The 'Corridor Coalition' and the 1974 Election
In December 2008, the Liberal Party and the New Democratic Party
proposed to form a coalition, to replace the Conservative
government led by Stephen Harper. The articles below, published in
Intercontinental Press in 1974, review the disastrous results of a
previous NDP-Liberal parliamentary alliance.
After the 1974 election, Trudeau’s government, in violation of its
campaign promises, imposed a sweeping wage-control program on Canadian
workers, using its emergency powers under the Constitution. The program
was later upheld by the Supreme Court of Canada on a constitutional
challenge by the unions.
Where NDP Leaders
Went Wrong in Parliament
By Ray Warden (Intercontinental Press,
June 17, 1974)
[The following article is reprinted from an
election supplement to Labor Challenge, a revolutionary-socialist
fortnightly published in Toronto.
[The July 8 elections in Canada were called May
8, when the Conservative party joined the New Democratic party (NDP —
Canada’s labor party) to defeat the budget proposal of Liberal Prime
Minister Pierre Trudeau.]
* * *
NDP leader David Lewis officially kicked off his
1974 election campaign in Toronto May 19. “In this campaign,” he told a
crowd of cheering supporters, “we are going to pose the blunt and
increasingly urgent question: Who rules Canada?
The NDP leader wasn’t long in answering his own
question. “Under Liberals and Conservatives,” he said, “the corporations
run Canada.” The two parties get “millions of dollars” in corporate
money; they are bought and paid for.
“The corporate thumb lies heavily across the
governmental institutions of our country,” the NDP leader charged.
“Canada cannot have a genuine social
democracy until the power to make economic decisions is wrested from
the hands of the corporations and placed in the hands of the people
through a parliament and a government which have removed the
corporate thumb.”
Those are fighting words. But Lewis has no
criticism to make of the program and strategy his caucus pursued over
the last parliament. The NDP leaders formed a voting bloc with the
Liberal party and helped keep Trudeau in power for 18 months. In
supporting the corporations’ government, they claimed to be “making
parliament work.”
In fact, Lewis is unhesitatingly boastful about
his parliamentary record. Throughout the last 18 months, he says, the
NDP has shown that it is “one of the major parties in this country.” The
NDP, claims Lewis, “has gained stature in this parliament.” In making
parliament work, “it has proven it is a reliable and responsible party.”
Parliamentary Allies
For 18 months, the NDP caucus was the reliable
ally of the Liberal party. Had they maintained their independence, in
firm opposition to the government, they might have correctly cast their
votes in favor of particular government measures, when these offered
some benefit to working people.
But the NDP leaders purposefully maintained the
Liberals in power, and gave them political support. The parliamentary
caucus acted as an appendage to the Liberal party. It embellished the
Liberals’ legislative program, and muted its criticism of the
government.
“You cannot condemn the government for some of
the things that you feel you ought to condemn it for, in a way in which
you’d like to do it,” Lewis confided to a national television audience
on Feb. 5, “when you’re refusing to vote it out of office.” In
maintaining the government in power, the NDP leaders are forced to share
responsibility for its record — and defend it.
When you’re refusing to vote it out of office,
admits Lewis, “you cannot make the demands on the Trudeau government
that you know he is not going to accept.” The political needs of labor
were subordinated to the parliamentary bloc with the Liberals. Labor’s
political leaders, so-called, allowed themselves to be bound hand and
foot to the policies of the corporations’ government.
For allowing themselves to be hog-tied, the NDP
leaders claim to have extracted important concessions from the Liberals.
In a speech to the Peel County riding association, only two weeks before
the election call, Lewis made one of many speeches full of praise for
the record of the Trudeau government.
‘Making Parliament Work’
“Taken together as a package of legislative
achievements,” the NDP leader said, “I have no hesitation in saying that
they are greater accomplishments achieved in 18 months than any obtained
by recent majority governments over four years.” They are measures “this
parliament was able to accomplish with the initiative and assistance of
the NDP caucus,” Lewis boasted.
Lewis showed little restraint in heaping praise
on parliament’s “accomplishments.” He waxed eloquent in listing the
reforms implemented over the last 18 months for his Peel County
audience: increased pensions and family allowances; cuts in personal
income tax; subsidies to offset increases in the prices of bread and
milk; improvements in the National Housing Act; stepped-up controls on
foreign investment; an export tax on oil; and controls on election
spending. Lewis went on and on.
Trudeau himself could hardly have been more
lavish in his praise of the accomplishments of the last parliament. The
prime minister gleefully quoted long excerpts from Lewis’s Peel County
speech to the House of Commons during the budget debate. “If they want
an election on that,” he taunted the NDP leader, “then we’ll have an
election on that.”
Trudeau claims it was his government, not the New
Democrats, that “made parliament work.” As for Lewis’s boast to have
“inspired” Liberal policies, Trudeau answers, “For 18 months the NDP
prospered by loudly demanding things that the Liberal government was
doing anyway.” The NDP leaders offered the Trudeau government support
and credibility in the eyes of the Canadian workers. In return he offers
them not so much as a “thank you.”
Miserly Reforms
From the standpoint of working people, whether
the Liberals or the NDP leaders are “credited” with the collection of
miserly reforms introduced by the last parliament is a matter of
indifference. The best measure of the Liberal government — and its
Social Democratic partners in “making parliament work” — is the falling
living standard of Canadian workers and the profit ledgers of the
government’s corporate backers.
After all, how do the pitiful increases in
old-age pensions and family allowances measure up against the
requirements of the aged, and low-income families? How does a five
percent reduction in personal income taxes stack up against ten percent
inflation? What good are minor changes in housing legislation, when
buying a home is beyond the means of most working people, and the land
speculators and developers reap windfall profits?
Who has benefited from the energy policies
implemented by the Liberal government, with the backing of the NDP
caucus, except the petroleum monopolies, and Canadian industrialists,
who have been guaranteed fuel supplies at prices slightly below the
international rate? Yet Lewis hails the government’s petroleum export
tax as a victory for working people.
In making excuses for their voting bloc with the
Liberal government, in the face of pressures from labor’s rank and file
for an independent course, the NDP leaders present this rag bag of
reforms as an important victory for working people. But the package of
legislative reforms the NDP caucus claims to have won from the Liberal
government, in exchange for its support, do nothing to stem capitalism’s
voracious assault on working people’s standard of living. Their
“make-parliament-work” strategy has been tested in life, to the cost of
the entire labor movement.
Real wages are falling in Canada. They were
falling over the entire period of the last parliament, while the
corporations were making record-breaking profits. The NDP helped “make
parliament work” but it worked in the interests of big business, and the
Liberal party, not for working people.
A Pressure Group
The NDP was founded in opposition to
“Liberal-Labor” politics. The rank and file of the trade-union movement
recognized that workers needed their own party, independent of the
Liberals and Tories, to pursue labor’s interests and fight for power.
The NDP leaders cut across that aspiration for independent labor
political action with their parliamentary alliance. In their support for
the Liberals they reduced the NDP from a party striving for power on the
federal and provincial levels, into little more than a pressure group
groveling for crumbs from the Liberal’s corporate table.
No parliamentary bloc with a capitalist party can
serve working people’s interests. The Liberals and Tories are agents of
the corporations, as Lewis is saying in this election campaign. They are
representatives of the capitalist ruling class, who own and run Canada’s
economy in the interest of maximum profits, for every ounce of sweat
they can drain from working people, at the lowest possible wage.
“Pressure” from a group of NDP MPs will not
change this.
The interests of big business and labor are
fundamentally irreconcilable. Every penny of capitalist profit is robbed
from the workers’ pockets. Only uncompromising struggle against the
capitalists and their parties can advance the position of working
people.
Labor can have no truck or trade with the
capitalist parties. No worker should vote for the capitalist parties at
the ballot box; no representative of labor should lend them support in
parliament. It is only through independent labor political action that
workers can win real power.
Who Rules Canada?
“Who rules Canada?” Lewis asks. “The
corporations,” he answers.
Power resides in the ownership of capital. The
capitalists control Canada’s mass media, the educational system, all the
means of indoctrination in capitalist ideology. This ruling class
exercises power through the state machinery which they control — the
army, the police, the courts, the upper echelons of the civil service,
all tied to the corporate bosses by a thousand strings.
The state is administered by the cabinet,
handpicked from the most reliable politicians capitalist politics has to
offer. Parliament does not rule. It provides Canada’s rulers with the
facade of sharing their power with working people.
How illusory, then, is the “balance of power”
which the NDP leaders claim to have been exercising in the last
parliament? They had no power. They were pawns in Trudeau’s game of
making parliament work in the interest of big business.
But the NDP leaders fetishize parliament. They
worship it, and have no conception of politics except within its
confines. They attempt to make over the NDP in the image of the
capitalist parties, an electoral machine at the service of
parliamentarians. Rather than basing their program on the fundamental
needs of working people and rallying support behind it, they adapt their
policies to the lowest common denominator of media-induced opinion, in
an endless scramble for votes.
Lewis rightly denounces Canada’s corporate
rulers. He spiels off reams of statistics on capitalist profit gouging.
But he has no serious perspective of struggling for power. His program
is limited to the piecemeal reform of the capitalist system.
Attack on Working People
With the current inflationary spiral, created by
capitalism to maximize corporate profits, big business has launched a
ferocious attack on working people. As leader of labor’s party, Lewis
has the responsibility to mobilize working people in fighting back.
The last parliament provided the NDP leaders with
a big opportunity. Their illusory “balance of power” position focused
public attention on their every move. But rather than use the
parliamentary stage to build support for a program of struggle against
the capitalists and their parties, the NDP crossed class lines to
maintain the big business government in power. They tried to make
capitalism work, to reconcile the interests of workers and those of the
corporate bosses.
No sharp policy disagreement with the Liberals
led the NDP leaders finally to break their bloc with Trudeau and vote
against the government’s budget. Their capacity for collaboration with
the Liberals over the past year and a half had proved almost limitless.
Rather, the NDP leaders were feeling the pressure
of growing public resentment against the government, and increasing
restiveness in the labor movement, fueled by the runaway cost of living.
Their support for Trudeau was becoming a millstone around their
opportunist necks. Rather than allow their parliamentary careers to go
down with the Liberals’ falling public support, the NDP caucus decided
to break the parliamentary bloc.
The Road Ahead
But in voting against the Liberals, they have not
abandoned class collaboration. Just as they refused to use the
parliamentary stage, now they refuse to use the electoral podium, to
carry a serious fight in defense of workers’ standard of living. They
refuse to use the election campaign to build workers’ struggles for big
mid-contract wage increases and cost-of living escalator clauses. They
refuse to campaign in this election for the nationalization of the
corporate profiteers. For all their anti-corporate rhetoric, they are
completely reconciled to continued capitalist rule. They will not use
the election campaign to build independent workers power.
“I predict a minority government,” says Lorne
Nystrom, the NDP MP for Yorkton-Melville. Nystrom’s prediction was
shared by most NDP MPs interviewed by the Toronto Globe and Mail shortly
after the Liberal government had been brought down by the no-confidence
vote. According to the Globe’s reporter, “Some members suggested that
the NDP was likely to gain an appreciable number of seats, but these
rosy predictions were few.”
The last parliament “has been an unusual
situation for everybody,” says Doug Rowland, the NDP MP from Selkirk.
“We’ve set up some patterns of behavior that worked well, but they were
new and untried.” With yet another minority government, he thinks, the
“new patterns of behavior” can be consecrated.
The cause of the labor movement cannot be
forwarded by crossing class lines: at strike pickets, at the ballot box,
or in the parliamentary chambers. But the NDP leaders are willing to
“make parliament work” again, in bloc with one of the capitalist
parties.
The class-collaborationist course of the NDP
leadership must be repudiated. The labor movement has no interest in
pursuing some phantom “balance of power.” The ranks of labor must rally
behind the NDP in this election, and demand that their leaders lead a
serious fight for power. The task is to wrest real power from the
corporations and their political agents on Parliament Hill, campaigning
to bring the NDP to power on a socialist program.
Why Liberals Won in Canadian Election
By Dick Fidler (Intercontinental Press,
July 22, 1974)
The Liberal government headed by Pierre Elliot
Trudeau was reelected in Canada’s federal election July 8, winning 141
seats in parliament, 32 more than in the 1972 election. They gained in
seven of the ten provinces and swept most of the major cities.
The Progressive Conservatives or “Tories” slipped
from 107 seats in the last parliament to 95, smashing their hopes of
replacing the Liberals in government.
The Social Credit party, based in Quebec, dropped
from its previous 15 seats to 11, losing some 200,000 votes in Quebec,
mainly to the Liberals, who took all but three of the remaining seats in
the French-speaking province.
The biggest loser in the election was the New
Democratic party (NDP), Canada’s labor party. Its parliamentary
representation was halved, dropping from 31 to 16 seats, and its share
of the total vote declined by 2.5 percent to 15 percent. NDP leader
David Lewis lost his own seat to a little-known Liberal candidate. In
British Columbia, a traditional stronghold of the NDP, it dropped from
11 seats to 2. Its representation was also reduced in the other two
western provinces where it holds office, Saskatchewan and Manitoba.
Ironically, the main factor in Trudeau’s victory
was inflation — over which he claimed he had no control. Prices are
rising in Canada at a yearly rate of more than 10 percent, and the high
cost of living was the dominant election issue.
According to Peter Regenstreif, a pollster,
“Personal interviews showed that in some areas of the country concern
about inflation was running as high as 80 per cent. In the history of
polling in Canada, no issue has ever registered so strongly.”
The Conservatives centered their campaign on a
promise to impose “controls on prices and incomes” — i.e., wage controls
— if elected. The electorate reacted sharply against this proposal. “By
the end of the campaign,” Regenstreif said, “close to half the
electorate was against the proposal and barely one-third was in favor.”
The election became, in effect, a plebiscite on the issue of wage
controls, with the Liberals opposing such controls as unworkable, while
carefully refraining from committing themselves to any alternative
proposal. In fact, Trudeau argued that the government was powerless to
combat inflation, that national measures could not counteract an
escalation of prices rooted in world conditions.
The NDP ought to have challenged this line and
advanced an anticapitalist alternative program around such demands as a
cost-of-living clause in union contracts, reopening of collective
agreements to provide for immediate wage increases, and sliding-scale
increases in pensions and other forms of fixed incomes. All these
demands have been advanced by workers in recent strikes and other labor
struggles.
But the NDP, a party largely financed by the
trade unions, offered no clear alternative to the demagogy of the
Liberals and Tories. The NDP advocated “selective price controls” and a
nationalistic “two price” system under which basic export commodities,
chiefly natural resources, would be sold at world market prices abroad
but at lower, subsidized prices in Canada. In practice, such a system
would benefit Canadian manufacturers, while Canadian consumers continued
to pay world prices on manufactured products.
The NDP was seriously compromised, moreover, by
the fact that for the past twenty months — during which prices have shot
upward with no response from the government — it has voted consistently
with the Liberals in Ottawa to keep the Trudeau government in office. In
fact, the NDP leaders were in the peculiar position during this election
of favoring reelection of a Liberal government.
Much of their campaign was spent in boasting of
“concessions” they claimed to have wheedled from the Liberals in return
for their parliamentary collaboration. This tended to appear as praise
for the accomplishments of the Liberals at the expense of the NDP. To
many voters, it must have seemed that the NDP differed but little from
the Liberal party.
Above all, the NDP leaders campaigned — as always
— as responsible parliamentarians, with “making parliament work” their
highest priority. A major theme in their campaign, aside from pro forma
calls for the election of an NDP government, was the advantage of
minority government by one of the capitalist parties (the Liberals, it
was implied) with the NDP providing helpful advice — and needed
parliamentary support.
If a minority government is elected, Lewis told a
television audience, “it will be our duty to look for ways to keep
parliament functioning.” And ‘not for eighteen months — but perhaps for
two, three, four years,” he told an interviewer.
According to the Canadian revolutionary-socialist
fortnightly, Labor Challenge, one NDP leader, Edward Schreyer, the
premier of the province of Manitoba, declared his support earlier this
year for “a frank and open coalition” with one of the capitalist
parties, if another minority government were to be elected. When Lewis
was asked during the election campaign if he would favor a formal
coalition with the Liberals in the next parliament, he refused to
comment.
The NDP leadership’s attack on the corporations
(for “excess profits”) was more populist than anticapitalist. Lewis
called for wresting decision-making power away from the corporations and
placing it in a parliament and government purged of corporate influence.
In the wake of its election debacle, the NDP is
almost certain to face an internal crisis. Even before the election, its
membership was dropping, and there was considerable demoralization in
party ranks as a result of its parliamentary collusion with the
Liberals.
The Canadian bourgeoisie was elated with the
election results. The Liberals’ parliamentary majority relieves them of
the necessity of relying on the support of the NDP for the next four to
five years, the length of their electoral mandate. This is only the
second time in the six elections since 1962 that the governing party has
enjoyed an absolute majority in parliament.
U.S. capitalist circles, which own about half of
Canada’s manufacturing industry, were no less exultant. “Canada has
given the world an impressive demonstration of the health and vibrancy
of its democratic institutions and practices,” wrote the editors of the
New York Times on July 10.
“At a time when democratic institutions are in
retreat or under heavy pressures almost everywhere,” they wrote, “and
when weak, minority governments are the rule rather than the exception
throughout the Western world, the significance of the decisive outcome
in Canada’s general election can hardly be exaggerated.”
A dispatch from Ottawa in the July 14 issue of
the New York Times noted that Trudeau’s electoral success
reinforces his government’s bargaining position in its continuing trade
negotiations with Washington, which were left largely in abeyance during
the last twenty months. “ . . . the relationship along the 4,000-mile
border is sharply different from that of three years ago, when the
Canadians tended to be supplicants.”
The New York Times noted that during the
election campaign, Trudeau promised that the government would start
insisting that all major new natural-resource projects, such as
pipelines and mines, be owned at least 50 percent by Canadians. Up to
now ownership has been predominantly foreign in these sectors.
A dispatch from Washington in the July 10 New
York Times spoke of Trudeau’s “shift in recent years toward economic
nationalism,” and suggested that this “may continue to pose an obstacle
to the settlement of issues sought by the United States.” A key issue is
Washington’s desire to modify a partial free-trade pact in automobiles
and auto parts in order to allow duty-free import of U.S.-manufactured
cars into Canada. Washington also objects to Canada’s subsidizing
manufacturers who export to the United States, Canada’s scheduled
reduction of crude-oil exports, its tariffs on U.S.-manufactured goods,
and its recent ban on imports of some types of U.S. beef.
In reality, the Trudeau government’s "mandate”
resulted more from popular opposition to wage controls than from
anything the government has done or proposes to do. Two days after the
election, Ottawa released the latest statistics on inflation, showing
that consumer prices have risen 11.4 percent in the past year, the
largest annual increase in twenty-three years. The editors of the
Toronto Star noted Trudeau’s admission that the Liberals have their
own “contingency program of income and price controls.” The editors
added regretfully, “Having campaigned so adamantly against controls,
however, Trudeau has made it immensely more difficult to gain the vital
element of public acceptance and co-operation in a program of economic
restraint.”
Despite the claim of the New York Times
that “with this election, the Canadians have sharpened their identity as
a united people and nation,” the Quebec national question was not a big
issue in the election. No major party supports the self-determination of
the Quebecois nation (almost one-third of the Canadian population).
A traditionally high abstention rate in federal
elections has reflected the alienation of the Quebecois from the
Canadian confederation. This year, the Parti Quebecois, a mass
petty-bourgeois party that advocates an independent Quebec, called for
Quebec voters to spoil their ballots as a protest against the oppression
of Quebec by Ottawa. Federal authorities refused to report how many
ballots were spoiled in Quebec; but in 1972, it was some 5.8 percent of
the total, far more than in any other province.
The revolutionary-socialist alternative in the
election was advanced by the Trotskyists of the League for Socialist
Action/Ligue Socialiste
Ouvrière, the Canadian section of the Fourth
International, and the Revolutionary Marxist Group, a sympathizing
organization of the Fourth International.
The LSA nominated Kate Alderdice, a woman worker
and staff organizer of the League, to run in a Toronto constituency
against External Affairs Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Mitchell
Sharp.
Alderdice focused on Canada’s complicity with the
Chilean junta in refusing asylum to the majority of political refugees
who have applied. She called for Canadian withdrawal from the
imperialist alliances NATO and NORAD (North American Air Defense
Agreement). Other major themes in her campaign were the need for
anticapitalist measures to fight inflation and unemployment, defense of
the national liberation struggle of the Quebecois, and full support of
the demands of the women’s liberation movement.
The RMG presented three candidates in Toronto,
Winnipeg, and Peterborough. The three candidates stressed what they
termed “a program of direct and immediate action: objectives which can
broaden the scope of workers struggles and improve the relationship of
class forces in favor of the proletariat; methods of struggle which
unify the working class and give it experiences in self-organization and
proletarian democracy.”
(The full texts of the LSA and RMG election
programs were published in the July 1 issue of Intercontinental Press,
pp. 875-80.)
Both organizations called for a vote for the NDP
where there was no revolutionary candidate. The LSA also gave critical
support to the RMG candidates.
According to incomplete election returns issued
July 9, Kate Alderdice of the LSA received 109 votes. The RMG’s results
were as follows: Linda Peevers (Peterborough), 207; Bret Smiley (
Toronto), 40; and Murray Smith (Winnipeg), 78. Smiley and Smith ran in
constituencies held by the NDP
The Communist party ran 69 candidates around two
central slogans: “Elect a large progressive bloc to parliament” in which
“Communists and NDPers would play a major part”; and “Defeat the drive
to the right.” The first slogan expressed the CP’s desire for an
electoral bloc with the ‘non-monopoly bourgeoisie,” while the second was
aimed against the Tories, the “main party of the Right.” Together, the
two slogans amounted to a call for the election of a minority Liberal
government.
The Maoist Canadian Communist party
(Marxist-Leninist) ran 107 candidates, who denounced the elections as “a
capitalist fraud.” This slogan may have referred to the $35,000 the
Maoists and the pro-Moscow CP were forced to pay the government, since
none of their candidates received anywhere near the required number of
votes for a refund of the $200 each candidate is required to deposit in
order to run. Almost everywhere, the CP outpolled the Maoists, but none
of its candidates received more than a few hundred votes.
A small grouping called the ‘Waffle,” which split
from the New Democratic party in 1972 around a program of
English-Canadian “national liberation” from U.S., imperialism, ran three
candidates in the province of Ontario. They, too, received no more than
a few hundred votes. Waffle leader Jim Laxer, running in Toronto, had
669 votes.
Copyright South Branch Publishing. All
Rights Reserved.
www.socialisthistory.ca ▪
|
