnings or 90% of an annual livable income, whichever is greater.

We call on all labour and progressive organizations to take up these demands, on behalf of the entire working class, in the struggle for a recovery that puts people’s needs before corporate profit.

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COVID-19 and the crisis in Ontario’s long-term care

PV Ontario Bureau

The pandemic currently gripping the world has exposed the precarious conditions in long-term care (LTC) homes in Ontario. Seventy-five percent of the deaths from coronavirus have been seniors who live in these homes. Out of a total of 626 long-term care homes in the province, there have been outbreaks (defined as two or more reported cases) in over 145 and this number grows every day. Several compounding factors have contributed to this crisis, but the root cause has everything to do with capitalism’s drive towards commodification and exploitation.

Ontario has the highest proportion of for-profit nursing homes in Canada – a whopping fifty-eight percent of them are privately owned. Extendicare owns thirty-four long-term care homes and manages forty-two others. The company earned $18.8 million in profits from its long-term care business across Canada in 2018. Tim Lukenda, the outgoing CEO of Extendicare, earned $5.1 million in 2018. Chartwell's CEO, Brent Binions, earned $2.5 million in 2018 while his company posted $18.5 million in profits. The current chair of the Chartwell Board is none other than former Premier Mike Harris, who made $237,000 in 2019 while workers at these homes made minimum wage. Profits in privatized long-term care homes have been amassed from the commodification of care for our parents and grandparents who, along with their caregivers, have been left in inhumane conditions, unprotected from the scourge of this lethal virus.

The massive profits made by the major LTC chains exerts extreme pressure on the government to regulate staffing levels at the lowest possible levels. This, in turn, non-profit and municipally-operated homes. CUPE Ontario, which represents 35,000 front line long-term care workers in the province, has been waging a campaign for years to urge the Ontario government to legislate a minimum of four hours of daily, hands-on care for long-term care residents. Both Liberal and Conservative governments have not only failed to do so but have inflicted further cuts to an already threadbare sector.

The Ontario Health Coalition, which has been doing important tracking of LTC infections and deaths, has exposed the Ford government’s negligence in carrying out inspections in LTC homes since coming to office in June 2018. While there were over 600 comprehensive inspections done in 2017, half that number were done in the 2018 and only nine were completed last year.

Before the pandemic hit, there were not enough staff in homes to meet the needs of residents. Most staff who do the direct work with the residents – bathing, feeding, toileting, dressing – are Personal Support Workers (PSWs), who are often assigned to the private homes by temporary employment agencies and who frequently work in more than one home. PSWs work part-time for low wages and often have to work at more than one home to make ends meet. The report after the 2003 SARS epidemic recommended that more effort be put into creating full-time positions in LTC, to strengthen the core staff team at each home. The Ontario government finally brought in a regulation that limits PSWs to one home, but it still exempts workers assigned from temporary employment agencies. Ford has recently announced that front-line workers in LTC homes will receive a $4 per hour wage increase, but it will only last for sixteen weeks.

LTC staff were also not afforded the proper and safe protective equipment to ensure that they would not be infected themselves or pass on the infection from resident to resident. N95 masks are the recommended personal protective equipment (PPE) for this virus, yet a shortage of these masks was common in most of the homes. Although Ontario Minister of Health Christine Elliot announced that PPE was readily available, eighty-seven per cent of health care staff polled by CUPE reported that they do not have access to the PPE they need to deal with COVID-19 patients.

An additional ingredient in the devastating number of cases and deaths of seniors living in homes is the offensive unwillingness of the provincial government to test for possible infection. As outbreaks began, many expected that the first step to prevent more cases would be to test all residents and any staff coming into contact with them. But Ford has just recently implemented this regulation – more than a month after the first case in LTC.

At the end of March, in an alarming development, Minister of Long-Term Care Merrilee Fullerton issued an emergency order– not requiring debate in the legislature – that amended the rules for LTC staffing. The order removes training requirements for workers, allows homes to bring in volunteers and eliminates the need for administrators to report most complaints to the ministry. Allegedly invoked to address the need to get more healthcare workers into the homes, to replace those that were falling ill to the virus, these unprecedented emergency measures floutedexisting collective agreements. The government’s new order made it possible for any warm body to take the place of skilled and trained workers in LTC homes. Ford has also called on the federal government to allocate armed forces personnel to assist in four of the LTC homes that have been hardest hit. These homes are all privately-run.

Federal Health Minister Patty Hadju has asked us to think about how society should look after the elderly, once the pandemic has been quelled. The first step should be the takeover of private, for-profit long-term care homes and the expansion of the funding to allow for compassionate and humane standards of care for residents. We should create a public infrastructure in the long-term care sector that is integrated into the public healthcare system. Each home should be linked to a local hospital to provide the extra care, resources and safety monitoring needed now and to be prepared before the next pandemic strikes.

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Frontline long-term careworkers: understaffed and unprotected

Helen Kennedy and Juanita Burnett

At a long-term care facility in rural Ontario, we chatted with a Personal Support Worker about the impact of the coronavirus on the residents and workers.

This home is chronically understaffed. With 65 residents, there are eight PSWs – less than one per 8 residents – but there are usually only five or six on weekends. The work is physically hard, and injuries are common. Finding workers in small towns can be difficult, especially if they’re only working part time. Pay varies – in this facility PSWs make a bit over $20 an hour, which is better than the average wage.

As the coronavirus pandemic took hold in Ontario, information and protocols changed almost daily. At first, workers were not allowed to wear masks, for fear of alarming the residents. As outbreaks in other LTC homes began, each worker was given a bag with two masks for each of their eight-hour shifts. The masks were not the recommended N95 masks.

Since the onset of the pandemic, the physical and mental stress of the PSWs’ job has compounded. Workers take their temperatures on arrival and departure and sign a screening questionnaire twice daily. Every morning and evening, residents have their temperature checked. PSWs clean constantly – they use bleach wipes to disinfect doors, handrails, lifts and so on. They enforce social distancing – residents are set two to a table, and meals are served in the dining room and in the lounge to spread people out.

At the beginning of the pandemic, the home admitted patients from hospitals that had confirmed COVID-19 cases. Residents and workers were all stressed at not knowing whether these new residents carried the virus. As outbreaks began to mount in other homes, public health issued a regulation that long-term care homes no longer accept hospital patients.

Workers, however, are still fearful. Some live with family members who have underlying conditions and worry about taking the virus home with them. Others live with essential workers, which increases the possibility of transmitting the virus even when all are doing their best to remain safe. The worker we spoke with said their biggest fear is that if one of the residents gets the virus, “it would be because one of us brought it in.”

While this home had no cases of coronavirus, management assured them that the homes had twelve days of PPE in storage – N95 masks, gowns and gloves. The workers were also assured that more would be ordered if an outbreak occurred. Let’s hope they don’t have to rely on management’s assurances.

The PSWs have pulled together with all the other workers at the home. Everyone who can do extra shifts, does them. Community members help where they can. They make small mask holders – crocheted pieces with buttons to hold the elastic of the masks to ease the irritation of the elastic from the masks on the ears.

The front-line workers at this home will benefit from the additional $4 an hour that has just been announced by the Ford government. It’s too bad that it will only be a temporary fix to a long-term problem of underfunding in the long-term care sector.

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Profit before people? Alberta meat industry debacle shows dangers of capitalist priorities

Corinne Benson

Our now-famous COVID-19 virus initially arrived through travelers on planes and cruise ships, but the source of the pandemic now seems to be “community spread,” which is really a name for workplace contamination. It means that workers, as well as seniors, people with disabilities, prisoners and homeless people will bear the brunt of it – all those in close contact, through no choice of their own.

Alberta has recently seen outbreaks in meat packing plants, with the latest count from the Union of Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) showing 604 cases directly linked to Cargill and JBS Foods in High River and Brooks respectively. This represents 16% of Alberta's confirmed cases. Already, this has resulted in more deaths from coronavirus.

Michael Hughes, spokesperson for UFCW Local 401, said the community spread from the meat packing plants has become particularly problematic because some workers’ family members also work in grocery stores and nursing homes. Carpooling and transportation have further complicated the spread.

UFCW represents the plant workers and wanted to have the operations closed for fourteen days to prevent this predictable spread of the virus. But they were shut out by the company and the government, who told workers they were essential and must report to work. Alberta Health Services inspected Cargill on April 7 when the first cases were confirmed. UFCW Local 401 was not included in that process. When the union asked for a written report from AHS about the inspection, they were told there was none. UFCW Local 401 has included the health inspectors’ reliance on verbal reports as part of its complaint about being excluded from the inspection process.

On April 12, Local 401 President Thomas Hesse wrote to the Minister of Labour, asking for the plant to be shut down, and the union also filed a complaint with Occupational Health and Safety. Shockingly, the investigation of the plant was done “virtually,” and no one attended the plant themselves. According to an April 23 press release from Marty Warren, President of United Steelworkers District 6, the AHS used a remote ‘Face Time’ inspection and “gave the plant a passing grade even as the disease was racing through the production line, where workers did their jobs in close proximity to one another.” Employees were assured by the authorities that the workplace was safe, and it was only after an employee died from the virus that Cargill announced the closing of the plant on April 20.

Between the first cases and the plant closure there were 13 days of operation and further dispersal of the virus. Hughes says the union called for closure of the plant on April 12 and delivered a petition to High River Mayor Craig Snodgrass. Active tracking of contacts and compensation for lost wages should also have begun at that point. Two thousand workers go into the plant every day, and between the two plants in High River and Brooks there are 4,500 workers involved. Closing the plant earlier could have controlled much of the virus spread in the workplace as well as through carpooling and public transportation.

The union has also worked hard to get agreements to protect Temporary Foreign Workers. Specifically, they are urging companies that hire Temporary Foreign Workers to support them in obtaining resident status. Many, in fact, have achieved that status. Newer Temporary Foreign Workers number about 100 out of the 2000 workers at Cargill. They receive orientation on the right to turn down unsafe work but acting on this right is a challenge because Temporary Foreign Workers face the fear of deportation. Still, a significant number have refused to go to work. At the JBS plant workers were offered a pay increase of $4.00 per hour to tempt them into working, but they still refused to come to work.

UFCW has sent a letter to the Alberta government with a sizable list of recommendations, addressing issues involving all workers in the chain of food processing and sales. For the processing plants, the union is demanding better social distancing since the workplaces have been designed for elbow-to-elbow work and the masks supplied have either been inadequate or completely absent. These conditions are true for workers throughout the food sector. After the plants reopen, they may have to accept a slower line speed with fewer animals being processed in a day. At present 4,500 head of cattle are slaughtered every day. The list of union recommendations is comprehensive and attacks the crisis from many standpoints. One of the most important demands is to involve workers in decisions made about them and to incorporate the union into that process, since this has not happened. The union specifically wants a veto right on these matters.

UFCW’s Hughes says there is a lot of work in Canada’s food supply sector, but he notes that the pay is poor and that this is a problem that needs fixing. Without question, the debacle in the Alberta meat industry shows that food and those who work in the industry are undervalued. It also exposes the dangers of capitalist priorities that put profit before people.

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Doug Ford’s rehabilitation is bad for public health

Drew Garvie

As working people suffer through a massive public health and economic crisis, the media and a wide range of politicians have come together on a project: the rehabilitation of Doug Ford.

Before the pandemic Doug Ford’s approval rating had dropped to around 30 percent. In a December 2019 poll, Ford ranked last in popularity of all premiers in Canada. But since mid-March, there have been countless articles congratulating the premier on his “handling” of the crisis.

A CBC article from late March tells readers that Ford has drawn praise from friends and foes. “Gone is the pugnacious partisanship and populist rhetoric that opponents once used to compare Ford to US President Donald Trump,” it says. “The premier's regular briefings have instead drawn widespread plaudits for their calm, collegial tone as well as their comparatively progressive content.”

In the same article a former senior Liberal staffer comments, "He's being transparent, responsive, engaging. Ontarians are really seeing him in action." BC Green Party leader Andrew Weaver said in a tweet that Ford has “shown strong, decisive and compassionate leadership at a critical moment in Ontario’s history.”

Deputy Prime Minister (and Canada’s leading war monger) Chrystia Freeland made headlines with Ford when the two announced their newfound friendship to the press. “He and I have actually come to describe one another as each other’s therapists,” said Freeland in a desperate effort to humanize herself and Ford.

Conservative operatives have taken to international outlets to sing the praises of Ontario’s new golden boy. Former Harper speech writer Michael Taube wrote a column for the Washington Post declaring that “great leaders emerge in difficult times, even if that leader isn’t someone you would have naturally considered for that role.”

It is true that Doug Ford has not verbally abused the media lately or suggested that ingesting disinfectant might be a good idea. So, comparing his presentation to that of Donald Trump (a man for whom he has previously expressed a fondness) Ford does look professional. But bourgeois political commentators always like talking more about presentation than substance and policy.

Even a superficial look at Ontario’s health crisis paints a different picture. Ontario joins Quebec and Alberta as the three provinces that are faring the worst during this pandemic. Ontario’s long-term care crisis has been raging for weeks and now over one hundred cases have been announced in shelters and prisons are reporting outbreaks. April 23 saw the largest single day increase in COVID-19 cases yet. So, where is the success in “handling” the crisis for which Ford is being applauded?

The reality is that Doug Ford, his government and his class all did their best to deepen the crisis in Ontario. Since becoming premier in 2018 he has carried out the most aggressive austerity agenda since the Conservative government of Mike Harris in the mid-90s. The main difference is that these days there is even less to cut. The hollowing out of social services and expansion of exploitation has drastically increased the Ontario’s vulnerability and has doubtless increased the death toll.

The government’s massive 2019 budget cuts included health. The current 18.3-hour hospital wait time is up 27 percent from 14.4 hours when the Conservatives were elected. Did Ford see the light after the pandemic struck? No. The new emergency funding of $3.3 billion for health care in Ontario due to COVID-19 is a 5 per cent increase, which is the same amount that the Ontario Health Coalition and other public healthcare advocates have long demanded just to meet the needs of population growth, aging and inflation. The emergency funding only keeps the system afloat at the current levels, which are already inadequate with hospitals at overcapacity for the last several years.

Holding back tears at a press conference about his mother-in-law testing positive for coronavirus in a long-term care home, Doug Ford declared that LTC in Ontario “needs to change.” But his government has been a proponent of deregulation and further privatization in the sector. Ontario has the highest proportion of for-profit nursing homes in Canada, with 58 percent of them privately owned. The website rankandfile.ca reported that the provincial Tories received $340,477 in political donations from for-profit LTC corporations in the decade leading up to Ford’s election. The government has cut inspections in LTC facilities down to almost nothing; only nine were completed last year.

The media gave Ford glowing reviews after he called out Donald Trump for blocking Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) shipments and helped move boxes of PPE produced in Markham. But front-line health workers still have a massive shortage of PPE. This week the government intervened in court in an effort to block the Ontario Nurses Association from winning access to PPE for their members working in LTC homes.

The dire PPE shortage did not just materialize unexpectedly this year; it is one aspect of the overall underfunding and privatization of the public health care system over several decades. Fifty-five million N95 masks were stockpiled in Ontario, but they were allowed to expire rather than being replenished to keep the supplies up to date.

Overall, the Ford government represents the most aggressive sections of capital in the province. They are quite clear in what they want – lower taxes on corporations and the wealthy, and defunding and privatization of social services, health and education. The less the government taxes and spends, the better for their profits. Never mind the impact on workers and the most vulnerable sections of the population.

We have witnessed this already in the last two years. Massive across the board spending cuts have been justified by lies and distortions about the government deficit. Ford’s tax cuts were already on pace to cost $4.2 billion in 2019-20, with more tax cuts pending. Comparing the cost of tax cuts to that of nominal spending increases planned for the next three years, tax cuts accounted for 60 percent of overall cost increases (“revenue loss”), compared to 20 percent for health and 2 percent for education.

To keep pace with population growth and inflation, without cutting already inadequate services, the province would need to spend $11.4 billion more in the next three years – less money than the government is planning to spend on tax cuts.

The current health crisis will not last forever and politicians, including Ford, pepper their speeches with hopeful messages about the future. However, the Ontario government is not being honest about the depth of the capitalist economic crisis that was triggered by the pandemic. The March 25 Fiscal Update is based on the overly optimistic assumptions that COVID-19 will have a minimal effect on government revenues from personal income and business taxes. It projects that Ontario’s low unemployment rate will not significantly rise this year and that Ontario will be back to growth in the second half of the year. In contrast to this rosy picture, the IMF is predicting the worst downturn since the Great Depression.

The way out of the last capitalist crisis paved the way for the current economic situation: massive corporate bailouts, record low interest rates, debt expansion, military spending, quantitative easing, and massive corporate and wealth tax cuts. These ruling class policies restored profits and sent stocks higher but corporate and personal debt hit record levels.

How will Doug Ford handle the crisis that we are only just starting to feel? Will his government make a sharp break from corporate austerity policies, cancel debts, nationalize the plants that will close, build social housing and infrastructure, bring in progressive taxation, and expand health, education and social services? More likely, he will continue to do what he has done all his career and what his brother and father did for a living – fleece the working class and deepen exploitation in order to recover profitability. Doug Ford has not changed; the only thing that has changed is that the corporate media, Bay Street and their politicians are more united in the face of a crisis. We need to see through it and build our own unity based on a recovery for working people, not for corporate profits.

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Lenin at 150: Still revolutionary and relevant

CheddiJagan

“Marxism-Leninism is outdated; it is a foreign ideology, it has no relevance to present day realities…”

This is the theme song of the puppets and defenders of imperialism, and unfortunately of quite a few who call themselves revolutionary.

Because of this deliberate distortion and genuine confusion, the need for propagating the principles of Marxism and the ideas of Lenin cannot be over-emphasized.

Those who prattle on about “Russian foreign ideology” should know that Marxism is not a lifeless dogma, not a completed, ready-made immutable doctrine, but a living guide to action. It is a science; it requires a concrete analysis of a concrete situation. Like all sciences, it grows and develops in accordance with changing conditions and times.

Lenin said, “We do not regard Marx’s theory as something completed and inviolable; on the contrary, we are convinced that it has only laid the foundation stone of the science which socialists must develop in all directions if they wish to keep pace with life.”

Lenin made it quite clear that each Marxist-Leninist Party must determine its policies and forms of activities in accordance with national conditions. He said that fundamental Marxist principles should be applied in a way “that will correctly modify these principles in certain particulars, correctly adapt and apply them to national and national-state distinctions.” In another context, he advised “to apply the general and basic principles of communism to the specific relations between classes and parties, to the specific features in the objective development towards communist, which are different in each country and which we must be able to discover, study, and predict.”

But some reactionary elements will distort the feeling of national identity, turning it to nationalism and chauvinism. They deny the Marxist principle of proletarian solidarity and internationalism. They contrapose patriotism, independence and sovereignty to internationalism. They do not want to admit that it is possible and necessary to harmonize national interests with international duties. They exploit nationalism and chauvinism to sow strife and division between the working-class movements in the imperialist states and the national liberation movements of the so-called Third World.

A Marxist-Leninist, revolutionary party is accountable not only to its own working class and people but also to the international working class.

Lenin made it clear that “capital is an international force. To vanquish it, an international workers’ alliance is needed.”

Those who take a narrow nationalistic position talk about national and cultural identity and the necessity to develop “relying on one’s own forces.” By refusing to make any real distinction between the imperialist and socialist systems, by equating western imperialism with what they refer to as “Soviet imperialism,” they help to prop up the main ideological pillar of US imperialism, namely anti-Sovietism, the modern garb of anti-communism, and at the same time to create disunity in the struggle against imperialism…

As regards motivation for socialist aid and assistance to the national liberation movements and Third World countries, Lenin set out the position clearly when he pointed out in 1917:

“Now, as always, we stand and shall continue to stand for the closest association and merging of the class-conscious workers of the advanced countries with the workers, peasants and slaves of all the oppressed countries…We shall exert every effort to foster association and merger with the Mongolians, Persians, Indians, Egyptians. We believe it our duty and in our interest to do this, for otherwise socialism in Europe will not be secure.”

Those who, in the face of imperialism’s heightened aggressiveness and guile, talk about “cultural nationalism and “relying on our own forces” are living in a fool’s paradise and sowing illusions for their supporters. Ultimate victory, that is, independence – political and economic – will never be achieved in isolation. As long ago as 1919, Lenin stressed the necessity of development the closest links among the Soviet Union, the international working and the national liberation movements. He said:

“It is self-evident that this revolutionary movement of the peoples of the East can now develop effectively, can reach a successful issue only in direct association with the revolutionary struggle of our Soviet Republic against international imperialism.”

Lenin’s greatest achievement was in his contribution about the necessity for building a Marxist vanguard-type of party, a party based on democratic centralism and operating in both the ideological and practical spheres.

At the practical level, Lenin urged the forging of close links with the masses. He advocated the necessity of working patiently and persistently; of mastering the various forms of struggle; of combining parliamentary with extra-parliamentary work; of being flexible and prepared to make the most rapid changeover from one form of struggle to another; of working in reactionary trade unions and even of working for reforms that may help improve the position of the masses.

“It would be absolutely wrong,” he wrote, “to believe that immediate struggle for socialist revolution implies that we can, or should, abandon the fight for reforms. Not at all. We cannot know beforehand how soon we shall achieve success, how soon the objective conditions will make the rise of this revolution possible. We should support every improvement, every real economic and political improvement in the position of the masses.”

[Excerpted and edited from CheddiJagan’s essay, “Lenin and our time” in World Marxist Review vol 13 no 4, April 1970.]

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The pandemic hits East Van: it didn't have to be this way

Kimball Cariou

So far during the COVID-19 pandemic, I'm one of the relatively fortunate ones. My family lives in an affordable and well-run housing co-op with an amazing view of the mountains from our roof deck. My office is just a few blocks from home. I have plenty of books to read and quiet streets to walk for my daily exercise. Once a week I put on a mask (purchased online from a local steam-punk shop) and head out to buy groceries.

But our view these days has more ominous aspects. Contrary to the popular mass media trope, COVID-19 does not affect everyone equally.

Looking to the west, the gleaming corporate offices and condo towers loom over one of the poorest urban neighbourhoods in Canada.

Vancouver’s Downtown East Side neighbourhood has a very high proportion of people in deep poverty. Hundreds or even thousands are homeless, with no easy way to wash their hands with clean water and soap, or to practice physical distancing. Many residents of the crowded, run-down buildings are elders, or people with compromised immune systems, or are suddenly unable to access their street drugs. Survival sex workers are among the many categories of people in this area without access to federal and provincial emergency income supports.

Just a dozen blocks from my housing co-op, hundreds live at the tent city in Oppenheimer Park on East Cordova – less than a hundred meters from an outbreak of COVID-19 which has infected dozens of workers at the United Poultry processing plant. Facing low wages and poor conditions, these are the essential workers who keep the rest of us fed. Many are from immigrant families, trying to build a better life here in Vancouver.

Looking in another direction, we see Grouse Mountain and North Vancouver, where virus outbreaks in early March killed many nursing home residents and infected dozens of caregivers. The same pattern has been seen in other provinces, driving home the point that poor people face far greater health risks during old age than others. Almost everywhere across Canada, nursing home employees are suddenly recognized as essential, after being treated badly for years, especially those who work in private-profit facilities.

To the southeast from Vancouver, one of the first penitentiaries going through a COVID-19 outbreak is at Mission. Like many others who live here, members of my own family have done time at Mission or one of the other prisons in the FraserValley. As of April 23, 65 inmates and 12 staff at Mission have been infected, and everyone at the facility will be tested.

Fortunately, East Vancouver is also a community with long traditions of labour and social solidarity. People in our housing co-ops and anti-poverty organizations and other groups are engaged in a daily struggle to hold back the virus, helping our neighbours to survive – because they are our friends, our relatives, our co-workers, the people who keep our local shops and services going. We need each other, just as residents in every other working class neighbourhood across TurtleIsland need each other in this moment of deepening crisis.

There is even a solidarity caravan going to Mission, to show that people care about prisoners facing desperate circumstances behind bars.

The situation didn't have to be this desperate in British Columbia, where corporations and a small number of wealthy people have reaped huge benefits while federal and provincial tax cuts slashed government revenues.

The greed of billionaires and the pursuit of higher corporate profits have driven the political agenda for decades, forcing a steady trickle of cutbacks to public education, universal health care, social housing. From time to time, fightback movements have forced a shift back towards funding human needs, but not yet enough to regain lost ground.

And so here we are today, in a panicked race to find enough ventilators, masks, ICU beds, trained medical personnel and everything else needed to help people live through a pandemic. Governments are suddenly trying to address the simultaneous crises of homelessness, poverty, unemployment.

But the resources needed to prepare for this situation have been squandered, for example by military spending approaching a trillion dollars annually on a global scale, including some $25 billion per year in Canada.

This militarism, we have been told repeatedly, was necessary to "defend" ourselves against outside threats, as though Russia or China had any possible interest in going to war against Canada. Meanwhile, the real dangers – environmental crisis, vast economic inequalities, outbreaks of disease – have been almost completely ignored. Why? Because none of these real enemies were seen as the source of potential profits for the corporate sector.

No, things didn't have to be this way, in east Vancouver or any other part of Canada. We shouldn't be wondering if our parents will survive another week in a seniors' home, or if a virus outbreak will spread from the packing plant or the tent city down the street, or if dozens of prisoners will die behind bars. We shouldn't have to fight every step of the way for better housing and higher wages and proper funding for schools and hospitals. We shouldn't have to point out the absurdity of spending tens of billions on fighter jets while Indigenous communities across Canada lack clean drinking water.

Maybe after the pandemic, we can achieve real, fundamental change in this country. From the roof deck of my co-op, I can see communities stretching in every direction, where people are demanding such change. It won't be easy, but this may be the opportunity we need to turn this society around, in the direction of socialism which puts the needs of people and the environment ahead of the drive for private profits.

(The author has lived in east Vancouver for 27 years, most of that time working as the former People's Voice editor. He has been the Communist candidate in Vancouver Kingsway in recent federal elections.)

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Pandemic brings out far-right responses

Kimball Cariou

When is science not actually scientific? One answer is that research which cherry-picks and manipulates facts to support a preconceived hypothesis is not truly scientific.

Long after Galileo and Copernicus demolished the Ptolemaic theory, some highly educated scientists kept creating astronomical models showing that the sun, planets and stars revolve around Earth. The sheer weight of evidence finally put an end to such exercises, and even the Catholic Church was at last compelled to admit that Galileo was right.

In our times, a few scientists with university degrees and published academic papers still claim that human-based carbon emissions are only a minor factor in climate change. Big Oil rewards such hired guns, who give plausible cover to say that "scientists are in disagreement." This is a lie, since the scientific community has overwhelmingly concluded that fossil fuels are a key driver of global warming.

A similar situation has emerged around the COVID-19 pandemic. Medical researchers and epidemiologists are almost unanimous in their support of physical distancing and other strategies to slow the spread of the virus and gain time for more effective treatments and the development of a vaccine. But many corporate forces and right-wing leaders like Donald Trump want a "herd immunity" strategy – accepting a higher number of immediate deaths in exchange for a faster return to economic expansion.

The herd immunity concept is a favourite theme of the recent "open up the economy" rallies, but this theory is based largely on guesswork since COVID-19 is proving to be a very unpredictable virus.

These forces also rely on data manipulation to inflame the deep fears the pandemic has created among people facing mass layoffs, small business shutdowns, school closures and other serious challenges. Nobody should arrogantly dismiss these fears as a desire to get a haircut or a mani-pedi. Working people have been slammed with the most serious economic crisis in nearly a century, and they have every right to want a return to "normal.” But as the mayor of Atlanta eloquently insists in the face of a badly bungled re-opening of the state of Georgia, you have to survive to fight another day.

In this confusing situation, far-right extremists are promoting the claims of scientists who are said to be presenting "the real truth.”

One of these is Knut Wittkowski, former head of the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Research Design at Rockefeller University. Wittkowski argues that the virus could be “exterminated” if most people were allowed to lead normal lives while the more vulnerable in society were somehow protected.

Wittkowski writes, “if you flatten the curve, you also prolong (it)…. And I don’t see a good reason for a respiratory disease to stay in the population longer than necessary.”

Critics respond that "flattening the curve" does indeed allow the virus to stay in circulation longer, which is certainly not ideal. But the benefit is that the necessary resources are then available to treat all serious cases properly, dramatically reducing the overall fatality rate.

Interestingly, Wittkowski claims that "there is no shortage of PPE equipment" since, somewhere in the world, there exists PPE equipment that is not currently being used. Therefore, any local "shortage" is just a misallocation – perhaps in the same way that a drought is simply a misallocation of water that is currently in the ocean.

Any reader can use Google to fact-check Wittkowski. But for the political far right, the argument is simple – don’t trust all those medical experts, trust this one guy who says what we like to hear.

Another case in point is the argument promoted by Trump that COVID-19 is much more widespread than thought, and no more dangerous than the flu.

Various internet sites have reported on a study out of Stanford University, which concludes that the COVID-19 infection rate is much higher among California residents than previously believed, and far less lethal. Back in March, the study's authors wrote an editorial in the Wall Street Journal arguing against quarantine strategies, which impose high economic and social costs. Critics, including many statisticians and epidemiologists, say that their poorly-constructed study simply confirmed their own political biases.

For their study, the authors relied on self-selected volunteers, disproportionately white and female, and very different from the overall demographics of Santa Clara county.

Perhaps more serious, the study used a testing kit from Minneapolis-based Premier Biotech, with known performance discrepancies including a high “false positive” rate that can skew results, especially with a small sample size.

Statisticians and medical experts are demanding that the Stanford study's authors apologize for their errors. Unfortunately, this study has been widely circulated on social media, not because it provides any truth, but because it backs up a far-right agenda.

The moral is, beware of right-wing forces using highly selective sources. They don't care about you, only about a quick return to profits as usual.

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"Our victory stems from our daily activism"

Discussion with elected French communist Diana Kdouh

Adrien Welsh

France has a long tradition of electing communists locally. As Georges Marchais noted in his 1980 book L’espoir au present (Hope in the Present), “The French Communist Party has 28,000 elected officials, 1500 mayors, nearly 500 councillors. One in five French people live in a communist-controlled municipality.”

Forty years later the French Communist Party (PCF) has certainly faded, especially after the counter-revolution in Eastern Europe and the USSR. Still, even today several “red cities” remain, particularly in the working-class suburbs around urban centers. These centers of power, which elude the bourgeois parties, are commonly called the “red belts.” The tradition of communist municipalities is so strong that it is sometimes crudely identified as "municipal communism." Some town halls have been run by the PCF since the 1920s (the Parisian suburb of Malakoff is a notable example) but the history of most of these red cities began with the Liberation in 1945.

This is the case in St-Martin d'Hères, a suburb in Grenoble’s “red belt” where, in the first round of the municipal elections on March 15, the Communist list was voted in with more than 53 percent support. For 75 years, the inhabitants of this working-class suburb have put their confidence in the Communists as the best defenders of social progress. This victory is all the sweeter since the opposition lists all hoped to end 75 years of municipal communism in St-Martin-d'Hères.

To get a deeper understanding of this victory, I contacted longtime friend and comrade Diana Kdouh, a young municipal councillor for the Communist majority in St-Martin-d'Hères.

Right away, she stressed that the PCF success was primarily the result of day-to-day work on the ground by local communists – leafletting, rallies, public meetings, banquets – as opposed to electoralism. "The door-to-door work we did was focused on specific municipal policies," she said.

"The key issue in the campaign,” she added, “was to project our program for a quality public service that meets people’s expectations and needs [...] at the municipal level and sometimes even beyond that.”

During municipal elections, the political forces that have power at the national level were challenged to establish themselves locally. Emmanuel Macron's La RépubliqueEn Marche (LREM) party did not even exist three years ago, and these elections were a referendum on his government’s policy. It’s a referendum which, according to preliminary results (the second round has been canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic), seems to have ended in failure for Macron and LREM.

In St-Martin-d'Hères, Macron’s anti-social policies, particularly his pension reform, were clearly rejected. The LREM list obtained only 15 percent of the vote. "Although [his] vote count should not be overlooked, Macron's challenge in St-Martin d'Hères was not successful. Our vanguard is making sure of it!”

It’s the same story for the Rassemblement national (heir to the Le Pens’ Front national) which has the wind in its sails overall, including in some municipalities in the region like Échirolles where it has 20 percent support. But in St-Martin, not only is there no Rassemblement list, but their activists are completely unwelcomed in the red city. As Kdouh remarked, "where the communists defend class positions on a daily basis, there is no room for the far right.”

The first round of municipal elections saw the lowest voter participation since the 5th Republic was formed, at just over 44 percent. Obviously, holding the vote at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic discouraged many people from voting. Kdouh noted that even long-standing PCF supporters did not mobilize. However, it would be wrong to believe that this low turnout is due solely to COVID-19. "Abstention reached record levels even before the pandemic, if we look at the presidential and legislative elections,” said Kdouh. “The dominant ideology’s attitudes of resignation and fatalism have become well-established.”

She emphasized that her role as an elected communist had nothing to do with municipal management or administration. For her, and for the Communists, "the municipal level like any other [...] must be a foothold, a platform from which we advance our struggles and demands."

In other words, the primary responsibility of elected Communists is to use their position to strengthen the struggle of the masses against their exploiters. With this view, elected communists have never hesitated to leap from their Senate or council seats in order to block bailiffs coming to evict workers from their homes. Nor have they hesitated to march at the front of demonstrations in their politicians’ tricolor sash.

However, it would be wrong to view a communist municipality as an oasis of socialism in a sea of ​​capitalism – far from it. Certainly, elected communists work to improve the living and working conditions of the people. But the fact remains that the conquest of power by the working class cannot be reduced to the conquest of different levels of governance, as we often hear.

If there is one point on which Kdouh insists, it is that elections must be a means of strengthening daily struggles, not the other way around. The class struggle comes before the struggle for seats.

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BC Teachers reach tentative collective agreement

PV Vancouver Bureau

After many long and difficult months of collective bargaining, British Columbia's 45,000 K-12 public school teachers finally have a tentative three-year contract with the BC Public School Employers Association and the NDP provincial government. The ratification process is expected to take some time, considering the public health emergency.

Before the breakthrough, achieved with the help of a mediator, BC Teachers' Federation (BCTF) president Teri Mooring had messaged members to outline four stages of potential job action: continued pressure on the government through communications; a withdrawal of administrative duties such as attending staff meetings, and a ban on specialist teachers (like librarians) covering absences; rotating district strikes and a province-wide strike.

News of the deal was announced on March 22, not long after the full implications of the COVID-19 health crisis truly began to sink in. Five days earlier, on March 17, the government had decided to extend the annual spring break period indefinitely. The suspension of in-classroom learning was made under the direction of the Provincial Health Officer, to help prevent the spread of COVID-19 and protect the health of education workers, students and their families. At that point, the Ministry of Education, school districts, the BCTF, CUPE, BC School Trustees Association and other education partners began working to determine how to maintain services and supports that teachers provide.

The government has committed to continuing to fully fund all boards of education, on the understanding that pay will continue at this time for employees whose work would not otherwise have been interrupted save for the pandemic response.

Full details of the tentative collective agreement have not been made public, but the deal is said to include measures to help bring BC teachers closer to the average pay rates of their counterparts in other provinces. This apparently includes putting starting teachers at a higher rung of the salary grid rather than the current initial first stage, an important measure to improve teacher retention rates.

One BCTF union local spokesperson told the media that despite “challenging times,” the union won some improvement over earlier pay offers by the province, and that the crucial class size and composition language which was restored in the collective agreement by a Supreme Court of Canada ruling will remain intact.

The new collective agreement also includes cultural leave for Indigenous members, and a strengthening of employment equity provisions for Indigenous educators.

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Pandemic highlights gender inequality, need for stronger movement and united action

Barbara Moore

This year, May Day celebrations will be under the unfortunate constraints imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, so we are unlikely to see masses of workers marching in the streets. Yet, workers must remain committed to building unity in the struggle for better working conditions, stable non-precarious jobs in all sectors, just pay, health benefits including pharmacare, good pensions, childcare and paid sick leave.

Women are among the first and hardest hit by the economic crisis caused by the pandemic. This is the case during every recession, and it reflects the profound gender inequality that is systemically embedded in capitalism. Rooted in the gender division of labour, this inequality facilitates capitalism’s reproduction and capitalism, in turn, reproduces gender inequality. A crisis such as the present one highlights this reality and reminds us that the struggle against capitalism must include the struggle for equality for women.

Educator Jeanne McGuire drew this together during a recent presentation:

“We demand jobs, good jobs, value-added jobs. We want an end to precarious jobs because precarious jobs mean precarious incomes, precarious housing, precarious nutrition, precarious health, precarious lives. We want investment in infrastructure – public transit, clean water for indigenous communities, sustainable energy. We want the rights of the Indigenous peoples and nations to be recognized and respected, including the right to have the final say over developments on their lands – any and all developments. And free public childcare is now an even greater necessity if women are not to be pushed out of the work force by the crisis. And women are already feeling the effects of the layoffs disproportionately.”

McGuire notes that while women are only 47 percent of the work force, they represented 63 percent of the job losses in March 2020. “If you take the age group 25 to 54, the number grows to 70 percent of the job losses. The number of women in that age group who lost their jobs is double the number of men in the same age group who lost theirs – 298,500 to 144,000. 1.2 million women lost at least half of their work hours and if you include those who lost their job, the total is 1.8 million women. That’s one in five women in the work force. In some sectors women represent almost 100 percent of the job losses. Of all jobs lost, 59 percent were in either the sales or service sector – a sector dominated by women.”

Health care reform urgently needed

Another reason that women are disproportionately affected during this pandemic is that they form the overwhelming majority of workers in the health care sector. Statistics Canada data from 2018 indicate that women comprise 82 percent of health workers in Canada, nearly 10 percent higher than the global rate of 75 percent. This has been a growing employment sector, especially for women – from 1997 to 2016, employment increased nearly 70 percent, and the proportion of women working in it grew at a rate of 72 percent. By comparison, the proportion of men working in health grew at a rate of 55 percent.

In the context of COVID-19, then, women are far more likely to be exposed to infected persons, as well as expected to work in stressful and isolating conditions. The increased pressures on women’s physical and mental health, combined with the impact they may feel in their families, take a particularly heavy toll. These are work issues that are concentrated on women, but which have a profound effect throughout society.

The Communist Party’s recent policy document “Healthcare is a Right – Not a Commodity” calls for particular protections for all front-line healthcare workers. These include immediately providing personal protective equipment (PPE) to everyone healthcare worker in all capacities; free childcare, food, sanitation and transit; and emergency housing during the pandemic. The document also calls for recognizing the credentials of international trained healthcare professionals and for accelerated production of PPE and ventilators through retooling of facilities like General Motors’ closed Oshawa plant, through public takeover and operation if necessary.

The pandemic has exposed the dangerous weaknesses of underfunded and privatized health care, including long-term care. Here, again, there is a convergence between underfunded services and women-dominated work sectors. Addressing this – by reversing privatization, increasing funding and improving wages and benefits – will not only save lives and help contain the virus, but will also be important reforms on the road to equality for women.

Action to stop gendered violence

As the pandemic has spread, the issue of violence against women has yet again become more widespread across Canada. Forced to stay in their homes, and often with sharply reduced incomes, women who experience domestic and gendered violence have fewer options for their safety and protection. Shelters are filling and their phonelines are flooded with calls from women seeking help to escape both physical and mental violence. Government underfunding of shelters and transition houses have meant a lack of children’s programs, mental health experts, transit to doctors’ appointments and family court dates, and other services women need to re-establish themselves safely. The high cost of housing is another huge barrier for women and their children to escape violence.

The majority of people killed during the terrible mass shooting in Nova Scotia were women. Sheri Lecker, executive director of Adsum House women’s shelter in Halifax stated that, “Every 2.5 days, a Canadian woman or girl is murdered, most often by a man. Each week, on average, one woman is killed by her male partner. The hatred of women that leads to violence and eventual homicide is known as ‘femicide’ and must become part of our vocabulary, and we must ramp up our actions to bring an end to it.”

A stronger, structured women’s movement is needed

In order to protect, defend and enforce the rights of women – and to integrate that struggle with those of workers, racialized and Indigenous peoples, immigrants and the LGBTQi2S folks – we need a strong and structured women’s movement. It has been almost a quarter of a century since the federal government pulled operational funding from the National Action Committee on the Status of Women (NAC), dealing a fatal blow to the pan-Canadian women’s organization. Since then, women’s voices have not been silenced. We have continued to demand an end to violence in our lives, in our workplaces, on the streets and in our homes. We have maintained our struggle for the right to strike, organize, picket and bargain collectively. We have not wavered in our demands to enforce hate speech laws and make hate groups illegal.

But we are to advance in our daily struggle to curb corporate power and put “People before Profits” and open the path to full equality for women and gender oppressed people, we need to rebuild a Canada-wide organization with labour at its core.

Let’s celebrate May Day this year with a commitment to building such a movement.

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Indigenous leaders, doctors, nurses call to close construction camps

A recent open letter issued by Indigenous leaders, doctors and nurses in British Columbia calls on the province to stop work on megaprojects as part of the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.

The letter reads, "In general, B.C.'s response to the pandemic appears to be showing promising results... This is grounds for some cautious optimism, but we should not lose sight of the fact there are still significant vulnerabilities within our province's overall response. One of these is the Downtown Eastside and B.C.'s homeless population, where the first COVID-19 cases are being reported. Another is the province's prison system, where there are significant outbreaks and the first deaths being recorded. A third point of vulnerability is long-term care facilities, where a high death rate has taken place in over two dozen infected facilities.

"This open letter addresses a fourth weak link – B.C.'s construction work camps. Work on megaprojects is continuing despite the pandemic, and the crews are still sizeable. BC Hydro still reports 975 workers are present at Site C. Fully 1,500 workers at Teck's Elk Valley operations are reportedly still at their jobs, 400 at the Coastal Gaslink project and as many as 600 at the LNG Canada project in Kitimat.

"To date the province has restricted COVID-19 testing to symptomatic workers, while inexplicably ignoring abundant and growing evidence for asymptomatic transmission, which studies reveal can range from 23% to as high as 62%. When 600 sailors on the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt tested positive for COVID, 60% of them had no symptoms.

"And U.S. media have reported on a homeless shelter in Boston where 397 residents were tested and 146 came back positive – but every single one of the 146 positive individuals were completely asymptomatic.

"On April 19, Dr. Bonnie Henry [BC Provincial Health Officer] reported on the outbreak at the Kearl Lake, Alberta work camp, which has transmitted the virus to B.C. There are already 7 COVID cases in Interior Health and Northern Health linked to returning workers from the camp, and despite this the camp remains open, and Dr Henry admitted ‘we know there are more people coming back and forth.’

"Only limiting work forces to skeleton maintenance crews at these camps will adequately protect the health of workers, their families, area communities and the workers' home communities. If the province continues to refuse to act it will only guarantee the continuing silent spread of the disease."

The Open Letter was signed by Andrea Glickman (policy director, Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs), Dr. Warren Bell (founding president, Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment), and Will Offley RN, an ER nurse and long-time progressive activist.

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Labour – it’s not just about employed workers!

Editorial

There’s a story about labour leaders from the AFL-CIO in the United States meeting with their counterparts from COSATU in South Africa. During their discussion, the question arose as to what the key job of trade unions is. The American delegates offered that the role of unions is to protect and advance the interests of their members. The South Africans replied, “No, comrades, the role of trade unions is to protect and advance the interests of the whole working class.”

It seems like a small point – just a few words – but it is hugely important. And in the context of the economic crisis brought on by the coronavirus pandemic, it is one that needs careful consideration by the labour movement in Canada.

The present situation brings up several comparisons with the experience of the 1930s. The Great Depression brought terrible suffering to the working class and people in cities and the countryside – factory closures brought mass unemployment, farmers were evicted from their land, poverty conditions deepened, and this contributed to a crisis in the country’s health system.

The response to the crisis of the 30s was uneven. Right-wing trade union leaders completely abdicated their responsibility to fight for workers’ rights and welfare. In contrast, the left wing of labour – and especially the Communist Party – took the lead in organizing and fighting back. Under left-wing leadership, the Worker’s Unity League was formed and organized many industrial unions in steel mills, auto plants, rubber and chemical factories, and in the forestry and fishing industries. Not content to settle for scraps, the WUL led 90 percent of the strikes during the Depression.

But the WUL also understood the critical importance of organizing the unemployed. Their leaders saw that the crisis of the Depression was providing capitalism with a huge body of unemployed workers who were desperate to find jobs – any jobs, at any price. This is what Marx called a “disposable industrial reserve army” – structural unemployment on a mass scale that allows capitalism to reproduce itself.

Recognizing that an unorganized industrial reserve army imperiled the entire working class in its struggle for jobs, wages, social programs and higher living standards, the WUL helped initiate organizations of the unemployed, like the Relief Camp Workers Union. The RCWU led the famous On-to-Ottawa Trek, which started the country-wide movement for unemployment insurance.

Conditions today are better in many ways than during the 1930s – thanks in no small part to the struggles of workers during the Depression – but the class struggle is intensifying in a similar way. Capitalism is still eager to press unemployed workers into the ranks of the industrial reserve army. Government policies willingly facilitate that process and transfer enormous wealth to corporations, while cynically masquerading as generous bailouts for workers.

The Great Depression caused deep and widespread hardship for millions of people, just as the current economic crisis is doing. Yet the labour movement emerged from the 1930s stronger – politically and organizationally – due left-wing insistence on organizing on a class struggle basis.

The same promise of a stronger labour movement exists today. But today’s trade union movement needs to recognize, as the Worker’s Unity League did nine decades ago, the urgent necessity of organizing the unemployed. This will require time, resources, and political and organizational effort.

Because, as the AFL-CIO leaders were reminded in South Africa, unions are not just about their members – there is a whole class that needs to be united in struggle.

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Roger and Me revisited: Lessons from history, for these difficult times

Brian W Major

Michael Moore is an amazing documentary filmmaker whose work, such as Bowling for Columbine (2002) and Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), has inspired viewers around the world. His first celebrated documentary was Roger and Me, released in 1989 and celebrated on the Left as a fantastic anti-capitalist film. Given the present crisis around COVID-19, it’s definitely worth a second look; re-examining this film allows some political discussion about its relevance to today’s issues.

Roger and Me is a documentary about what happened to the town of Flint, Michigan after General Motors’ 1988 decision to close its local automobile factories. Approximately 30,000 workers were laid off by GM at that time and, as a result, Flint quickly looked as if a giant bomb had hit. The very factory that GM closed was the site of the famous 1936-37 “sit-down-strike” which led to the formation of the United Autoworkers Workers (UAW).

In the film, Moore tries to secure an interview with Roger Smith, then the CEO of GM, which proves to be very difficult. The same year the plants closed Smith made a $2 million bonus and he refused to go to Flint, although many community members had asked him to. Moore clearly makes the point that corporations such as GM do not feel any gratitude or obligation to support the local community or their workers who were responsible for their profit margin. In the case of Flint, a once thriving community quickly became the “unemployment capital of the country.”

The film reveals the absence of leadership and militancy on the part of UAW. Instead of building resistance against the layoffs, the union did nothing to stop the plant closures. When Moore asks UAW leaders about the value of another militant strike, similar to 1936, the response he receives is that such an action will not change anything. Instead, the union agrees with GM in suggesting that laid-off workers can find work as correctional officers in the newly built jail, where they become literal jailers of their fellow workers who are now imprisoned.

Roger and Me also portrays the response of the business community to the mass layoffs. Many of the wealthy people interviewed reflect an attitude that industrial workers are “lazy,” and a common response is that workers ought to show initiative and start their own business. One scene shows a laid-off worker running her own business selling Amway products, a corporation that also began in Michigan. While such initiatives might help certain individuals, it is difficult to imagine that this could be a realistic option for 30,000 people, especially in a relatively small city. Some folks are shown selling their blood at the local clinic.

One occupation is revealed to be recession-proof. It seems the most secure person is the local sheriff whose job is to physically evict people who were unable to pay their rent or mortgage. One evicted family was only one month behind in rent; they are ejected on Christmas Eve and even their Christmas tree is forcibly removed.

The film also chronicles some bizarre – and useless – government responses. At one point, public funds are used to build a massive new hotel, with the goal of attracting tourists and conventions. The hotel soon closes due to lack of business.

What does Flint look like today? After 1988, the town lost one half of its residents and the community is still very much affected by unemployment. The enduring financial crisis prompted the city to change its drinking water source to save money, which caused the Flint Water Crisis. This public health crisis, which began in 2014 and continues today, exposed over 100,000 people to lead contamination. The toxic water caused an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease, which killed 12 people. Flint residents are still unable to drink their tap water, an untenable situation that has upset people throughout the community.

One criticism of Roger and Me is its failure to explore the issue of international solidarity. The film mentions that GM closed eleven US plants in the United States in 1988 and, the same year, opened the same number in Mexico where is pays workers a mere fraction of the wages for autoworkers in the US or Canada. But instead of building solidarity with Mexican workers to collectively fight GM, the film shows workers fighting the purchase of cars manufactured outside the US. Mexican workers are symbolically seen as some sort of replacement worker or “scab.” Workers need to criticize GM, not other workers, as the corporation seeks greater profit by cynically pitting workers of different countries against one another.

Twenty-five years after Moore’s film was made, David Menzies from the far-right Rebel Media travelled to Flint as a follow-up. In his short film Flint Michigan Uncovered, Menzies shows some level of praise for Roger and Me (in a right-wing populist way) but argues that the layoffs happened because the unions were too powerful. Of course, the opposite is true. The film also calls Moore out for not living in Flint himself.

Today’s reality sees a steep decline in industrial manufacturing in Canada and the United States. More and more, greater amounts of capital are being concentrated in fewer hands. With the rise of Donald Trump and other right-wing governments across North America, including several provincial governments in Canada, corporations are receiving increased tax cuts from government. They don’t use this capital to increase salaries or invest in local communities but are building factories and farms all over the world, in an attempt to minimize labour cost.

In response, we need a much more militant labour movement, based on internationalist workers’ solidarity with those at home and abroad, so all workers across the world will have decent jobs and equally enjoy democratic rule on the job.

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