09) DEFEND DEMOCRACY: DEFEAT BILL 78
By Darrell Rankin, Manitoba leader of the Communist Party of Canada
As the Liberal Charest government goosesteps over Quebec, it is essential to continue building solidarity to help students to win their entirely reasonable campaign to block an expensive tuition hike. This is not a time to be neutral, as we hear from the NDP!
The massive, illegal protest of up to 250,000 people in Montreal on May 20 gives an idea of the importance of this issue. It is Charest who must back down, or Aboriginal and working class youth right across Canada will continue to suffer from high tuition.
New statements and actions should condemn the reactionary Bill 78, the emergency anti‑protest law. Spread the word and join local actions that are springing up across the whole country in solidarity with the Quebec students!
The true picture of the dramatic struggle in Quebec is being covered up and distorted by the compliant corporate media. Even before the draconian anti‑protest law, students faced truncheons, tear gas, pepper spray, plastic bullets and thousands of arrests, mainly for the "crime" of protesting. Police have inflicted serious injury; courts have imposed heavy fines and criminal records.
The Communist Party and YCL say that the emergency law smells of fascism. Is this reasonable? Here are some important historical realities:
"Before the establishment of a fascist dictatorship, bourgeois governments usually pass through a number of preliminary stages and institute a number of reactionary measures which directly facilitate the accession to power of fascism. Whoever does not fight the reactionary measures of the bourgeoisie and the growth of fascism at these preparatory stages is not in a position to prevent the victory of fascism but, on the contrary, facilitates that victory." (Georgi Dimitrov, 7th world congress of the Communist International, 1935)
"The facts show conclusively that the conditions of which fascism was a product were not limited to the countries where the fascists were temporarily triumphant. It requires little consideration to show that they were not limited to the pre‑war years. They are conditions created by monopoly capitalism and the
determination of the monopolists to maintain the hegemony of finance‑capital in opposition to rising democratic pressure for progressive social change." (Tim Buck, Canada: The Communist Viewpoint, Progress Books, 1948, p. 125)
The Communist Party's view today is informed by decades of fighting fascism. We have never been soft on fascism, unlike the Conservatives. We are speaking as a party that was outlawed in 1931, two years before Hitler outlawed the German CP. We are speaking as a party whose members laid down their lives in the Spanish Civil War, in defiance of Canadian law and the Mackenzie King government's policy of appeasing fascism.
In today's situation, the struggle to defeat Bill 78 is a critical piece of the movement to defend democracy and civil rights across Canada.
(The above article is from the June 16-30, 2012, issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $30/year, or $15 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $45 US per year; other overseas readers - $45 US or $50 CDN per year. Send to People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 706 Clark Drive, Vancouver, BC, V5L 3J1.)