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02-15-06,9:19am
STEPHEN HARPER APPOINTED an array of hard right neo-conservatives to his new
cabinet on Feb. 6, winning a warm response from the Bush administration but
slapping Canadian voters in the face.
The federal election results made it clear that with only 36% of the
vote, Harper has no strong mandate to push the country sharply to the right.
But his Cabinet signals that the Conservatives are determined to move
quickly in that direction, adopting the same strategy as the Harris Tories
in Ontario and Gordon Campbell's right-wing Liberal government in B.C.
The new cabinet is also proof that the Conservative rhetoric about
"trust" was a pack of lies. Foreign Affairs minister Peter MacKay, for
example, tore up his signed guarantee not to merge the Progressive
Conservatives with the Canadian Alliance. The new International Trade
minister, ex-forest company executive David Emerson, jumped from the
Liberals two weeks after voters in Vancouver Kingsway gave just 18% of their
votes to his Conservative opponent.
Even more ominously, the Harper cabinet is stacked with veterans of
Mike Harris' hated Tory government, which inflicted heavy blows against
workers' rights, democracy, and social programs.
Health Minister Tony Clement held four Ontario cabinet posts and was a
senior political aide to Mike Harris. Totally discredited after the
Harris/Eves regimes, he was defeated in Brampton in both the provincial
election of 2003 and the 2004 federal campaign. Switching ridings, he won
his seat on Jan. 23 by a mere 29 votes. His new post indicates that
right-wing provincial governments will have a much freer hand to push
private health care, unless the labour and people's movements can mount a
powerful campaign to defend universal Medicare.
Jim Flaherty, was the "law-and-order" cabinet minister in Ontario
responsible for building private "super-jails" and boot camps for young
offenders. As treasurer under Mike Harris, he instituted major tax cuts for
the corporations and the wealthy. More such breaks for the rich can be
expected under Flaherty, who is now Harper's Finance Minister.
Treasury Board minister John Baird served as minister of community and
social services under Harris, after serving as an assistant to a member of
the Mulroney cabinet.
Several MPs who entered political life as members of the far-right
Reform Party are in the new cabinet. They include Stockwell Day as minister
of Public Safety, where he will ironically push for an end to gun control
regulations, as well as for new restrictions on civil rights and an
increased military presence in cities. Day was prominent as the most
ultra-right member of the Ralph Klein Conservative government in Alberta,
before leading the Reform Party to a disastrous defeat in the 1997 federal
election.
Agriculture minister Chuck Strahl, another long time Reform/Canadian
Alliance MP, is from BC's Fraser Valley, a noted stronghold of religious
fundamentalism. Strahl will speak for the agri-business corporations which
have driven tens of thousands of Canadian farm families off the land.
Vic Toews, a former Tory provincial justice minister in Manitoba, now
has the same federal post. Toews has been one of the most vocal "law and
order" Tories, and is also known for his reactionary positions on social
equality issues.
Defence minister Gordon O'Connor was the Opposition critic for Defence
in the last Parliament, pressing for increased military spending and closer
cooperation with the Bush regime's global agenda. He served in the military
for 33 years, retiring at the rank of Brigadier General.
Jean-Pierre Blackburn's name is familiar as a prominent Quebec member
of the anti-labour Mulroney government. Blackburn is now the Labour and
Housing minister, indicating that workers and social housing advocates both
face tough battles in the months ahead.
Overall, the Harper cabinet is overwhelmingly male and white, almost
entirely consisting of politicians with close links to big business and
anti-equality forces.
Reacting to the new cabinet, Communist Party leader Miguel Figueroa
warned, "Although the Tories are still thirty seats short of a majority,
nobody should expect that Prime Minister Harper will tread water until an
election a year or two down the road. This cabinet is built to drive through
a far-right agenda of anti-labour and anti-democratic measures, brokering
deals as necessary with the various opposition parties to push through
legislation.
"There is no room for a complacent attitude that the Tory minority will
be unable to act on this agenda. Massive popular pressure will be decisive
to block the Harper Tories, and to compel the opposition parties not to
simply retreat and cut deals. The time for labour and democratic movements -
and especially the Canadian Labour Congress - to start mobilizing is now,
not later. The CLC should immediately take the initiative to convene a broad
fightback meeting of people's movements."
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2) HUGE MANUFACTURING JOB LOSSES CONTINUE
Special to PV
THE TIDE OF massive layoffs in Canada's manufacturing sector kept rising on
Feb. 2 when the French transnational Michelin SA said it will close its
BFGoodrich factory in Kitchener next July, wiping out 1,100 jobs.
A report in the Globe and Mail called the shutdown "the latest victim
of a combination of economic forces that has battered segments of the
manufacturing sector ranging from forest products to furniture. The soaring
value of the Canadian dollar, surging energy prices and competition from
lower-cost countries around the world are playing havoc with the sector."
The Kitchener plant makes replacement tires, a market that has slumped
in recent years. The jobs will be shifted to BFGoodrich plants in Alabama
and Indiana. The closing of the 44-year-old plant comes 18 months after a
three-month strike. The company had tried to impose cuts of 20 per cent
across the board in wages and benefits. The United Steelworkers local at the
plant finally won a pension increase, no cuts in benefits and a
cost-of-living pay raise, only to see the plant shut down to protect
profits.
"The decision to close the Kitchener plant was very difficult,"
according to Guy Pekle, president of Michelin North America (Canada), who
will of course keep his job. "The competitive nature of today's tire
industry requires the company to invest and maintain production in the
plants that can compete successfully in an increasingly difficult global
market."
The Michelin announcement came one day after Bridgestone Firestone said
it will close its tire distribution centres in Langley, B.C., and
Mississauga, Ont. Ford Motor has just eliminated 1,200 jobs at an assembly
plant in St. Thomas, Ont., and 3,900 jobs were cut by General Motors in
Oshawa last November.
In other announcements, John Deere Ltd. will soon shut its operations
in Woodstock, Ont., putting 325 people out of work, and in December,
La-Z-Boy Inc. closed its manufacturing plant in Waterloo, Ont.
Domtar Inc. has closed its mill in Cornwall, with more closings or
slowdowns expected, and the latest closing in northwestern Ontario is at
Abitibi-Consolidated newsprint mill in Kenora.
Overall, the manufacturing sector has lost more than 100,000 jobs over
the past year, two-thirds of these in Ontario.
According to corporate economists, the rising Canadian dollar is to
blame, going up by about 35 percent since 2002, a fourteen-year high. The
same Globe and Mail article which reported the Michelin closure said that
"analysts have been optimistic that manufacturers would be able to muddle
through by trimming costs, cutting prices and boosting productivity. But
with the dollar trading at 14-year highs against the U.S. currency, there is
a sense that a second round of adjustment has begun and that this round will
be much rougher than the first."
The Canadian Manufacturers & Exporters predicts that another 100,000
jobs in manufacturing will be lost again this year, mainly in Ontario, as
the higher dollar takes its toll. But Ontario has a "diverse economy" and
can "withstand turmoil in a few sectors," claims Carl Gomez, an economist
with Toronto-Dominion Bank. "You're certainly not going to see some kind of
big recession or anything like that."
However, declining growth in the US will have a wider impact on Canada,
and the pattern of layoffs is wider than "a few sectors." For example, Bell
Canada just announced that it will reduce its workforce by between 3,000 and
4,000 positions this year, about half from attrition.
Just as significant, what's "good for business" is usually bad for
workers. The much-ballyhooed drive for "productivity increases" may boost
shareholder profits, but almost always at the expense of jobs. Productivity
increased in 2005 largely due to the loss of thousands of relatively stable,
high-paying manufacturing jobs. This trend means that Canada is relying more
heavily on the export of volatile natural resources as its economic base.
Jim Stanford, economist with the Canadian Auto Workers, told the media
recently that "the real story (of the economy) is bubbling under the
surface. We're back to being hewers of wood - and drawers of oil."
Stanford predicts that another 100,000 more manufacturing jobs could be
lost in the coming year as companies struggle to cope with rising energy
costs, overseas competition and the soaring dollar. "There's a major
structural change developing in the Canadian economy ... we're taking
capital and labour out of manufacturing and moving it into the oilpatch."
During the recent election, Communist Party candidate Sam Hammond ran
in Sudbury, where the workforce in local mining and smelting operations has
been repeatedly downsized.
In an election news release, Hammond said, "In the past two decades the
Liberals and Tories have pushed the neo-liberal corporate agenda and brought
Canada to the brink of disaster and ruin. The North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA), the giveaway of the Auto Pact, privatization of key
resources and transportation, the loss of key industries to foreign
ownership, and massive plant closures have created more than 1.5 million
unemployed."
The Communist Party, said Hammond, "calls for a made-in-Canada
industrial strategy to reverse de-industrialization, recapture control of
energy, fossil fuels, transportation and put these resources to work for the
Canadian people. We need a strategy to develop secondary manufacturing close
to the points of extraction, a massive low-cost public housing program, an
east-west power grid and the development of fair trade mutually beneficial
to all participants. We call for broad based movements, including labour and
social justice organizations, to push for a strategy to recapture Canadian
sovereignty, get out of NAFTA, and create jobs for our youth that will
ensure quality of life and equity."
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