PEOPLE'S VOICE - Issue of February1-14, 2023

 

The following articles are from the February 1-14, 2023 issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading socialist newspaper.

1. Communist Party: "Ford's privatization scheme is the tipping point that threatens Medicare across Canada"
2. Mobilize now to stop Ford’s healthcare privatization!
3. F-35 deal: Austerity for the working class funds unlimited spending for NATO wars
4. New Brunswick Peace Council action against war, military spending
5. BC police funding scandal is the latest proof that governments prioritize corporate interests over Indigenous rights and environment
6. Solidarity with French strikes means stepping up (to) the struggle in Canada
7. BC Labour Board ruling puts picket lines in the crosshairs
8. OFL “Enough is Enough” campaign – has the sleeping giant awakened?
9. Toronto budget is about life-or-death choices
10. Rewriting the script on municipal budgets
11. Thousands demonstrate against private hospitals
12. Brazilian communists call for united, mass struggle against coup movement
13. Venezuelan teachers mobilize for better wages and to protect contract rights
14. Labour’s fighting history shines a light on the path forward
15. The climate crisis and literature – a call for “cli-fi socialist realism”
16. Art show takes viewers into the “hidden abode of production”

 

 

Communist Party: "Ford's privatization scheme is the tipping point that threatens Medicare across Canada"

Stop Healthcare Privatization in Ontario!

Ontario’s Tory government has just announced it will create a two-tier healthcare system in the province: one, a private-for profit system which is expected to thrive off the funding and staffing diverted from the public system; and the other, the chronically underfunded and understaffed universal public system of Medicare, which will be further impoverished and in critical condition if this legislation is not stopped.

Two-tier healthcare is illegal under the Canada Health Act and a direct threat to Canada’s universal public system of Medicare. The Prime Minister’s statements that he has no power over the provinces and Medicare is not true. The PM and the people of Canada have the Canada Health Act to protect them and to protect universal Medicare.

The PM’s most recent statement that Ford’s two-tier plan is “innovative” exposes the collusion and complicity of the federal Liberal government with Tory and right-wing provincial governments in their quest to destroy universal public Medicare and open up the country to private for-profit healthcare companies like the HMOs in the US that have transformed healthcare into a super-profitable commodity for sale to those with the money to buy it.  Working people in the US are dying because healthcare in the US is a private, for-profit system.   This is most evident in the huge number COVID deaths in the US as compared to other developed capitalist countries. More than 1.1 million Americans died, victims of private for-profit medicine and right-wing governments.

If the Prime Minister, the government and Parliament will not act to stop this proposal, to reverse privatization and to adequately fund and support universal Medicare now, using the power of the Canada Health Act, then the Canadian public must rise up to defend Medicare – long-regarded as a sacred trust and the “crown jewel” of social programs in Canada. Failure to protect Medicare has enacted a big price for every government since 1966, and it will be no different in 2023.

The very real crisis in public healthcare,which has been exposed with the COVID crisis, is a direct result of chronic federal underfunding coupled with provincial hospital closures, bed closures, extensive delisting of publicly funded health services, understaffing, falling real wages and wage restraints, and galloping privatization including P3 hospitals and services. 

This is why people are dying in emergency waiting rooms.

This crisis has been developing over many years, with legal challenges from private doctors wanting the courts to open the doors to two-tier healthcare in Canada. The Chaoulli decision in Quebec in 2005 was a serious attack on Medicare when it did not reject two-tier healthcare.  The Cambie Surgery decision in BC, which supported the single payer public system and opposed privatization, is likely to be appealed to the Supreme Court where that battle will continue. At the same time, provincial governments on the prairies enabled the introduction of private for-profit healthcare services as public hospital and healthcare services were deliberately underfunded, as waitlists grew and as hospital personnel and the public cried out for government action to support the public system. A meeting of Tory premiers last year, which included NB’s Premier Higgs and Ontario’s Premier Ford, set the stage for the current move to open up the country to a two-tier system that will lead to the complete privatization of healthcare if it is not stopped. That is the real significance of the Ontario’s move to private-for profit healthcare. This is the tipping point that threatens Medicare across Canada.

This crisis was made-in-Cabinet by federal and provincial governments, both Liberal and Conservative, and the privatefor-profit healthcare corporations located in the US who see Canada as an untapped and rich source of mega-profits. Profits made on the deathbeds of long-term care residents in for-profit facilities owned and operated by transnational corporations.

Because government responses to these awful deaths was not to expand publicly owned long-term care, but instead to expand private for-profit LTC, it’s clear that the public must pick up the fight,and that the labour and democratic movements must take the lead to build a powerful movement to save Medicare, without delay.

The Communist Party is committed to fight for universal Medicare and to expand it. We call for:

• Federal government action to stop and reverse private for-profit healthcare in Ontario
• Restore and expand federal funding for Medicare across Canada
• Remove wage restraints such as Ontario’s Bill 124 and raise wages
• Hire healthcare professionals and open closed wards and beds
• Recognize the credentials of internationally trained healthcare workers
• Build regional public hospitals to replace those closed or never built
• Reverse privatization including P3 hospital construction and outsourced services
• Expand Medicare to include long-term care, pharmacare, vision, dental and mental healthcare
• Introduce Canada-wide standards of care

Medicare in Canada was never a gift, it was the prize fought for and won by working people in struggle for their health, for the health of their children and their communities, against greed and the drive for wealth and profits. 

Sixty years on, the struggle continues.

Central Executive, Communist Party of Canada

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Mobilize now to stop Ford’s healthcare privatization!

The creeping privatization of public healthcare in Ontario has picked up pace sharply, with the Ford government’s announcement that it will expand the number of publicly funded procedures done at private facilities.

This is a classic example of a government deliberately underfunding a public service to the point that it begins to break down and people become desperate enough to accept privatization as an immediate solution. It is reminiscent of 1995, when Mike Harris’ Minister of Education John Snobelen was caught on filmbragging that he was “creating a crisis” and “bankrupting” public education, to make public opinion more open to expanded private education in Ontario.

In the case of healthcare, and hospitals in particular, successive Conservative and Liberal governments have systematically gutted it through underfunding. If funding were at the level of other provinces in Canada, Ontario would have 33,000 more hospital jobs than at present. Clearly, the long waitlists and appalling lack of beds are direct consequences of government policy.

But when Ford says he’ll “do whatever it takes to fix the system,” he clearly isn’t prepared to do what is needed – provide proper funding. His only answer is privatization.

For millions of people in Ontario, Ford’s announcement will mean extra charges for care, aggressive upselling of procedures which they do not require and a deeper drain on already insufficient government funding, as private for-profit facilities syphon it off. More vulnerable populations – especially elderly people and people in distress – will be particularly targeted for manipulative upselling.

Ford denies the risk of fees and upselling, repeatedly stating thatOHIP will cover everything. But this is very misleading, since the provincial governmentalready allows private clinics in Ontario to nickel and dime patients and to upsell them, while OHIP covers less and less.

Furthermore, as experience has repeatedly shown, private sector service delivery (whether in health or any other sector) quickly follows a pattern of two-tiered access – areas which are poor, remote or otherwise “less profitable” receive vastly reduced care options. Northern Ontario, Indigenous communities and rural areas already face enormous shortcomings in terms of the quantity and quality of facilities and services to which they have access. Privatization only exacerbates and accelerates this trend.

Public healthcare rests on the pillars of universality, portability, accessibility, comprehensiveness and accountability. These pillars can only be guaranteed through public sector delivery of fully and adequately funded services in publicly owned institutions. Private sector involvement not only cannot support these pillars, but it actively undermines them.

People in Ontario and throughout Canada fought long and hard to win socialized medicine, back to the heroic campaigns of communists and progressives like Dr. Norman Bethune, Manitoba MLA James Litterick and Fred Rose MP, all of whom organized struggles for public healthcare in the 1930s and 1940s. These efforts laid the stage for the major breakthrough when the CCF/NDP successfully introduced public healthcare in Saskatchewan in 1962.

Since then, working people have had to fight to protect and expand public healthcare, against constant attacks from health profiteers and their allies in government.

In the face of the current threat from the Ford government, working people and health advocates are quickly rising to the challenge. The Ontario Health Coalition (OHC), in particular, has built a province-wide network of local committees that unites labour and community and has repeatedly mobilized to defend public healthcare against privatization, delisting of services, forced amalgamation and underfunding.

The Communist Party of Canada (Ontario) is a longstanding member of the OHC and supports the coalition’s campaign to stop Ford’s privatization of hospital procedures. The Party calls on all labour and progressive organizations to help build this campaign and defend public healthcare. Rather than diminishing Medicare through underfunding, delisting and privatization, the government must be forced to adequately fund it and expand it to include dental, pharmacare, vision, mental health and LTC.

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F-35 deal: Austerity for the working class funds unlimited spending for NATO wars

The Canadian state continues its march to war with the purchase of eighty-eight F-35 fighter jets from Lockheed Martin for the Canadian Armed Forces. The price tag is at least $70 billion, with some analysts predicting the cost to be over $90 billion. This purchase is combined with those of 200 armoured vehicles from Roshel at a cost of $90 million and an over $400 million surface to air missile system from Raytheon, for the war in Ukraine.

For the seventh consecutive year, global military expenditure and worldwide arms sales increased. Global military expenditure exceeded $2.1 trillion USD in 2021, surpassing $2 trillion USD for the first time ever. Worldwide sales of arms and military services by the 100 largest companies in the industry reached $592 billion USD in 2021.

The purchase of unnecessary weapons is especially egregious amidst the staggering cost of living and stagnant wages for working-class people. Workers are being forced to choose between groceries or gas bills, while provincial governments understaff hospital emergency rooms and close schools to try to drive education workers’ wages down. Two hours of operating one F-35 is equivalent to the annual salary of a nurse, teacher or paramedic. The purchase of new weapons is not to keep people in Canada safe – the armoured vehicles and missile system are being sent to forces in Ukraine and the F-35 is a ‘first strike’ weapon with limited range designed for bombing missions. The purchase of these weapons is only to fuel the wars of the ruling class.

The conflict in Belarus, Ukraine and the Russian Federation has impacted the global supply of wheat, fertilizer, pork, oil and gas, all of which are major exports from Canada. Ninety-five food and energy corporations more than doubled their profits in 2022 – they made $306 billion USD in profits and paid out $257 billion USD (84 percent) of that to rich shareholders.

The roughly 50 billionaires in Canada have seen their assets rise 51 percent since the start of the pandemic, with billionaire assets reaching $249 billion versus $248 billion belonging to the bottom 40 percent of people in Canada. The devastation of the war and resulting global food and energy shortages are enriching the wealthy while hurting the workers and oppressed here and around the world.

The global arms race is being driven by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and its demand that all member states spend an arbitrary 2 percent of gross domestic product on military expenditures. NATO is an illegal alliance under international law. Membership in the alliance carries profound military, political and economic consequences for individual states and their peoples. By compelling its members to adopt, support and enact its mutual clause, NATO draws them into wars of aggression in the pursuit of imperialist expansion. Through the alliance’s nuclear weapons sharing policy, NATO countries become de facto nuclear weapons states, active participants in the development, testing, proliferation and use of weapons of mass destruction. Through NATO, officially nuclear-free countries such as Canada become components in imperialism’s multilateral nuclear strike force, usually without the consent or even knowledge of their people.

With the purchase of F-35s Canada is once again capable of deploying nuclear weapons, bringing the world closer to the brink. The F-35s purchased by the Canadian government can hold two B-61 nuclear bombs per plane, with each bomb being over three times stronger than the weapons used on the people of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. The B-61 is the primary weapon in the NATO nuclear weapon sharing program, with stockpiles around the world. Polling has shown the majority of working people in Canada have opposed the purchase of F-35s for over a decade and yet not a single elected party or parliamentarian has taken a stand against the announcement of the purchase. In 2015, Justin Trudeau promised to cancel the planned purchase of F-35s if elected. The Liberals’ 2015 policy book included a plank on cancelling the F-35s because they opposed a ‘first strike’ weapon. The Canadian military is being handed nuclear weapons unbeknownst to the working people in Canada, at a time when the Finance Minister and Chief of Defence Staff are making public proclamations of war with the Russian Federation.

Communist Party denounces the Canadian government’s drive to war

In response to the F-35 purchase, the Communist Party of Canada issued a statement on January 20, reiterating its longstanding demand to beat swords into ploughshares. “In this time of economic uncertainty working people are looking for serious investments into healthcare, education, housing and compensation nearing the dignity and worth of the human person. We will continue to mobilize and campaign against the purchase of these weapons and call for the funds to be instead invested in public social services.”

The Communist Party has campaigned continuously for an independent Canadian foreign policy based on peace, international cooperation and solidarity. As a necessary first step in developing such a policy, the Party calls for Canada’s immediate and unilateral withdrawal from NATO.

All labour, peace and progressive organizations need to take a stand and join the struggle against the acquisition of these dangerous weapons. They should also all add their voice to the growing call for Canada’s immediate and unilateral withdrawal from NATO.

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New Brunswick Peace Council action against war, military spending

In conjunction with the MLK Week of Action called by the United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC) in the US, New Brunswick’s Conseil de la paix NB Peace Council organized an action on January 19 to denounce US wars and Canada’s increasingly complicit role in the US imperialist agenda. The group released the following statement.

At a time when working people are getting the equivalent of wage cuts as inflation dilutes the purchasing power of wages, rents continue to rise beyond people’s ability to pay and the cost-of-living crisis exacerbates, Canada is turning its attention away from its own people. Instead, it moves to increase its contribution to NATO by boosting defense spending, purchasing military equipment, diverting billions in weapons and fighter jets instead of public housing, price controls, healthcare and employment insurance.

US wars need to stop. Efforts by the US to “contain” putative adversaries through the manipulation of vassal states of the US’s own creation enables the US military-industrial complex to profit over the weapons sold to proxies, dragging whole regions full of innocents including women and children into devastating chaos. For what? For the profit of the shareholders of the defense industry. Canada’s ruling class hopes to profit from the bloody business of war by pushing for further Canadian integration into US imperialism and calling for further defense spending no matter what the social cost may be.

Canada is increasingly abandoning all notions of having a foreign policy independent of the US and NATO. Domestic airwaves, guided by an editorial line captured by the US imperialist agenda, normalize a dangerous “us versus them” notion not so keenly felt since the Cold War, combining fear of the other with overlysimplistic, reductionist presentation of “facts” to whip up the masses to enthusiastically support war to the detriment of peace.

We call on Canada to put its people first, to raise wages, enact rent and price controls, to focus on its own problems and complicated colonial history and fulfill its commitments to reconciliation, and become a real leader in solving the climate crisis. None of this is possible if the federal government is beholden to the imperial interests of the United States and NATO. Canada must restore an independent foreign policy of peace and disarmament, diplomacy and dialogue, mutual respect and common development.

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BC police funding scandal is the latest proof that governments prioritize corporate interests over Indigenous rights and environment

Communist Party calls for secretRCMP squad to be dismantled

The revelation that almost $50 million has been spent over the last five years by a special RCMP squad assigned to shut down grassroots opposition to energy and forestry projects in British Columbia is the latest proof that the BC and federal governments prioritize corporate interests over Indigenous rights and environmental sustainability.

The Communist Party of BC condemns this ongoing waste of taxpayer dollars as a serious violation of Indigenous sovereignty, and an attack on the democratic and civil rights of all those working to defend the environment in British Columbia. We demand the immediate dismantling of the RCMP's so-called Community-Industry Response Group (C-IRG), an end to injunctions and attacks against environmentalists and Indigenous land defenders and water protectors, and genuine action by Canada to implement the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which explicitly states that resource extraction projects must not proceed without full consultation and approval by the Indigenous peoples whose lands are affected.

Established in 2017, the C-IRG has no defined territorial jurisdiction, and no set budget or staff size. The squad "goes where industry meets land occupations, blockades and civil disobedience," as a CBC news report states. The C-IRG's spending has included $27.6 million related to policing the Coastal GasLink LNG pipeline across unceded Wet'suwet'en territories, where several massive and brutal RCMP raids have targeted Indigenous land defenders. Another $18.7 million has been devoted to enforcing injunctions and arresting over 1,000 protesters at the Fairy Creek old-growth logging project on Vancouver Island (on behalf of the forestry firm Teal Cedar) and a further $3.5 million on the Trans Mountain (TMX) project to expand the controversial tar sands pipeline from Alberta to the west coast.

Despite these expenditures, the C-IRG functions in secrecy, as part of a wider policy by governments and courts to expand resource extraction and exports. In the view of the Communist Party, the real criminals are the big resource monopolies seeking to maximize private profit. The use of the RCMP to promote this strategy is appalling, but not surprising. The RCMP's origins are rooted in the post-Confederation drive by the Canadian state to expropriate Indigenous territories, extract natural resources, weaken working class resistance against capitalist exploitation, and to attempt to smash radical and Communist movements which oppose this agenda.

This is not the first time an NDP government has used police and military violence against people who challenge the dogma of private capitalist control of the land. For example, during the Gustafsen Lake case in 1995, BC Attorney General Ujjal Dosanjh authorized a 400-member RCMP task force to attack and arrest a small number of Indigenous Sun Dancers and supporters on a ranch near 100 Mile House.

That history and this latest shameful episode show that politicians who speak in performative ways about Indigenous rights and a sustainable environment must be held to account for their actions and policies. The Communist Party of BC is urging the labour and democratic movements in British Columbia to call for dismantling the C-IRG and to give full support to struggles against the CGL and TMX pipelines, the logging of old-growth forests at Fairy Creek, for cancellation of the Site C dam and for ending taxpayer subsidies of the energy and forestry corporations.

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Solidarity with French strikes means stepping up (to) the struggle in Canada

PV Labour Bureau

In June 2001, a group of trade union leaders from the US visited South Africa for a focused exchange which examined issues confronting each of their movements. At one point, while discussing political action, one of the US labour leaders remarked that the role of the union in political action was to represent the interests of its members. The South Africans politely disagreed: “Comrades, the role of the union is to represent the interests of the working class. There are times when the interests of the working class conflict with the interests of the members of our respective unions.”

The point here is not to skewer the US labour leaders – by all accounts, they were progressive political activists, and their view that the union needs to represent the interests of its members is not incorrect.

Rather, the point is to highlight a vision of trade unionism which is all too frequently absent from the labour movement in the US and Canada. That is a vision of what is sometimes called “class-oriented social unionism” – of the union actively representing broader working-class interests which may go beyond those of their specific members and workplaces.

Right now, workers in Canada are getting a good look at this vision through the pension reform strikes that have rocked France since mid-January, mobilizing 2 million people into the streets and bringing the country to a standstill on January 19.

These actions are in response to governmentproposals increase the retirement age for a full state pension from 62 years to 64 and to lengthen the overall contribution period to 43 years. The government claims this reform is necessary to ensure the pension system is funded, estimating that the 2-year extension will provide an additional $19 billion annually. The proposals are a reintroduction of similar ones that were pushed back in 2020 and they remain enormously unpopular among the French people, with two-thirds opposed.

That the public is against the reform is not surprising; neither is the fact that people are demonstrating. Similar attacks here in Canada would elicit similar responses. What is notable in France, though, is how that opposition has been built into mass social protest including strike action. This is not the result of some spontaneous eruption of political consciousness – it is the product of class-oriented social unionism.

Leading the charge is the Confédérationgénérale du travail (CGT), France’s most militant and politically progressive trade union central. When the government first introduced the pension reforms at the end of 2019, the CGT responded before they were even formally announced, with strikes and protests which quickly grew to involve about 1.5 million people across the country. Notably, the number of people involved in the struggle was more than double the union’s entire membership of about 640,000.

The CGT’s initiative was crucial, since the country’s largest labour central, the more conservative Confédération française démocratique du travail (CFDT), declined to act. The CFDT initially took a conciliatory approach to the reforms and had been in negotiations with the government on them. It only joined the protests after nearly two weeks of CGT-led strikes had shut down France’s transportation infrastructure.

When the government was forced to delay its proposed reform until December 2022 (and subsequently to January 2023), the CGT spent the time continuing to build the base for mass social protest. While the CFDT remained open to negotiating with the government and calling for maintenance of the status quo (retirement at age 62), the CGT has worked to rally people to an alternative proposal for pension reform. That proposal would allow for full retirement at age 60 and be paid for by cutting off public subsidies to corporations, raising wages for all workers, eliminating the 28 percent gender wage gap, closing corporate tax loopholes and increasing overall employment through a shorter work week. One union’s approach takes care of the interests of its members; the other union’s approach does the same but develops that into taking care of the interests of the whole working class.

The CGT’s efforts appear to have paid off in 2023, with increased public opposition to the government’s proposals, even larger strikes than in 2020 and the involvement of the CFDT from the beginning. Some observers have already suggested that the current mobilizations have the capacity to bring down the government.

Workers and unions in Canada have expressed solidarity with the pension reform strikes in France. But solidarity involves more than expressions of support – it also involves learning from the experiences of other people’s struggles and applying that insight to step up the class struggle here.

The class-oriented social unionism of the CGT in France demonstrates the importance of moving (or developing) workers’ struggle from the point of production to the point of consumption – from fighting at the “shop floor” level to engaging in political struggle at the country-wide and even international level.

Doing this means immersing the union in large-scale issues like global political economy, international trade and finance deals, militarism, climate change and environmental degradation. It means helping working people to understand how they fit into this larger picture and how it affects them in their workplace and community. This involves more than simply having union leaderships fund and support social movements. During the anti-globalization struggles of the late 90s and early 2000s, unions in Canada helped fund coalitions and campaigns, and union leaders regularly showed up and spoke at demonstrations. But, millions of grassroots union members were often left unaware of their own union’s analysis about globalization and why it mattered to the working class. The same is often true now with key issues such as climate and environmental justice, militarism and war, and racial and gender equality.

Class-oriented social unionism requires a leadership that is responsible to the membership – accountable, responsive, engaged – and a membership that is united with a fighting leadership.

France has a very low rate of unionization, and the total membership of the various union centrals is about 2.4 million workers. So, 2 million protesters represent around 80 percent of total trade union membership. By comparison, if the labour movement in Canada were able to mobilize a similar proportion of its total membership (about 4 million) 3.2 million would hit the streets. Of course, these aren’t just union members in the streets of France – but that’s precisely the point. Class-oriented social unionism mobilizes the entire working class, not just union members, on issues that affect the entire class.

Why is this so important?

For the working class to wage a fight against capital and ultimately win political power, it needs an independent working-class ideology. This is especially important in the current conditions, in which the economic base for reformism and opportunism inside the labour movement is diminishing.

For many decades, exploitation of colonial and semi-colonial peoples allowed capitalists in the exploiting countries share a small portion of their super-profits with a section of the workers, in the form of higher wages. This formed a basis for class collaboration and the resulting penetration of capitalist ideas into the labour movement. Inasmuch as the Canadian monopolists shared in colonial super-profits, this process has had its effects on the Canadian labour movement.

However, as the class contradictions within capitalism have sharpened, workers have faced increasing pressure from the bosses and their governments, who are less willing to share their more limited spoils and are demanding more concessions and more wealth from the working class.

These increased attacks typically generate increased labour militancy, but this doesn’t translate directly or immediately into increased class and political consciousness. That develops from outside of workers’ experience in the workplace, as socialist theory is welded onto their struggles, and they are drawn to the political level. In the process, the illusions fostered by reformism and opportunism come into conflict with an intensifying struggle, and are replaced with class consciousness.

So, the view that the state is neutral authority, standing above all, is replaced by an understanding of the state’s class nature and role in capitalist society. Reliance upon narrow electoralism is replaced by mass extra-parliamentary struggle that seeks to build a parliamentary reflection. Reformist campaigns, which fight for limited and partial gains, are replaced by campaigns for concrete and far-reaching reforms which build working-class confidence and experience, strengthen unity and organization, deepen class consciousness and shift the balance of class forces. Class collaboration is replaced by class struggle.

Workers in Canada can strengthen the labour movement by organizing around the kind of class-oriented social unionism we see in the CGT in France. Drawing upon their own long collective of class struggle here, they can press their unions to mobilize and lead independent working-class political campaigns. They can build local labour-community resistance committees and left caucuses in their unions and labour councils, as the basis for representing and fighting for the interests of the entire working class.

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BC Labour Board ruling puts picket lines in the crosshairs

Federally regulated workers no longer considered “persons”

BC Labour Opinion

Trouble is brewing for workers on the west coast, where a successful strike action is retroactively being declared illegal by the BC Labour Relations Board.

Reversing their 2022 ruling –in which the legal right of workers to refuse to cross a picket line was upheld at a picket line outside of Seaspan's Vancouver Shipyards last year – the Labour Board has yielded to semantic quibbles by company lawyers in a decision which will be almost certainly used again against organized labour. Declaring that federally regulated workers are not considered “persons” under the BC Labour Code, and by leveraging vague language in the code about what is prohibited or expressly permitted on a picket line in favor of the employer, a big victory for the working class in this province is being stolen and reversed as a dangerous legal precedent.

During year's job action at the Seaspan shipyard, when a small but militant picket of striking tugboat operators set up at the sole entrance to the shipyard, the struggle quickly grew to include half a dozen unions in a strike whichgrounded Seaspan’s entire construction operation to a halt for seven weeks. After two years of stalled negotiations, the picket was the definitive factor which forced Seaspan back to negotiations, inking a tentative deal which is said to include a 5.7 percent pay hike for tugboat workers with the Canadian Merchant Services Guild.

While the Labour Board ruling does not nullify that victory and will not result in fines against the unions who respected the picket line, a legal precedent has been set which will very likely be used against BC workers in the future. In a recent article for the Tyee, Zak Vescera noted the ruling may be wielded against picket lines where federally or provincially regulated units overlap –effectively forcing unions under different jurisdictions to choose between crossing a picket line or facing outrageous fines. As the poly-party unions (referring to single bargaining units represented jointly by more than one union) in the hearing make clear,this cowardly ruling is an open attack on the sanctity of the picket line and an open assault on the principles of working-class solidarity.

It is well within the realm of possibility that the new ruling will be revived back at the scene of the crime – another potential picket line at Vancouver Shipyards. With 2018’s collective agreement between the poly-party locals of Marine & Shipbuilders Local 506, UAP 170, IBEW 218, IAMAW 692 and MOVEUP on one hand and Seaspan on the other expiring in February, collective bargaining will be taking place against a background of intensified economic breakdown, inflation, rising interest rates and a looming recession. While Seaspan CEO John McCarthy proclaims the bright future of expansion and growth in Vancouver, the shipbuilding industry (flush with public tax dollars) flounders – caught between the reality of Canadian deindustrialization, ballooning costs, cascading supply chain disruptions and a big skilled labour shortage in BC. With the ever-present threat of losing federal contracts to Irving Shipbuilders in Halifax, it doesn’t take much imagination here to see the class contradictions sharpening at the yard towards another showdown.

The question in such a hypothetical scenario is whether Seaspan’s tugboat operators with the CMSG (under federal jurisdiction) will respect another picket line at Seaspan (under provincial jurisdiction), reciprocating the solidarity that helped them negotiate a contract. Because doing so, even though they are under the same employer, is now illegal in BC.

Even if such a scenario does not unfold – if negotiations succeed at the bargaining table – this anti-worker ruling will be wielded elsewhere. As Vescera notes, over 120,000 workers in BC work in federally regulated workplaces. With this new legal precedent, which attempts to reverse a significant victory for labour, bureaucratic overtures towards federal and provincial jurisdictions are being cynically employed to chip away at a hard-won legal provision in this province for workers to refuse to cross a picket line.

This shameful ruling raises an urgent question – will the labour movement in BC continue to slumber while the very foundations of working-class solidarity are erased? Or will it fight back, tapping into the proud history of the labour struggle in this province? Because business unionism and sole reliance on lobbying the NDP are guaranteed avenues for losing.

The truth is, the right to strike and to respect a picket line did not drop from the sky from a benevolent master. It was fought for collectively and won, and questions of Illegality and legality are stopgaps from the ruling class made after the dust settles. What is needed now is broad unity within the labour movement and its allies, the kind of solidarity we saw last year when workers put down their tools on behalf of their comrades for seven weeks and showed the profound power of working-class solidarity.

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OFL “Enough is Enough” campaign – has the sleeping giant awakened?

PV staff

As the issue of PV heads to press, the Ontario Federation of Labour is preparing to launch a province-wide campaign to increase wages, reduce prices and improve public services like healthcare, education and housing.

In the wake of the Ontario Conservatives’ electoral victory last year, and in the current context of soaring prices and reduced real wages, the “Enough is Enough” campaign has the potential to turn widespread frustration and discontent into a powerful mass social movement for progressive advance.

The OFL has presented some very good demands in the campaign, generally reflecting working people’s immediate concerns and pushing some fairly far-reaching solutions.

On the issue of incomes, the campaign focuses squarely on the issue of real wages and notes that consumer prices in Ontario are increasing by as much as twice the rate as wages. Citing the province’s average living wage of $19.72 per hour and the fact that at least 863,000 Ontarians in 571,000 households live in deep poverty while receiving social assistance, it calls for a $20 minimum wage and doubling of social assistance rates. It also calls for a halt to the government’s appeal of the court ruling which overturned Bill 124 (broader public sector wage and benefit cap), for the restoration and expansion of decent work laws including paid sick days and equal pay for equal work, and legislation making it easier for workers to join a union.

On healthcare and education, the campaign says, “Enough is Enough!” to Ontario’s bottom-of-the-pile per capita health spending, day-long emergency room wait times and tumbling funding for public schools. It calls for an end to privatization of education and healthcare, increasing staffing for healthcare, proper funding and elimination of user fees for all public services, slashed post-secondary tuition fees, affordable and accessible childcare and free and accessible transit.

Noting that grocery costs for a typical family will rise by $1065 this year while corporate grocers continue to enjoy enormous profit increases, the campaign is pushing for government action to stop price gouging, impose price caps on basic goods including groceries and fuel, and tax the profits of food and oil corporations. In response to a nearly 50 percent increase in food bank use since 2018, it calls for a Right to Food law to guarantee universal free school meals.

On the issue of housing, the campaign proposes a series of policies and programs to address the immediate crisis. Among these are real rent controls and a Tenants’ Bill of Rights, a halt to evictions and foreclosures, and a cap on mortgage payments as inflation rates rise. Some of the demands, though, could go be more specific or bolder. For example, while the campaign calls for a province-wide public housing program “that builds decent homes in every community,” it could specify that the province needs to provide rent geared to income (RGI) rental housing. Similarly, while the campaign includes rent controls, it falls short of calling for rent rollbacks – this is particularly urgent given that rents are already out of reach for many people.

The section on corporate taxation is a bit confusing. On the one hand, the campaign notes that the highest-paid corporate executives in Canada “shattered records for compensation” by earning an average of $14.3 millionin 2021, and that corporate profits have skyrocketed. However, the policies which are put forward to address this accelerating inequity are very modest: a tax on record profits, restored tax rates for the highest individual earners, ending corporate tax breaks and loopholes and fining those that do not pay. A bolder approach is needed here, one that will double the corporate rate, introduce plant closure legislation with real teeth, and demand the public takeover and operation of key industries like banking, energy and transportation.

Unfortunately, three key areas seem to be missing altogether from the campaign demands. Nothing is said about climate and environmental justice, military spending or Indigenous rights and sovereignty. Important in their own right, all of these relate intimately to the other themes which the campaign (rightfully) identifies – jobs, development, services, funding – so it will be important for workers in Ontario to press for their inclusion.

In general, though, “Enough is Enough” appears to be a strong step in the direction of the kind of independent labour political action that working people in Ontario desperately need the OFL to initiate and lead. It is certainly a promising departure from the election countdown clock which dominated the OFL’s website for the past four years.

Yet, there is a difference between words and actions. The OFL’s previous campaign, “The Power of Many,” was little more than a branding exercise for the NDP as “labour’s party” – as a campaign for a better society, it was an utter failure to launch.

If “Enough is Enough” is going to translate into real action, workers in Ontario will need to push the OFL leadership and the heads of unions to make it happen. Here are some ways they could do it:

Develop the campaign as the basis for a structured common front that can unite labour and community groups in an escalating fightback that includes the political strike weapon. There is a real danger that the focus will be on lobbying, which is not a winning strategy – there needs to be mass political action now.

Use the campaign to rebuild unity of the labour movement, on a class struggle basis. The dispute between the heads of Unifor and the CLC may not have a simple resolution. But, at the same time, simple unity on paper doesn’t advance working class interests. Local anti-cuts assemblies, bringing together all unions and community organizations that are committed to building a mass campaign, are the best vehicle for developing strong unity through coordinated action.

Include in the campaign the organization and mobilization of community-labour solidarity flying squads, to support and defend local struggles. As the strike movement continues to build, bosses and governments will try to weaken it using picket injunctions and back-to-work legislation. Coordinated mass solidarity, that includes cross-picketing and direct action, is proven to be an effective tactic.

Workers in Ontario have a lot to gain by building the OFL’s “Enough is Enough” campaign – unfortunately, they have a lot to lose if the campaign is weak. The time to organize and build is now.

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Toronto municipal budget process is about life-or-death choices

JM

I was one of many people presenting a deputation to the City of Toronto’s public budget committee meeting on January 16. My goal for being there was to ensure that another voice was added to the speakers list highlighting the critical need for social service funding, particularly for housing and shelter and harm reduction services.

There were 31 speakers that day. All of them, including me, spoke about divesting and defunding the police budget to reflect the growing social needs of Toronto residents. These needs are growing due to increased poverty, stagnating wages and social assistance rates, growing unemployment and food insecurity, to name a few. There were representatives from numerous drop-ins and senior and harm reductions services, from all demographics and all neighborhoods in this diverse city.

The TTCriders advocates were there to challenge the city’s proposal to introduce fare increases and add special security officers into the transit system, arguing that the cost of these officers would be better spent lower the fees and expanding services. The afternoon speakers made it clear that poverty in this city does not happen in isolation from other issues. The barriers that many communities face would be increased with the current proposed budget plan, if the current budget committee and council refuse to listen to the speakers from the public meetings and continue to ignore their own research and equity models (including SAFE TO, Housing TO, Truth and Reconciliation planning and Anti-Black Racism planning).

I spoke about the critical need for social services funding as a priority in this budget, because in Toronto we are in the midst of a humanitarian crisis. As someone who has worked on the front lines of the housing, shelter and opioid crisis in Toronto for more than 20 years, I know that just when we think this situation can’t get any worse, it gets worse.

Instead of housing development for people, we see condo development for profit. Instead of rent caps, we get sky rocketing rents. Instead of tenant protections, we get renovictions. Instead of healthy communities, we see poverty assaulting more people each year. Yet every time a new budget is proposed, the plan minimizes or ignores how dire this situation is.

Currently, the social housing waitlist has 90,000 people waiting an average of 8 years for a home. Close to 10,000 people seek shelter on any given night and nearly 200 turned away. Many more are “hidden homeless,” and the committee heard that this group of people are disproportionately women and families, who are forced to stay in abusive and violent situations. Every year growing numbers of seniors and newcomers are forced to live in the isolating conditions that poverty assaults them with, deeply impacting their mental and physical health. Each day we watch our friends and family members die from the growing opioid epidemic and preventable opioid poisoning. This budget proposal continues to abandon our most vulnerable neighbours, leaving them in critically unsafe situations.And make no mistake – they are dying.

Recently, we heard about Ken Lee. He was homeless. As he stood outside in downtown Toronto, Ken was swarmed and stabbed to death. On Christmas Day, a community member froze to death in his tent in Allan Gardens. Just a few days ago, in Liberty Village, another man died out in the cold – he burned to death. These are tragedies. These people were forced to live in these kinds of unsafe and life-threatening conditions because for far too long, budgets and policies prioritize profit margins and over-policing rather than preventive, proactive social planning that invests in people’s basic human needs and genuine safety.

The SAFE TO plan tells us to re-imagine core elements of community safety and wellbeing in order to shift our thinking from “a reliance on reactive emergency response to a culture of proactive prevention.” The current proposed budget does not do this. I contend that, in part, a truly re-imaged community safety plan means reallocating the proposed $48 million increase to the existing and already substantial police budget, into social services. The SAFE TO report, adopted by council in July 2021, outlines that respondents stressed that their community’s safety needs were around fundamental basic needs. They said they want housing, not police knocking on their door; shelter, not handcuffs; mental health and harm reduction, not criminalization. Communities also said that they don’t call the police when they feel insecure or unsafe – they call social services. The most unsafe condition that someone can be in is not having a home, not being able to turn on your heat or access clean water and sanitation.

I’m asking the budget committee and city council to listen to marginalized communities. Budgeting for housing and shelter and people’s genuine needs would be a human rights-based approach to a budget. So, invest now in public housing, in emergency shelters, in 24-hour warming centers and safe injection sites, and in safe supply, because these services truly enhance safety and wellbeing. They save lives.

We are in a dire, urgent crisis. This is a matter of life or death.

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Rewriting the script on municipal budgets

Editorial

This is the time of year that municipal councils typically invite public deputations on their proposed budgets.

They sometimes feel like very scripted affairs.

Scene One: A hand-wringing council presents its draft budget with a proposed increase for policing and reduced commercial and industrial tax assessments. “Sadly,” they say, “the difference can only be made up through increased residential property tax, service and program cuts, and new user fees.”

Scene Two: Scores of people turn out to speak at public hearings, presenting their budget priorities. At least 80 percent speak about the need for social housing and emergency shelters, the importance of funding public transit and reducing fares, the police harassment and violence which poor and racialized communities experience on a daily basis, or the urgent need to increase community recreation programs and playgrounds for every community.

Scene Three: The hearings adjourn, councillors breathe sighs of relief and stop their hand wringing, members of the public return to their regularly scheduled programs and hope that the municipal government heard them and will do the right thing.

Scene Four: A business leader says in the media that their industry cares about the public’s priorities, but they just can’t stay in the municipality if they have to pay for them. A police chief says in the media that the force cares about the public’s priorities, but they just can’t maintain public order if they have to pay for them.

Scene Five: Council passes the original draft of the municipal budget, without amendment to reflect the public’s priorities. The business leader smiles. The police chief smiles. The public shakes its head.

It’s time for working people to rewrite this script.

Over 80 percent of the population in Canada lives in urban areas, and more than one-third lives in the three largest cities of Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. And yet, those political entities and all other municipalities in Canada have no status in the country’s constitution. They are mere creatures of their respective provincial governments and can be created, dissolved or amalgamated at will.

It is a profoundly undemocratic reality which leaves municipalities unable to secure the necessary statutory federal and provincial funding – or, failing that, the necessary taxation powers – to serve the needs of their populations. The lack of constitutional status means it is easier for right-wing provincial and federal governments to implement neoliberal austerity measures on the vast majority of the population. They generally accomplish this through simultaneous downloading and underfunding of provincial services like public health, housing, public transit and more.

Municipalities, especially large cities, represent a concentration of the forces of production – labour and capital – and are therefore a key battleground in the class struggle. Managing cities, then, is critical to the reproduction of capitalism.

So, when it comes to municipal budgets, in addition to presenting at public hearings (which is very important), working people need to take a more forceful approach. We need to fight for democratic constitutional change, which grants municipalities status and guarantees that they receive funding for the programs they need. Then, we need to fight for that funding.

It sounds daunting, to speak of municipal coalitions fighting for constitutional change. But considering that municipalities right across the country are in the same situation, and that working people in those municipalities have a shared interest in winning this, there are enormous possibilities for building a vast and powerful movement.

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Pages from our past…

Thousands demonstrate against private hospitals

People’s Voice Vol 10 No 19 ~ November 1-15, 2002

About 2,000 demonstrators showed up in Brampton Oct. 19, to protest the green light given by the Ontario government to open up private hospitals in Brampton and Ottawa. On the same day, about 400 gathered in Ottawa at City Hall to hear speeches and move in a car cavalcade through downtown to the Royal Ottawa Hospital. In Ottawa, protesters came from as far away as Pembroke and Kingston, while in Brampton protesters came from Windsor, St. Catharines, and Toronto.

Under the guise of “public private partnerships” (PPP), the Ontario government is using public funds to pay private health care providers to deliver essential services. The PPPs are the wedge that is opening up public Medicare like a sardine can to the US health care and hospital business, whose appetites have long since been whetted by the incursions of the Klein government in Alberta and Campbell in BC.

The PPPs threaten the principles of the Canada Health Act and should be stopped by the federal government for that reason alone, says the Ontario Health Coalition.

But the federal government has yet to move to defend either the Canada Health Act or health care delivery on the ground and is in fact responsible for over a decade of huge cuts to transfer payments for health care, made to the provinces. The collusion between federal and provincial governments to deep-six Canada’s 40-year-old Medicare system is palpable.

First Harris, and now the Eves government is aiding and abetting the corporate “health care” providers by continuously de-listing services, while depressing real health care funding to deficit levels at hospitals and facilities around the province.

The passage of provincial legislation prohibiting deficit budgeting at hospitals (or any public institution) has created chaos in service delivery and led to bed closure and layoffs of hospital staff.

“This is a recipe for privatization,” said Communist Party of Canada leader Miguel Figueroa. “Health care has to be fully and adequately funded out of general revenues (which include corporate tax revenues) … And it has to be fully delivered by the public sector in publicly owned institutions. There is no room for any private health care delivery anywhere in Canada. The so-called public-private partnerships should be outlawed in Canada. Their existence is contrary to the Canada Health Act and the Liberal government should act now, without further delay.”

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Brazilian communists call for united, mass struggle against coup movement

In the afternoon on January 8, supporters of former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro invaded the country’s National Congress and tried to occupy other government buildings, with the intention of provoking riots and initiating a coup d'état.

This movement has been coordinated for months by sectors of the Brazilian ultra-right, which has strong financial support from business and segments of the military police and the Armed Forces. Using different media platforms, extreme right groups have openly guided demonstrations which reject the results of the October presidential elections, and which include attacks on democracy.

Images circulating on social media and on television leave no doubt as to the prevarication and collusion by the police forces in Brasília which, in addition to fielding staff far below what should have been available to contain this announced attack, also facilitated movement of the coup plotters in several areas. They already knew that about a hundred busloads of coup protesters had arrived in the federal capital. Nobody can claim surprise at this: after Lula's victory was announced, coup actions were plotted in broad daylight. These included those in Brasília on December 24 and the attempt to blow up a tank truck at Brasília airport, as well as those on the eve of the end of the Bolsonaro government, to spread chaos, hatred and confrontation, setting the stage for a possible military intervention.

The Brazilian Communist Party (PCB) understands that an attack on democratic bodies is clearly underway. We demand an immediate investigation and punishment of the colluding authorities which facilitated this despicable incident. We demand investigations to identify and arrest the leaders and financiers of these actions.

The moment demands a clear and effective response with strong united action, from all popular and social movements, democratic entities and leftist parties against neo-fascism and its terrorist groups.

We propose:

1. An emergency meeting of the national leaderships of left and progressive parties and movements, to build actions and mobilizations against the coup movement and to demand imprisonment of coup leaders and dismissal of public servants who were complicit in the coup attempt.
2. Building mass actions in the states, denouncing coup efforts and demanding the arrest of coup agitators.
3. Organizing broad, state-wide meetings to denounce the coup attempts and to defend democratic freedoms.

Fascistas nãopassarão!! Fascists will not pass!!

Statement from the National Political Commission, Brazilian Communist Party

Translated from Portuguese by PV staff

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Venezuelan teachers mobilize for better wages and to protect contract rights

PV staff

Teachers in Venezuela are continuing their country-wide protest against contract violations and wage losses, including a national day of action on January 16. The protest began with return to classes in early January.

The teachers are demanding salary improvements, respect for the collective agreement and the repeal of instructions imposed by the National Budget Office (ONAPRE) to lower the income of public employees. They are also calling for the Minister of Education to resign.

The workers and unions say that the government’s reduced Christmas bonus payment was “the last blow of 2022 against teachers' incomes.” The bonus is a key element of teachers’ wages, and one which the government of Nicolás Maduro has deliberately cut as it increasingly pursues neoliberal policies in its response to pressure from both domestic oligarchs and US imperialism.

Pedro Eusse, general secretary of the Central Unitaria de Trabajadores de Venezuela (CUTV), said that "the State refuses to discuss the III Single and Unitary Collective Bargaining Agreement of the education sector with obscene delaying tactics, postponing the improvement of economic and social clauses, condemning the teaching personnel and all the workers who work in this sector to misery.”

The CUTV and the National Front for the Struggle of the Working Class are proposing that Committees of Struggle for Wages and Other Labour Rights be formed in each workplace to fight, in unity with all Venezuelan workers, against the government’s neoliberal and “anti-popular” policies, and to win indexation of wages and pensions in accordance with the cost of the basic food basket.

Maribell Diaz, leader of the ‘BelénSanjuan’ Front of Professionals and Technicians, noted that the attacks on teachers’ pay and rights are part of a wider assault on public education: “In addition to the delayed payment of the performance evaluations of the administrative and classroom personnel of the Ministry of Education, we must also add the serious deterioration of IPASME (Institute of Social Welfare and Assistance for the personnel of the Ministry of Education).”

In the oil-rich state of Anzoátegui (which includes part of the massive Orinoco oil deposit) the January 16 day of actionsaw teachers joined by other civil servants and oil workers.

The government has tried to discredit the protests by labeling them “a destabilization attempt.”However, many progressive forces in the country including the Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV) are supporting them. Janohi Rosas, member of the PCV Political Bureau, said that the Party " is in the streets, fighting for the construction of the broadest unity of action to confront the offensive of capital and its allies in Miraflores [the presidential residence]." Rosas noted that the Venezuelan workers and people are facing "the effects of the capitalist crisis and imperialist aggressions, but also the anti-popular policies of the Maduro government."

The PCV calls Maduro’s recent economic report a “pantomime” that was filled with “inflated figures that are encouraging for the capitalists and that do not reflect the daily reality of the Venezuelan people …which is organizing to fight for their just demands."

With files from Tribuna Popular

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Labour’s fighting history shines a light on the path forward

Smelter Wars: A rebellious red trade union fights for its life in wartime western Canada

Ron Verzuh

University of Toronto Press, 2022

Review by Stéphane Doucet

Historian Ron Verzuh’s in-depth study of Mine-Mill local 480’s struggles in Trail, British Columbia offers a fascinating view into the political battles that made Canadian unionism what it is today. While the trials and tribulations of a single union local nestled deep in the Kootenays of interior BC may seem a little niche to your average person, what emerges from Verzuh’s narrative is a quite illustrative and instructive microcosm of the biggest political and economic conflicts that shaped the Cold War.

Trail, BC is the site of the one of the world’s largest lead and zinc smelting and refining plants, according to its current owners, Teck Resources. Back in the day, the smelter was property of the Consolidated Mining and Smelting Company of Canada (CM&S) and employed several thousand workers at various sites in and around Trail.

Verzuh explains some of the early history of the labour movement’s attempts to unionize the workforce, including failures by the Western Federation of Miners starting in the late 19th century, featuring famous labour martyr Albert “Ginger” Goodwin. Then comes the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers (Mine-Mill) which battles a well-organized and well-funded company union under the leadership of company president Selwyn Blaylock. Eventually, after decades of struggle led by Communist Party labour militants including Arthur “Slim” Evans and Harvey Murphy, the union wins its legal right to represent the CM&S workers in 1944.

A couple of chapters focus on different facets of the union’s life: a powerful Ladies Auxiliary led by Communist Party women; sexism in hiring, firing and wages and the union’s response; nativism, immigration, culture and religion. The bulk of the rest of the book explores the impact of the Cold War on the labour movement and its incidence within the local.

I would argue that this is the most important section in terms of its current impact on the labour movement and Canadian society as a whole. What happened was essentially McCarthyism, tearing labour apart from the inside by attacking its most militant and democratic organizations. The way it played out in Trail was the Canadian Congress of Labour, ancestor of today’s Canadian Labour Congress, alongside the Canadian Commonwealth Federation, predecessor of the National Democratic Party, conspiring with the most vicious anti-communists and company officials to isolate, raid, bleed and crush the local union leadership under the guise of “fighting communism.”

Histories such as these can help the labour movement, and particularly its younger members, to understand the struggles – against the employer, but also and more often forgotten or obscured, inside of the labour movement itself – that shaped the labour movement we have before us today. They also steel us for the battles to come – as the crises of capitalism grow and the fightback builds, we need to be ready to fight on all fronts, including against those who would choose to liquidate the best elements of the movement in order to shore up their position within the established order.

There was a time when communists and other militant progressives were very often the leaders of labour and democratic struggles. To face current struggles, these movements again need fighting, class struggle-oriented leadership and membership – working people had best study what that was like, as a way to prepare.

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The climate crisis and literature – a call for “cli-fi socialist realism”

Leslie Misson

Throughout the Cold War, most professors of English Literature in North America vociferously criticized politics in literary works. Superior art and literature, they argued, could never be political. There were, of course, anti-communist/anti-Soviet exceptions including George Orwell’s 1984.

The overtly political nature of most religious art was studiously ignored, as was the obvious view that being apolitical implies acceptance of the status quo. While poetry of protest was popular, it generally did not propose alternative versions of society, socialist or otherwise.  Marxist and communist literary magazines such as The Masses, which attracted the best and brightest young American writers during the 1930s, were long gone, drowned in the deluge of literary anti-communism covertly funded by the CIA. The legacy of this deluge was an absence of ‘serious’ literature which dealt with profit-driven, fossil-fueled climate disruption.

Literati, perhaps unconsciously anticipating Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything, realized that unfettered capitalism and its underlying neo-liberal ideology, could not be used to combat the climate crisis. It was, perhaps, tacitly realized that the alternative would require extensive state intervention in the economy to curb combustion of fossil fuels. But such intervention raised the spectre of Soviet-style socialism. This was anathema to most Western literati, not to mention the boards of governors of the universities where most of them taught.

Thus, the lit crit response to global climate disruption was, for the most part, a resounding silence. It was prudent, as the Guyanese say, to hang one’s mouth where the soup falls. And the soup was still largely falling from the anti-communist/anti-Soviet Orwellian tureen.

In 2018, well-known Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh suggested that the literati’s failure to deal with the climate crisis would lead future generations – if there are any – to characterize the dominant ideology at the beginning of the Anthropocene as “The Great Derangement.”

There were, of course, early outliers in speculative fiction and theatre who anticipated the climate crisis. These included George Turner’s Drowning Towers (1988), Ben Elton’s Stark (1989),Ronald Wright’s A Scientific Romance (1999), Margaret Attwood’s Oryx and Crake (2009) and Steve Waters’ The Contingency Plan (2009). There were also a few utopias which explicitly acknowledged the necessity of international cooperation and socialism to curb profit-driven fossil-fueled climate disruption,as inPacific Edge by Kim Stanley Robinson (1995).

It should be noted that there were a growing number of young adult novels in which fossil-fueled climate change was a central theme, such asSaci Lloyd’sThe Carbon Diaries 2015(2010).

Eventually, one hopes, much of mainstream ‘serious’ literature will be compelled to deal with profit-driven, fossil-fueled climate disruption. If it does, this may create a dichotomy between works of fiction with anthropogenicclimate disruption (i.e., climate-fiction or cli-fi) as a major theme, and those without such a theme. The former might be roughly characterized as ‘realist’ while the latter might be roughly characterized as fantasy, escapist or nostalgic. The realist/cli-fi genre might be further divided into works which dramatize the disastrous effects of climate change – the ‘Oh, ain’t it awful’ school – as opposed to works which highlight the necessity of socialism to curb climate disruption. The latter school might be called “cli-fi socialist realism.”

The first version of this article was written in 2015. Readers can judge whether it is still timely.

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Art Show takes viewers into the “hidden abode of production”

Review by Manden Murphy

On view at The Plumb gallery in Toronto, Ian Willms and Liam Crockard’s compelling exhibition, At The Chair Factory, simultaneously manages to render labour the elephant in the room while brazenly highlighting its status as a commodity for consumption.

The exhibition is centered around the documentation of an anachronistic furniture factory and its workers. Krug Furniture, located in Kitchener, Ontario, has been manufacturing commercial furniture for over 140 years and currently employs around 500 workers. In the tri-cities region of southern Ontario, once a hotbed for the automotive parts industry as well as furniture and leather companies, Krug Furniture is now a novelty amongst multinational giants like Manulife Financial, Research In Motion (BlackBerry) andSunlife Financial who have taken up residency there.

Methodically capturing as much detail of the factory as possible, the exhibition spans two separate gallery spaces within The Plumb. The north gallery is wrapped with 215 unique black and white photographs of the workers of Krug Furniture, as well as the spaces they inhabit and the workplace culture they produce. Taking in each photo individually one begins to recognize the minutiae of workplace customization that is bound to emerge in any work environment: family photographs, posters, graffiti on factory floor beams, stickers on radios, Sunday funnies, community announcements in break rooms, communal lotto picks, etc.

The south gallery has been converted into a small cinema for showing At The Chair Factory (February) 2019-2023, a three-hour video documenting the workers and their spaces over the course of their shift. The video roughly follows along the division of labour within the factory so that the viewer is guided through all the departments of the Krug establishment, from the first stages of assembly to upholstery to the warehouse. Shot in a deadpan style with no post-production narration for guidance, the viewer is forced to passively follow along as a worker nails together component parts of a chair to the sounds of local radio. Whether or not these workers are unionized, part-time or content with their working conditions remains below the surface of the ongoing process that is projected for viewers to consume: the production of value.

Taking in both galleries in their entirety amounts to a case study of what would appear to be a bygone era of production: industrial manufacturing. The effects of this are twofold. Firstly, it creates a sense of nostalgia for a simpler time when workers actually produced physical commodities and secondly, suggests an uneasy feeling that one is participating in a wake for something that hasn’t died, but has rather moved on to greener pastures. In this sense, the exhibition nods at the uneven development of capital, reminding its viewers that industrial manufacturing is alive and well, but only where profits are to be made and cheap labour is in abundance.

Thanks to this rare glimpse into “the hidden abode of production” that the artists have provided, the “secret” of value production is laid bare. In this era of decaying capital where the production of value has been obscured to parodic proportions, via the financialization of the economy, At The Chair Factory provides a chance to recalibrate our thinking and to question who claims to produce value, and more importantly for whom that value is produced.

This line of questioning is appropriate regardless of the age of the building one works in, lest the viewer slide into a misguided nostalgia for something that never actually existed. A curious moment in the exhibition didactic slips momentarily into just this sort of daydreaming: “Unknowingly capturing [...] an economic depression that would last for decades, there was one building that never shuttered, collapsed or found a new life as a flexible workspace. One building in downtown Kitchener that still produces […] what the flaked and faded text states on the exterior: FURNITURE.”

However, what makes the exhibition such a success is how Willms and Crockard guide the viewer past this initial inclination to dwell in nostalgia and towards the realization that buildings don't produce furniture, workers do. By allowing us past the threshold that allows “no admittance except on business,” the artists have provided a space for the viewer to consume everyday workers as they go about their jobs. It is through this sustained meditation that the viewer does become nostalgic, but for a time when workers were more keenly aware that while they were producing commodities, they too were reproducing themselves in order that they may be bought and sold as commodities in their own right.

At The Chair Factory is on view until February 19 at The Plum, 1655 Dufferin St, Basement, Toronto.

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