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.'

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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.'