Socialist
Worker | January 2010 |
no. 514
MAKE HARPER PAY
“EVERYBODY KNOWS that Parliament was prorogued in order to
shut down the Afghan inquiry”, said Tom Flanagan, former chief
of staff to Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
No one could have said this with more authority. While Harper and
pundits claimed that Canadians don’t care about the torture
of Afghan detainees transferred by the Canadian Forces to Afghan
authorities, the past few weeks have shown otherwise.
Within days of Harper proroguing Parliament, people across the country
were up in arms, organizing rallies and meetings expressing their
disgust.
Even before Harper prorogued Parliament, the vicious attacks launched
by the Tories on Richard Colvin, a career bureaucrat who brought
to light the issue of the torture of Afghan detainees, shocked many
people. But his decision to suspend Parliament until after the Olympics,
to avoid the scrutiny of the parliamentary committee looking into
the detainee scandal, detonated a simmering anger.
Harper faces a tidal wave of criticism from every direction, and
the Conservative minority government seems to be in freefall, bleeding
support and now neck-and-neck with the Liberals in the polls.
Harper’s shameful performance at the Copenhagen summit has
only fuelled this growing movement, along with anger at declining
pensions, growing poverty and the lack of jobs.
But there is also another worry fuelling the mobilization across
the country. Parliament is seen as one of the few spaces where democracy
exists in society. That space has gotten smaller and smaller, and
now Harper and his friends at the right-wing Fraser Institute are
musing about Parliament being a hindrance and superfluous.
If Parliament can be shut down to cover up a scandal, it raises
questions in many people’s minds about the meaning of democracy,
and the need for an alternative to this stunted, shallow sham of
a democracy.
This is the biggest crisis to hit the Conservatives since their
election in 2006. And just a few months ago, it would have seemed
impossible that the Tories could drop so quickly in support.
The inspiring mobilization that has happened thus far shows the
potential for building a real fightback to make Harper and the Tories
pay for ignoring the will of the majority of Canadians on Afghanistan,
on climate change, on jobs and so much more.
But this also takes place against the backdrop of continued economic
crisis, whose ravages are far from over. Harper has vowed to bring
in an austerity budget in the next Parliament to make workers bear
the burden of the crisis. The cuts have already started—with
funding slashed to NGOs such as KAIROS—and more are on the
way.
The political fight taking place now will not only play itself out
in the next election, but most importantly in the economic struggles
ahead. The contours of resistance today help us gauge the possibilities
of resistance tomorrow.
This is why the union movement, social justice organizations, anti-war
activists, environmentalists and socialists must go all-out to make
this movement as big and as militant as possible.
