Quote:The following interview with Roger Annis was translated and published in Russia by the Actual Politics Center, October 20, 2015. The text in English, here below, has been slightly edited from the original.

Quote:On October 19, Canadians elected a new national government, electing 184 candidates of the Liberal Party out of a total of 338 seats in the federal Parliament. The hated Conservative Party of Prime Minister Stephen Harper came in second place with 99 seats. The other party results were New Democratic Party (44), Bloc québécois (10) and Green Party (1). The Liberals won 39.5% of the vote, the Conservatives 31.9%.
It was a remarkable performance for the Liberals, who finished in third place in the 2011 election with only 18.9% of the vote. There were three main reasons for the Liberal victory:

1. Canadians wanted an end to the anti-social and anti-democratic government of Harper. Nearly three million more people voted in 2015 (68.5% of registered voters, or app. 61% of the adult-age population) compared to 2011. The Liberal vote total more than doubled compared to 2011, to 6.9 million votes. The Conservative vote dropped by 235,000, to 5.6 million. (Canada’s population is 35 million.)

Quote:2. The Liberal Party successfully projected a youthful and progressive image of “change”. It said it would increase taxes on the wealthiest people in Canada to better fund government services and it would run budget deficits, as needed, to finance capitalist infrastructure programs and restore some of the cuts to government services made by the Conservatives since 2011.

3. The progressive posturing by the Liberal Party was facilitated by the staid, conservative campaign of the social-democratic New Democratic Party. NDP leader Tom Mulcair campaigned as a fiscal conservative who would not radically change the economic policies of the Conservatives. The NDP vote dropped from 4.5 million in 2011 to 3.5 million in this election. The party lost all its seats in Toronto, Canada’s largest city. Its seat total in the province of Quebec dropped from 59 in 2011 to 16.

There were no significant differences in foreign policy between these three leading parties in the election.

Quote:Actual Politics: Observers of American politics frequently call members of the U.S. two-party establishment “Republicrats”, referring to their allegiance to roughly the same political interests.  Is the Canadian political system, with its three main parties – the Conservatives, the Liberals, and the New Democrats – similar?

Roger Annis: Yes. In both countries, the political system is controlled by large corporate interests. The political parties act as their direct representatives, or they represent them indirectly by way of sharing the same ideology and outlook.

That said, the founding of the social democratic New Democratic Party in 1961 was potentially an important break from this mold. The party was a merger of the main trade union federation of the day with the social democratic Cooperative Commonwealth Federation. The founding of the NDP was a progressive step that could be built upon to provide the working class with its own political party and program.

Social policy was strong in the NDP’s founding program. The party was a voice for the working class population. It advocated a national medical care program and stronger national pension and unemployment insurance programs. It was sympathetic to the language and national rights demands of the French-language people of Quebec, including in October 1970 when it was the only party in Parliament to vote against the declaration of the War Measures Act by then-Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. (The War Measures Act was a measure intended to break the rising Quebec independence movement.)

The NDP also favored Canadian withdrawal from NATO. In general, the party membership was antiwar and pro-peace in its outlook. Unfortunately, the NDP’s ‘out of NATO’ policy was reversed by party leaders some ten years ago.

Quote:Over the past 35 years, the progressive policies in the NDP program have been steadily watered down or even abandoned. Today, the NDP still has a moderately progressive social program compared to the Liberal Party. And it defends important civil liberties, which the Liberals abandoned a long time ago. For example, on May 6 of this year, the Liberals voted in favour of the Harper government’s draconian, police-state Bill C51 whereas the NDP voted against it. The Liberals also voted in June for the grotesque Bill S-7, the “Zero Tolerance for Barbaric Cultural Practices Act”.
But the differences between the two parties are getting more narrow as the NDP slides to the political right. And importantly, the NDP does not typically fight outside of the Parliamentary chamber for the improvements it says it wants. It’s been many decades since we’ve seen a significant mass rally in the streets of Ottawa for a major social cause with mass trade union, First Nations and other participation.

On foreign policy, the NDP’s policies today are little different from those of the Liberals and Conservatives.
As I have been writing for several years now, Canada needs a genuine party of the political left. I believe that much of the present NDP membership and its trade union affiliates can be won to this. But it won’t happen through incremental change within the party. A distinct, new voice needs to be built. This will influence the discourse in the NDP far more than fractious debate within the party.