Canada’s new Conservative government will intensify assault on workers’ rights

In the 2006 federal election, the most powerful sections of Canada’s corporate elite threw their support behind the Conservatives with a view to pushing government policy sharply right. This shift was reflected in the editorial support given the Conservatives by the country’s leading dailies, but even more importantly in the press’s trumpeting of Conservative charges that the Liberals were so corrupt as to be morally unfit to govern and its whitewashing of the right-wing roots, aims and ties of Harper’s new Conservatives. (Formed from the merger of the right-wing populist Reform/Canadian Alliance Party and the Progressive Conservatives, the new Conservative Party models itself after George W. Bush’s Republican Party.)

Through a Harper-led Conservative government, corporate Canada aims to press forward with the razing of what remains of the welfare state and, by means of an enlarged and rearmed Canadian Armed Forces and closer relations with the Bush administration, to more aggressively assert its predatory interests on the world stage.

Prime Minister-designate Stephen Harper spoke to both of these aims in his victory speech. A beaming Harper promised to deliver “balanced budgets, low inflation and debt repayment,” hailed Canada’s militarist tradition as the bulwark of Canadian democracy and championed the current Canadian Armed Forces’ (CAF) mission to prop up Afghanistan’s US-installed government.

Proclaimed Harper, “We will continue to help defend our values and democratic ideals around the globe. As so courageously demonstrated by those young Canadian soldiers who are serving, and who have sacrificed, in Afghanistan.”

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http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/jan2006/cana-j25.shtml