What kind of capitalism? The revival of class struggle in Canada

Monthly Review, May, 1996 by Robert Chernomas, Errol Black

The deepest cuts occurred in unemployment insurance and cash transfers to the provinces for Medicare, social assistance, and post-secondary education. Cuts to unemployment insurance were not only intended to save money, but also to deregulate and intensify competition in the labor market by impoverishing a significant proportion of the unemployed workforce. As a result of these cuts, the proportion of unemployed workers eligible for benefits was cut from about 70 percent in the early 1980s to 40 percent.

Cuts to cash transfers were similarly ominous. In effect, the federal government handed the provinces a carte blanche to undermine and dismantle major programs that have contributed significantly to the welfare of all Canadians. The result will be a balkanization of vital social services and a return to the conditions that existed in the 1950s.

From Neoconservatism to Neocretinism

Similar assaults on the working class are taking place in the provinces. This is especially true of Alberta, under a Tory government led by Ralph Klein, and of Ontario, where the electorate recently replaced the NDP with a right-wing Tory government led by Mike Harris.

Klein set the pattern for slashing the public sector by instituting major cuts to welfare and 20 percent reductions in spending on health care and universities, privatizing services (including liquor sales), converting welfare to workfare, and subverting Medicare by endorsing user-pay, for-profit clinics.

More recently, Mr. Klein and his cabinet colleagues have adopted U.S. style "reforms" in the prison system and are now talking about Alabama chain gangs. As well, Klein is flirting with the idea of making Alberta Canada's first "right-to-work" province.

The Tory government in Ontario was elected in June 1995 on a New Jersey inspired platform of "reforming" welfare, repealing progressive labor legislation, slashing the provincial deficit, and reducing personal income taxes by 30 percent. Since taking office, this government has: cut welfare payments and instituted a form of workfare; amended labor legislation not only to obliterate all the reforms initiated by the previous NDP government such as pay equity and anti-scab legislation, but also to make it more difficult for workers to achieve and retain trade union and collective bargaining rights; and, in the last week of November, announced $6 billion in expenditure cuts, which will affect all social welfare programs in the province and lead to the privatization/commercialization of many services and increases in user fees and property taxes.(5)

Much of what is being done in the name of "fiscal responsibility" verges on the neofascist. This is especially evident in Alberta and Ontario, but it is also present in other provinces, including our own province, Manitoba. Thus the weak and the vulnerable--welfare recipients--are the initial victims of budget cuts and increased harassment. Subsequently, the focus is shifted to trade unions and other organizations that promote and defend the interests of working people. There is a systematic strategy, which includes in Ontario and Alberta a concentration of power in the cabinet, to curtail public-sector programs that enhance the material conditions of working people in general. The overall objective of this strategy is, in brief, to weaken unions and individual workers in their relations with employers for the purpose of driving down wages and compelling workers to submit to employer discipline at the point of production.