The crisis of the
Canadian state
May 11, 1992
AROUND THE WORLD / CANADA number of veteran leftists, and some leftwing trade unions publicly ditched the
Labor Party to back him. Even the conservative ACTU, the Australian union confederation, declined to call for first preference votes for Labor.
Despite efforts to downplay the result, everyone knows that it is a referendum on
THE Canadian state is currently going through one of the the policies of the government, which has gravest crises in its history. Its very survival as a unified presided over the highest levels of unemstate is now threatened, under the impact of a strong ployment since the 1930s and a depression revival of pro-independence sentiment in Francophone that has meant growing poverty. A report in Adelaide's Advertiser on April 14 clai-
Quebec. Moreover, there has been a renewal of the med that one out of every four children in struggles of the native peoples, who form around 5% of the that city of 1.5 million people goes to population and occupy the majority of the country's school hungry every day. The report stressed that poverty, not avoidable neglect, was the cause.
Furthermore, voters did not move from
Labor to support the platform of the main opposition party, the Liberals, who are to the right even of the government but preferred to vote for a candidate clearly identified as being to the left - John Tully *
NORTHERN IRELAND
Strip searches of women political prisoners
TWENTY TWO Republican women prisoners held in Northern Ireland's Armagh
Jail have publicly protested about the torture they have been subjected to by the
British state. According to their statement:
"On March 2, 1992, Women POWs were told that a search of the jail was to take place... a short time later women were informed that they would each be subjected to a strip search... They were threatened with loss of remission and solitary confinement if they did not comply... However, we decided to resist...
"Gangs of screws [prison guards] armed with batons and shields entered the wings. A gang of up to 16 screws entered a cell and set upon the defenceless woman inside. The POWs were seized and dragged to the floor so that they couldn't see their assailants and their mouths covered to stifle their screams.
Once inside the screws began to remove the woman's clothes until she was totally naked."
The women comment that the authorities have tried to portray this planned assault as a "routine search". They point out that all the 21 women who resisted the assault on the first day sustained injuries of some description. But it is the women prisoners who are to be charged with assault.
Our correspondents also report that these events have not been mentioned in the Irish media. A campaign is underway to press for the charges against the vic-
1 tims of this attack to be dropped. *
International Viewpoint # 228 • territory. FRANÇOIS MOREAU
HE history of Canada is, first and foremost, a history of conquest. The colonies established by France in the 17th century were then conquered by Britain in the following century, and the British settlement made Canada a predominantly Anglophone country, relegating the Francophones to the rank of dominated nation. But they still account for a quarter of the total population and 82% in Quebec, the second most important province in Canada with 7 million inhabitants. As to the natives, they were reduced to the legal status of minors, cooped up on reservations and placed under the tutelage of the federal government and its Ministry of "Indian" Affairs.
The 1867 constitution had however granted a certain degree of autonomy to the provinces in the areas of education, culture and social affairs in particular: at the time it represented a compromise with the regional bourgeoisies of the Atlantic provinces and with the FrenchCanadian nationalists.
However the Canadian big bourgeoisie has always wanted a stronger centralization, and the federal government in Ottawa has made energetic efforts to encroach on the jurisdiction of the provinces, using its superior financial resources.
It is in Quebec that these efforts have met the strongest resistance, for the Francophone majority considered the provincial government as its national government and sought to increase its powers, whereas the Anglophones had a tendency to see Ottawa rather than the provinces as their true seat of government.
This permanent conflict, inscribed in the very structure of the Canadian state, is now approaching the point of explo sion. Indeed, the independence move-
STRIKE
May 11, 1992 • # 228 International Viewpoint ment which emerged in Quebec at the beginning of the 1960s now enjoys an unprecedented level of support, even a majority according to some surveys.
But Canadian bourgeois opinion is no more disposed than before to concede an increased autonomy to Quebec in order to divide the movement. On the contrary, it is insistently demanding greater centralization.
This leaves very little space for the efforts of the federalist governments of
Quebec and Ottawa to concoct a new constitutional arrangement which would give at least the illusion of greater autonomy for Quebec.
But without this, it is very probable that the Parti Québécois (PQ) will win the next sovereignty, which it defines as the recuperation of the exclusive power of taxation and of legislation in Quebec
This will take the crisis of
Canada to a higher level.
The Anglo-Canadian left has a tendency to see the Quebecois bourgeoisie as the guiding spirit of the movement for sovereignty in Quebec, thus justifying its opposition to independence with seemingly progressive arguments.
This theme is even used by the Canadian Liberal Party, the principal governmental party of the Canadian bourgeoisie during the most of the 20th century, which affects to be worried about the fate of the
Quebecois working class in case of independence! Only 2,000 bourgeois would profit from independence, its leader,
Jean Chrétien, has said.
Yet it is among the Quebecois bourgeoisie, including its Francophone component, that one finds the strongest opposition to sovereignty, apart from among the Anglophone minority, too long accustomed to a dominant position in Quebec.
A survey carried out by the
Employers Council of Quebec among its members revealed that 65% were opposed to sovereignty, the reverse of the population in general. What is new is rather that a minority of the bourgeoisie is now favourable to sovereignty, or at least ready to accept it, compared to the virtually unanimous opposition shown during the 1980 referendum.
On the contrary it is in the ranks of the organized working class that support for independence is highest, more than 80% according to internal surveys commissioned by the trade union leaderships.
The three principal trade union federations have taken a position in favour of independence by overwhelming majorites at their congresses, and it is they who have constituted the bulk of the attendance at the big national demonstrations, like the march of 300,000 people on June 25, 1991 on the theme:
Quebec, our only country.
School students are another component of Quebecois society which is very favourable to independence. The Federation of Women of Quebec, the principal feminist grouping, has also come out in favour of sovereignty.
The eternal problem remains that the Quebecois working class has still not conquered its political class independence. Inspired by their English-Canadian leadership, the principal currents of the international workers' movement, Social Democracy and Stalinism, have completely marginalized themselves inside the Quebecois workers' movement by their reticence on, indeed their open hostility to, the national demands. Labour bureaucrats support bourgeois nationalists
The attempts to create a Quebecois Labour party have each time been checked because the trade union bureaucrats have preferred to give their support to the most nationalist bourgeois party, which would promise social reforms in exchange. For the support of the bourgeoisie goes massively to the least nationalist party, today the governing Liberal
CANADA
Party of Quebec, obliging the other to seek the support of the working class.
This is why the Parti Québécois, an officially pro-sovereignty bourgeois party, with a modernist and technocratic image, took on certain social democratic pretensions in the 1970s.
Coming to power in 1976, it paid its debt to the trade union bureaucracy by carrying out some timid reforms in the field of labor relations, despite the heated opposition of the employers, before turning against the public sector unions to impose draconian wage cuts on them during the 1982 recession. It lost power at the following elections in 1985.
Yet, despite a flagrant lack of enthusiasm for the PO and in particular for its leader, the extremely bourgeois
Jacques Parizéau, elected in
1988, the majority of the working class once more intends to vote for this party, as the sole way of defeating the detested Liberals of
Robert Bourassa and in the hope of winning at least the sovereignty of Quebec.
All the opinion polls for two years indicate that the
PQ will win the next elections, which must be held by
1994 at the latest. In this situation, the struggle to create an alternative working class politics is conducted within very narrow parameters.
Meanwhile, the rest of
Canada is experiencing an incredible political crisis. The Conservative Party, in power in Ottawa, is in fourth position in the opinion polls after the Liberals, the Social Democratic NPD and a western regionalist right wing party, the Reform Party. The Conservatives are rejected on their left, because of their regressive fiscal policies and the massive job losses brought about by free trade with the United States.
This is why three provinces have elected NDP governments in the last year, in
Ontario, Saskatchewan and British
Columbia. But the Conservatives are also rejected on their right by those who find them too conciliatory towards Quebec and not conservative enough, above all the Reform Party.
There is even a rise ofopenly anti-
Francophone currents still further to the right, like the
"Confederation of
Regions" which won a quarter of the seats at the last provincial elections in
New Brunswick, which is still 40%
Francophone.
11
In Quebec, on the contrary, the first
International Viewpoint # 228 • May 11, 1992
CANADA place went to the Bloc Québécois, an equivalent of the Parti Québécois which claims to fightt for sovereignty on the federal level, and which would win the majority of seats in Quebec if elections were held today.
It would be extremely difficult for Quebec and Ottawa to concoct a new constitutional arrangement capable of cutting the grass from under the feet of the pro-sovereignty camp, for the minimal concessions required to regain a majority in Quebec are massively rejec-
This upheaval has opened the door to a political eruption of the native peoples, who are demanding the recognition of their right to self-government as an "inherent" right, that is previous to the arrival of the whites, and who are making claims on the majority of Canadian and Quebecois territory, without going so far as talking of secession. Although opposed to these demands, which they have no intention of satisfying, the federalist forces are doing their best to turn them against the independence project in Quebec.
In this they are greatly helped by the stubborn, rigid and authoritarian attitude taken by the PQ leadership towards the native demands on Quebecois territory, and still more by the heated efforts of the Bourassa government to construct a hydro-electric mega-project on a territory claimed by the Crees, despite the opposition of the latter, a project which has nothing to do with the demand for Quebecois sovereignty — it is already a matter for provincial jurisdiction.
Native leaders tempted by federal card
Moreover, a part of the native leadership is visibly tempted to play the federal card in exchange for possible concessions, furnishing Ottawa with the dream moral pretext for rejecting an eventual declaration of sovereignty on the part of
Paying the PQ leaders back in their own coin, Ovide Mercredi, the president of the Assembly of First Nations, the principal native group in Canada, has denied that Quebec is a nation having the right to self-determination, to the great joy of the Anglophone chauvinists who would not dare to openly say such a thing.
The native groups of Quebec and elsewhere have however disassociated themselves from these declarations and recognized Quebec's right to self-determination, while continuing to affirm their own. 12 and the Quebecois national movement But the bridges between the natives are very fragile, and the PQ, which simply seeks to take over from the federal government the domination of the native peoples, is not going to construct any more.
The Quebecois trade union federations have taken some timid steps and adopted some positions of principle in favour of the self-determination of the first nations, but they hesitate to go down a road which would put them in conflict with the PQ and oblige them to confront the anti-native racist attitudes among their members and the population in
The Canadian bourgeoisie still hopes that the pro-sovereignty current will flinch at the critical moment, faced with the campaign of political and economic intimidation currently being prepared, and that some symbolic concessions will be enough to win the "soft" pro-independence current back to the federalist
But this strategy could well fail, in part because of the political crisis in English-speaking Canada, which makes it very difficult to formulate some kind of federal "offer" andis leading to an increase in anti-Francophone chauvinism. In this case, the Canadian bourgeoisie would use force to keep Que-
The technical preparations are already underway. The budget of the secret police has been increased and that of the army maintained — in the midst of international detente - while the troops stationed in Germany have been repatriated to Canada. So far as political preparation is concerned, what better than to claim to be defending the natives to justify the use of force against Quebec?
We are also now witnessing a resurgence of anti-Quebec literature, depicting the Francophones as a racist and xenophobic tribe, anti-Semitic and reactionary, hostile to individual liberties and to the rights of minorities, manipulated by the nationalist media, and so on. If this was true, Canada would not only have the right, but the duty, to stop a national movement which some go so far as to compare to Nazism!
Very much depends on the attitude of the workers' movement in English-speaking Canada. After having rejected it for
25 years, the NPD officially recognized
Quebec's right of self-determination in
1987, while continuing to firmly support
Canadian unity.
The same goes for the Congress of
Labour of Canada, the principal trade union federation, whose Quebecois component is the pro-independence Federation of Workers of Quebec!
But the English-Canadian left is ill prepared to confront the political campaign underway to justify the use of force in the name of the defence of native liberties and rights, supposedly threatened by Quebecois nationalism.
Worse, these views are widely current in the left itself. There is reason to fear that at the critical moment, it will be disoriented and paralyzed by the federal strategy.
Illusions in federal state persist
However, the principal political weakness of the left and of the English-Canadian workers' movement is its almost unanimous identification of social progress and individual rights with the cen-
Far from recognizing it for what it is, the principal instrument of domination of the Canadian imperialist big bourgeoisie, it idealizes this state as the defender of the weak, the minorities and the oppressed against the US multinationals and against the reactionary provincial governments, including if not above all that of Quebec.
This stems from the fact that the federal government was the principal agent of Keynesian welfare state policies in Canada from the 1940s onwards. But it is today the principal agent of their dismantling, in the interests of the Cana-
For this latter, the stakes are sizeable. The independence of Quebec would be an unmitigated catastrophe which would reduce its international stature, amputate its internal market and challenge the current equilibrium of Canadian institutions. One can then expect it to do all in its power to block such a possibility.
However, the same degree of determination does not exist on the other side. The Quebecois bourgeoisie, in its overwhelming majority, desires a new arrangement which reinforces the provincial autonomy of Quebec, but at the same time avoids a dangerous rupture. This limits the PQ leadership to a stagist and gradualist drift whose final result would be provincial autonomy. The petty bourgeois nationalist currents which lead the national societies might sincerely wish for the complete indepen dence of Quebec, but they do not represent a social force capable of achieving
The Quebecois working class is the only significant social force seeking to break with the Canadian state which has the ability to impose such a break, providing that it frees itself politically from the PQ. This is the struggle to which
Quebecois revolutionary Marxists have committed themselves. *