May Day 2009: Their Crisis and Ours

As we mark International Workers’ Day this year, an economic crisis is sweeping the world. It promises to be the deepest recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s and it has major implications for workers and oppressed people.

For the minority of wage-earners organized in unions, the limited protections won by past efforts are being eroded. Many corporate employers will try to use the concessions extracted from auto assembly plant workers by the Detroit 3 to pressure workers into opening up contracts in the name of “competitiveness.” Public sector workers will be told that they must give concessions, just like private sector workers. The majority of workers not in unions are in an even worse position, with no protection but pathetically weak employment standards laws.

Workplace pension plans – funded by workers’ deferred wages – were already suffering from employer contribution holidays and have been hit hard. Over 400,000 jobs in Canada have been lost already and the official employment rate stands at 8%, a 7-year high, and rising. For young workers, it’s a staggering 14.8%. The Bank of Canada estimates that another half a million jobs will be lost this year. Since the Bank has consistently underestimated the depth of this crisis, we can bet that the numbers will be higher still.

Faced with this onslaught, resistance is difficult but vital. Unions and community groups must organize and support each other in fighting back against layoffs, demands for concessions, racist scapegoating, deportations of undocumented people, public service cuts, and other regressive attacks.

The economic crisis provides an opening to build support for progressive reforms like meaningful improvements to Employment Insurance, social assistance and CPP and the creation of universal public child care and prescription drug coverage. Mobilizing for upcoming rallies and actions called by the Canadian Labour Congress to demand action on the economic crisis is one way to do this.

But a round of rallies is clearly not enough. To begin to rise to the challenge, unions and social justice groups need to start becoming much more active, militant and democratically member-run. They also need to be explaining how the economic crisis is caused by a profit-driven system and why working people shouldn’t pay for it.

Unfortunately, capitalism’s crisis exposes another crisis: in Canada , supporters of this kind of response have almost never been weaker in numbers and influence than we are at the moment. It’s high time that people who agree on the need to build serious mass struggles for radical social change and who recognize that capitalism is responsible for today’s ghastly social and ecological crises start to come together. Supporters of the New Socialist Group are committed to working with others to help make this happen.

Executive of the New Socialist Group

Reframing the Warin Afghanistan and Pakistanas a Class War

By Michael Skinner

The fact that the Taliban is a party of the peasant classes, but certainly not the only one, is not news in Afghanistan or Pakistan. It is thus interesting that The New York Times (“Taliban Exploit Class Rifts to Gain Ground in Pakistan,” 16 April 2009) is now exploiting the fact the Taliban do represent significant groups of peasants as if this is news. This indication of a possible reframing of the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan as a class war is significant as the U.S. escalates the intensity and scale of warfare in the region.

My Afghan-Canadian research partner, Hamayon Rastgar, has said many times since we returned from a research trip in Afghanistan that “the West gives the monopoly of anti-imperialism to the Taliban” by crushing and continuing to suppress socialist forces in Afghanistan and by portraying the complex insurgency in the simplistic way Western governments and media do.

Many non-violent resisters as well as various insurgent groups oppose the Taliban, the mujaheddin, and imperialist forces. The complexity of the resistance and insurgent forces remain opaque to most Western analysts. Articles by Afghan intellectuals engaged in non-violent resistance against all the forces of repression – the Taliban, the mujaheddin, and the Western forces – are rarely translated for Western readers. Westerners believe all insurgents are under a Taliban banner. However, as an Afghan Maoist leader told us: “The government credits the Taliban for every insurgent attack; the Taliban like to take the credit; and that works for everyone else at this moment.”

Operation Enduring Freedom and the Afghanistan State

It is important to recall that the militaries of Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF), from the U.S., Britain, Canada, and Australia, set the stage to institute a supposedly ‘democratic’ state in Afghanistan. However, this state is a reconstitution of the theocratic Islamic Republic of Afghanistan originally instituted in 1992. The Islamic Republic was instituted by one of several competing mujaheddin factions who were built up as part of the U.S.'s anti-socialist “freedom fighters.” The later rise of the Talban, facilitated as it was by the Pakistani equivalent of the CIA, the ISI, was in good part a response to the horrors inflicted on Afghans by conflicts between the rival mujaheddin factions after 1992. Several of these factions retreated to the north, in 1996, fleeing from the advance of Taliban military forces. These mujaheddin factions formed the United Islamic Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan, which the Western news media sanitised with the title Northern Alliance.

In an article in Briarpatch (March/April 2008) regarding the use and abuse of feminism to sell Canada’s war in Afghanistan, I wrote: “The Taliban are radical Islamists intent on isolating Afghans from the world; the mujaheddin are radical Islamists intent on profiting from their relationship to the U.S. and now Canada. The Taliban are reprehensible, but the mujaheddin are hardly different; both created misogynistic regimes based on erroneous interpretations of Islam.”

The Taliban and mujaheddin also share a hatred of ‘Godless’ socialists. It is still illegal, based on religious grounds, as it has been since 1992, to form a socialist party in the elected theocracy of Afghanistan. Freedom of religion is supposedly guaranteed by the new Afghanistan constitution. But in practice the state acts in a way that all Afghans are considered Muslim by default. This misses the incredible cultural diversity in Afghanistan, and the many religions including several unique indigenous ones, that Afghans practice. Moreover, socialists (which include an important organized Maoist component) are not likely to have suddenly found salvation in Islam. There is, it seems, no Islamic equivalent of Latin American liberation theology or Canadian Christian socialism in Afghanistan.

The kicker is that in the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan apostasy is punishable by death. Any Afghan socialist could be ‘legally’ executed on the grounds she or he has converted from Islam. Moreover, the Afghan Supreme Court ruled socialists are legally atheists to ban socialist parties from electoral politics.

Despite this suppression, Afghan Maoists claim they have consolidated disparate Maoist and socialist organisations into a new party. The Maoists also claim they will eventually beat the Taliban in a competition for the hearts and minds of peasants, once the insurgency has exhausted the OEF-NATO occupation, which even Afghan liberals consider as an imperialist occupation.

Even Michael Ignatieff (2003), in his book Empire Lite, which is a collection of his New York Times essays, explicitly identifies the occupation of Afghanistan as imperialist. Ignatieff just happens to think this imperialist occupation is “humanitarian,” because, he argues, imposing a liberal world order in Central Asia is preferable to allowing people he claims are “barbarians” the autonomy to govern their own affairs. The fact that the hierarchical priorities of this liberal world order rank the accumulation of state power and individual wealth far above observation of international laws and human rights is, for Ignatieff, an inconvenient but unavoidable truth. Ignatieff’s complaint is that this empire needs to throw its weight around more forcefully to establish liberal world order – an argument the Obama administration seems to be implementing.

The New York Times and Class War

However, the powerful Western states are finally acknowledging the fact – made rather obvious by the events in recent weeks over applications of law with respect to women – that the ‘Global War on Terror,’ overtly being fought in Afghanistan and covertly in Pakistan since 7 October 2001, was never a war for the liberation of Afghan women. Now they seem to be reframing this imperialist war as a class war.

The prevailing narrative of the press, prior to The New York Times declaration of a class war, on 16 April 2009, was that Taliban leaders either physically or economically coerce peasants to fight as insurgents. Thus the article, written by Jane Perlez and Pir Zubair Shah, published online 16 April and on the front page of the New York print edition 17 April, represents a significant shift in the hegemonic narrative. Perlez and Zubair Shah claim the Taliban “have advanced deeper into Pakistan by engineering a class revolt that exploits profound fissures between a small group of wealthy landlords and their landless tenants.” The writers claim the “Taliban’s ability to exploit class divisions adds a new dimension to the insurgency.” They cite an unnamed senior Pakistani official who states: “I wouldn’t be surprised if it sweeps the established order of Pakistan,” which, according to the writers, “remains largely feudal.”

Perlez and Zubair Shah report that Pakistani-American lawyer, Mahboob Mahmood, who they add was a classmate of Barack Obama, states Pakistanis are “psychologically ready for a revolution.” The insurgents are “taking advantage of deep class divisions that have long festered in Pakistan,” according to the lawyer. He adds that the insurgents promise “Islamic justice, effective government and economic redistribution.”

When we visited Afghanistan in 2007, one of the narratives we frequently heard from Afghans, whether intellectual elites and students or workers and peasants, was that the complex insurgency was an anti-imperialist class war. We were told non-Taliban resistance and insurgent groups existed in parallel to the Islamic insurgency, which is far more complex than Western reports generally indicate. It is curious that it has taken so long for a major Western news source to begin to barely scratch the surface of a story of class conflict so obvious to Afghans.

This new narrative of class war, if it is picked up beyond The New York Times, might replace two faulty narratives previously observed in North American media. The first of these faulty narratives was that the Taliban are the only force oppressing women and a primary goal of defeating the Taliban is to liberate women. The fracturing of this narrative became evident in recent weeks as the truth that the mujaheddin, who Western forces rewarded with political and economic power in 2001, differ little from the Taliban.

Replacing the faulty narrative claiming Western forces are liberating Afghan women, an interim narrative that claims the supposedly backward people of the region are not ready to allow the Western powers to liberate women, has become evident in North American media in recent weeks. This narrative conveniently ignores the fact that many groups resisting misogyny are suppressed by the occupation itself. This narrative also ignores the facts of six decades of slow but consistent progress demanded by women during the peaceful interregnum of 1919 to 1979 between the British-Russian inter-imperialist wars and American-Soviet proxy war. This inter-bellum period of progress was problematic, but it did allow increasing space for women to effect their own liberation. This period culminated in legislation that, among other progressive initiatives, banned dowries for brides, protected freedom of choice within marriages, and enforced compulsory universal education for boys and girls.

However, progressive legislation and some of the ways it was clumsily and coercively implemented by the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan government provided some of the sparks for the mobilization of Islamic forces in 1979. Islamic revolutionaries were subsequently supported by the U.S., and eventually sucked Soviet forces into Afghanistan to back the socialist government. Leaders of the Islamic revolution were rewarded for their service to the U.S. during the anti-socialist jihad. They were rewarded for their service to the American, British, Canadian, and Australian forces of Operation Enduring Freedom in 2001. And many of them continue to be rewarded by the parallel OEF and NATO missions that continue today.

Many of the leaders who now occupy power in the coalition backed Afghan government and positions of economic power were mujaheddin warlords. It is no surprise that they promote the ongoing oppression of women. As the reality that the war in Afghanistan (and Pakistan) was not fought to liberate Afghan women as part of the legitimation of the ‘War on Terror’ has become too obvious to deny, a new narrative to legitimate escalating the war is desperately needed.

The Obama Military Surge

If the example set by The New York Times is followed, we may soon see state and media agencies in the U.S., UK, and Canada shifting their war propaganda to suggest that the Operation Enduring Freedom and NATO forces fight to usurp the Taliban’s claim as liberators of the poor in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This argument is as threadbare as the propaganda Western forces were acting as liberators of women, and it is equally as likely to fail.

The Obama administration is deploying a military surge in Afghanistan pushing the combined total of OEF and NATO forces in Central Asia close to the 100,000 mark. The OEF forces also seem to be in preparation for an escalation of military activities not only in Pashtun regions of Pakistan, but also in Balochistan. An attack on Baloch Pakistanis could draw Baloch insurgents from Iran and western Afghanistan into the war. This could provide a pretext to attack eastern Iran and establish OEF and NATO forces in the yet impenetrable Baloch province of Nimroz in the far west of Afghanistan.

An invasion of northern Pakistan seems ever more imminent, given the failures of escalating covert actions. State agencies and news media have for some time been fanning fears by suggesting Taliban forces will seize Pakistani nuclear arms. Since the first U.S. presidential debate, Obama has stated he would not hesitate to bomb Pakistan if Pakistani nuclear weapons fell into the wrong hands.

Westerners may be led to fear a class war led by the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan in the way they were previously led to fear the Taliban as misogynist Islamists. However, the real reasons for the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, remain the same as ever, the geopolitical manoeuvrings of a superpower to maximise state power and facilitate the accumulation of capitalist wealth. •

Michael Skinner is studying international relations at York University and is a long-time activist with the Canadian Union of Postal Workers and the Canadian Union of Public Employees.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~(((( The B u l l e t ))))~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Is nationalization of the banks good for us? Is it socialism?

By Yen Chu

The financial crisis has prompted the nationalization of major banks in the United States and in several European countries. The move to nationalize has sent journalists proclaiming the arrival of socialism. “We Are All Socialists Now” was the cover story in the February 16th issue of Newsweek. The story claims that the nationalization of the banks by the Bush administration back in September is a strong sign of socialism.

Unfortunately, socialism is not just around the corner. While nationalization can be an aspect of socialism, it has also occurred under capitalism. As George Bush said when he moved to nationalize, “These measures are not intended to take over the free market, but to preserve it.” But while the government works to preserve the free market, the working class is left to suffer the effects of the crisis. Although no Canadian banks are facing nationalization, the nationalizations in the US and Europe raise the issue of what consequences these measures have on capitalism and what potential it has for the left.

Nationalization occurs when private firms are taken into state ownership. Traditionally, nationalization meant that an enterprise simply became state-owned and operated. The implication is that private interests lose out on the profits. Profitable nationalized industries can generate a lot of revenue for government coffers and some on the Left believe this can benefit the working class if the government distributes that wealth. However, the working class doesn’t always benefit; the political and economic reality of nationalization is far more complex.

Capitalist Nationalization

Under capitalism, nationalization sometimes occurs when the private sector is unable to operate an industry, service or enterprise profitably. But because some enterprises are considered an economic priority, the government runs and operates them, such as VIA Rail. The working class does not have direct input into how these enterprises are operated and as such do not directly benefit from them.
Today, the term nationalization is often used loosely – the current “nationalization” of banks means that the government owns shares in these firms, but the capitalist owners still run them and receive the profits.

In the mainstream press and among capitalist economists, reaction to the recent “nationalization” in the financial sector has been mixed. There is an ideological debate over the role of government in the capitalist system. There are those free market purists who believe that any tiny speck of government interference is a whiff of socialism. They believe that everything from social services to public infrastructure must be left to the free market and that the system will sort itself out on its own without any government intervention. But most feel that the government needs to do whatever is necessary to save capitalism.

President Barack Obama is caught in the middle of this ideological debate. His administration has so far resisted calls for further nationalization and control of the banks. But there is pressure for further nationalization from members of the Democratic Party, some in the Republican Party and finance capitalists, including Alan Greenspan. They see nationalization as a temporary measure to overturn the crisis. Some point to bank nationalization in Japan and Sweden as examples of how bank nationalization can help overcome the crisis in capitalism. Once things stabilized in those countries, the banks went back to private ownership.

The Obama administration has not ruled out more nationalization, but it recognizes some of its dangerous implications for the capitalist marketplace. A New York Times article on January 26, 2009, quotes a political adviser saying that if the government is seen as owning the banks “the administration would come under enormous political pressure to halt foreclosures or lend money to ailing projects in cities or states with powerful constituencies.”

The key word here is political pressure. The government does not act in the interests of working people without significant pressure. With trillions of dollars going to the banks and financial sector, the US government can not avoid the issue of foreclosures without significant political backlash. It has implemented a foreclosure rescue plan that mostly subsidizes the bank into renegotiating mortgages. The plan, however, does not halt all foreclosures and does not address the issue of affordable housing.

Political pressure was used last December by workers in Chicago who occupied Republic Windows and Doors. Bank of America pulled the company’s credit even though the bank was partially nationalized through a $25 billion injection of capital by the government to encourage lending. This partial nationalization of the bank by the government did not automatically mean that the workers would be given what was owed to them. Instead, it was only through the workers taking direct action in occupying the company that Bank of America agreed to restore the credit in order for the company to issue the severance and vacation pay owing to them. The workers’ victory was bittersweet as they have been left unemployed. The trillions of dollars given to the banks is not trickling down to workers and the poor.

The current “nationalization” of the banks is not even a moderate social reform where there is the potential to improve the living conditions of the working class. It is the nationalization of the banks’ losses and not the banks themselves. Working people in the US are paying for the losses but receive no benefits.

Banks’ decrees affect our lives, but we have no control over these decisions. We deposit our money in banks and get very low rates of return. We have no say in how they use our deposits. They charge us inexplicable user fees for every transaction. We borrow money from them at very high interest rates and can become homeless when the banks refuse to renegotiate our loans when we become unemployed. We can become unemployed when the bank refuses credit to the company we work for. If we are workers in a company that goes bankrupt, we lose out to the banks, who get first claims on the company. We’re left without severance and vacation pay. Furthermore the banks refuse to set up branches in lower-income neighbourhoods, where residents end up relying on services such as Money Mart, which charges exorbitant fees to cash cheques and ridiculously high interest on pay day loans.

Democratic nationalization

Credit unions exist as an alternative to banking and offer some ideas and possibilities of what a democratic nationalization of banks could look like if financial institutions were nationalized and turned into public utilities. Credit unions are owned by the members who use the service. Members elect the board of directors who act on their behalf to oversee the operations of the credit union. Profits are used to ensure members get a higher rate of return on their deposits and are used to keep interest rates low.

Another alternative to the current banking system is participatory budgeting, which was first implemented in Porto Alegre, Brazil. There, the public was directly involved through public forums in the decision-making process of how public spending would be allocated and what projects to implement. In banking, the model of participatory budgeting would allow the public to actively participate in the decision making process of allocating credit, setting interest rates and determining the supply of money in the economy.

However, both credit unions and participatory budgeting have their limitations. Neither model address the issue of workers’ control and both highlight the limitations of a democratic nationalization of banks within a capitalist system, as they must operate within the framework of capitalism. Credit unions, for instance, were hurt along with the commercial banks when the value of hedge funds plunged. In Porto Alegre, participants had to make decisions on where to make cuts to social programs. Furthermore, if other industries are still privately owned, workers’
exploitation still remains.

Democratic nationalization does not automatically lead to socialism. Socialism is not simply the redistribution of wealth; it is about building the capacity for workers to run the political and economic life of society. It is only through strong social movements that democratic nationalization and the move toward socialism is possible. The current way in which banks are being rescued through “nationalization” should not be endorsed by people opposed to neoliberalism. But these new circumstances offer an opportunity to challenge the neo-liberal orthodoxy of the free market – and the capitalist system that gave rise to it.

Yen Chu is a member of No One is Illegal-Toronto.

Corporate elite settles an old score

By Linda McQuaig

By any logic, advocates of unfettered capitalism should be seeking cover from public wrath these days, as the deregulated capitalism they foisted on us continues to self-destruct, bringing calamity into the lives of millions.
Yet I've heard barely a whisper of mea culpa from members of this corporate crowd.
On the contrary, they seem to see the economic meltdown as an opportunity to finally do in their old foes in the labour movement.
After years of demonizing unions and undermining workers' rights, they're now taking advantage of the unpopularity of the auto bail-outs to try to take away gains that the Canadian Auto Workers spent decades achieving, and that set a standard for the labour movement.
In demanding wage concessions of up to $19 an hour, auto company executives and the Harper government are hoping to deflect public anger for the economic meltdown onto those who assemble cars. (If only GM workers hadn't frittered away their time on the assembly line bundling together those Credit Derivative Swaps.)
In reality, it isn't the auto workers, but the economic meltdown, that has plunged auto industries all over the world into a slump. Since these industries are crucial to national economies, they're being bailed out everywhere. But, as the CAW notes, only in North America are the bailouts accompanied by demands for wage concessions – even though German and Japanese auto workers earn more than their North American counterparts.
Meanwhile, debate about how to fix the slump is confined within the same old rigid doctrines. Public ownership remains taboo.
Sam Gindin, a former CAW economist who teaches at York University, argues that public ownership may be the answer in the case of the hundreds of auto supply plants that have been shut down in Ontario (and hundreds more facing imminent closure). Gindin insists Canada can't afford to lose this productive capacity, and proposes that closed plants be expropriated and turned over to a new public corporation.
These plants could become part of an ambitious government-directed project to convert us to a green economy – building the components for expanded public transit systems, redesigned machinery, appliances, electricity grids.
Such ambitious conversions have happened before. Gindin points out that from 1942 to 1944, GM auto plants were overhauled to enable GM to become the world's largest producer of naval aircraft. After the war, they were quickly converted back to auto production.
But now, faced with the worst economic crisis since the Depression, we're led to believe the solution lies not in bold initiatives but in rolling back the gains of the labour movement.
The rest of us shouldn't be acquiescent as the auto workers are vilified for their aspirations to be well paid and secure in retirement. Isn't that what we all want?
The United Auto Workers (U.S. parent of the CAW) helped create the North American middle class. They led the way in the postwar years, winning innovations like annual cost-of-living increases, as they spearheaded the development of a strong union movement that ushered in the broadly shared prosperity of those decades.
The auto workers also provided funding for important social movements of women, students, environmentalists. They even put out a pamphlet back in 1949 arguing for smaller cars, citing the need for fuel efficiency.
No wonder the business elite has long had it out for them – and now want us to believe the only viable economic model is the one that has recently brought the world economy to its knees.
Linda McQuaig's column appears every other week. lmcquaig@sympatico.ca

Colonialism and theEconomic Crisis in Canada

By Todd Gordon

The Left in Canada has been quick to point out the shortcomings of the Conservative government's official response to the recession. Not surprisingly, the response doesn't mark a departure from their knee-jerk pro-capital and anti-worker reflexes.

Critics have rightly stressed the small size of the stimulus plan; that a significant chunk of the supposed stimulus (50 percent) is actually tax breaks, and thus not really stimulus; that the Tories failed to revamp Employment Insurance rules beyond temporarily extending the length of time a person can receive benefits to a mere 50 weeks, even though less than 40 percent of the unemployed actually qualify for benefits and the most a person can receive is a meagre 55 percent of their wages (capped at $447/week); and that bailout spending, such as that in the auto sector, is being used to roll back working-class living standards and job security that had been built up over a half century of struggle.

These are indeed serious problems with the way in which the Conservatives, with the largely uncritical support of the Liberals, are addressing the economic crisis: putting the needs of capital ahead of the social needs of Canadians.

But we have to be very careful on the Left about how we advance our criticism of the government's strategy. As the recession deepens into the worst global downturn since the Great Depression people will quite rightly demand more from their government. Calls will be made for the government to spend more and create good jobs for people. And organizations of the Left will play a central role articulating those demands and mobilizing people for the inevitable struggle that will be necessary for the demands to become actual policy.

However, the government's response to the recession has a sharply colonial dynamic to it. And if we aren't cognizant of this dynamic we risk reproducing it in our efforts to build an alternative way of dealing with the crisis. The fight for a more socially just Canada will be an anti-colonial struggle in support of indigenous rights, or it won't be at all.

Exploiting Fear

The Conservative government's goal in this recession is clear: exploit the scale of the crisis and the fear and uncertainty it's instilled in people to intensify an agenda it and business leaders would otherwise have to approach more modestly. The attack on auto workers is a good example of this; the expansion of capitalism into indigenous territories is as well.

Indigenous land and resources are central to Canadian capitalism, plain and simple. Reports written by Indian Affairs and Northern Development, Natural Resources Canada and various industry organizations make this point plain enough. Most of the mines being explored or dug, oil deposits being developed, pipelines being constructed and hydro-dams imposed on the landscape are on or adjacent to – and thus impact – indigenous territory. All these resources and other industrial developments besides, furthermore, require infrastructural investments, such as roadways or electricity grids, in order to be operationalized, putting even more pressure on First Nation lands.

The otherwise relentless growth of a capitalism steamrolling any obstacle in its path to making profits has been kept in check in Canada, to some degree, by the efforts of First Nations to defend their land. In some instances they've directly stopped developments, while their cumulative struggle over decades, along with environmental campaigning, has led to an oversight system, however very imperfect, of environmental assessments and consultations with indigenous communities, which has slowed the pace of development down somewhat. These oversights, derided by industry organizations and the Harper Tories as nothing more than “red tape,” have long been viewed by these same critics as a barrier to corporate profitability. The economic crisis has given the Tories and business leaders new ammunition to mount a frontal assault on these policies, while stepping up and expediting infrastructure funding that clearly impacts First Nations.

Cutting “Red Tape”

Infrastructure spending is obviously an important component of the Conservative government's 2009 post-financial-meltdown budget. Canada had already committed $33-billion over several years toward infrastructure development in November 2007 with the Building Canada fund. With the additional money earmarked in the new budget, they're planning $18-billion of infrastructural spending in the next two years.

The government's goal is to fast track new projects and those already planned, arguing that this is necessary in order to keep the recession from worsening. According to Infrastructure Canada, the government “has an opportunity [i.e. peoples' well-grounded fear of recession] to modernize its federal reviews by cutting red tape and increasing federal-provincial cooperation” (emphasis added). Things need to move quickly, in other words, and efficiency (spending lots of money minus meaningful oversight) equals progress.

As part of the effort to expedite spending, the government plans on “overhauling” – in the words of Environment Minister, Jim Prentice – the Environmental Assessment Act. While full details of the government plans haven't been released, a leaked government document reveals a goal of cutting reviews by as much as 95 percent. Infrastructure Canada says the government is planning a “dramatic reduction in the number of federal assessments and regulatory reviews,” adding, to assuage those who might question the wisdom of such a move, that the cuts will be done “without compromising environmental protection.”

Prentice also announced, at a Calgary business luncheon in mid-March, the Tories' plan to simply waive environmental reviews for favoured public projects for the next two years. The waivers will be made regardless of the size of the project.

How fewer reviews or weakened (or “modernized,” as they like to suggest) environmental policy won't compromise the environment and those indigenous communities that rely on it for cultural and material sustenance is a mystery. Tory wizardry, perhaps. After all, this is the government that can apparently turn water into wine: making a Free Trade Agreement with Colombia about improving human rights in the troubled Andean nation, helping the poor by cutting taxes, or supporting immigrants' rights by concentrating arbitrary power in the hands of the Minister of Immigration.

Ottawa claims that it can rely on provincial assessments, but the provinces have different criteria and standards than their federal counterpart. As critics point out, provincial standards in environmental reviews are themselves not necessarily that reliable. In B.C., for instance, indigenous groups have long criticized the provincial government's assessment process as biased in favour of business interests. Moreover, the Ontario Liberal government announced in 2008 in its Open for Business: Guide to Reduce the Burden, that it's cutting regulations in every ministry by 25 percent. Like the federal Tories, the Ontario Liberals describe the rollback as “modernization.” At a time when the condition of our environment is rapidly deteriorating and indigenous land claims continue to grow, reviews should be strengthened not weakened.

Environment Canada's response to a scientific study it commissioned on protecting the endangered woodland-caribou – an important part of the livelihood of many indigenous communities – makes crystal clear the government's priorities. Released in early April of this year, the study, conducted by leading woodland-caribou scientists, recommends tightly controlling development in approximately half of Canada's northern boreal forest. But Environment Canada suggests the science in the study is inadequate, and doesn't offer sufficient information on how much development can be pursued without undermining the sustainability of caribou herds. Instead of acting on the report, it says it will study the issue further until the end of 2010. Much of the woodland-caribou's habitat is sought after by logging, mining and oil and gas companies. Thus even when a serious scientific study is undertaken, Environment Canada simply ignores conclusions that don't fit with the agenda of the resource industry.

Infrastructure Spending:
More Money, More Colonialism

A cursory glance at some of the government's recent infrastructure spending plans – some made before the crisis but likely expedited as a result of it – offers us a clear picture of how stimulus spending will be implicated in the expansion of the domestic Canadian colonial project.

Infrastructure Canada and the B.C. government, for instance, are committing over $115-million to the expansion of a number of sections of Highway 97 in British Columbia. Both levels of government and the Northwest Corridor Corporation, which includes among its members municipal and provincial governments and private companies, tout the expansion as crucial to the economic development of the region. The expansion is aimed at making the 97 a key part of the corridor linking up NAFTA trade flow through Manitoba with B.C.'s Pacific ports (which are also slated to receive federal funds). Making the 97 a major industrial transit way is also expected to spur further developments in the mining and oil and gas industries in the province, cited as key to the latter's economic future by both levels of government and the Northwest Corridor Corporation. Two major pipelines, the Northern Gateway and the Pacific Trails, are in fact being planned for B.C., both of which will cross unceded indigenous land.

A number of indigenous communities are located along or near the various Highway 97 expansion points and in areas resource corporations are hoping to develop with help from infrastructural enhancements. While some First Nations are supportive of oil and gas and mineral development, hoping for a piece of the pie, others are less enamoured by it. In a 2004 press release, the Treaty 8 First Nations, located in northern B.C., declared that “oil and gas development as currently practiced has an unacceptable adverse impact on wildlife, and on the exercise of traditional hunting and fishing rights through environmental degradation.” They also noted “the failure of the government to require cumulative impact assessments in advance of oil and gas development,” which “infringes on our Treaty and Aboriginal Rights.” The Blueberry River First Nation, a Treaty 8 member, launched a lawsuit in 2003 against the B.C. government and Calgary-based Canadian Natural Resources Ltd., demanding redress for gas-related illnesses suffered by community members and a halt to all development activities within 10 kilometres of its reserve.

In another example of the colonial character of infrastructure spending, Infrastructure Canada and Quebec are committing funds to the expansion of Highway 30. But in order to undertake the project Quebec plans to appropriate mainly agricultural land on unceded Mohawk territory along Montreal's South Shore. The plan evoked a strong response from the Kahnawake community, including a threat to blockade the Mercier Bridge, invoking memories of the Oka Revolt when Mohawk Warriors shut the bridge (which runs through Mohawk territory) down after the Suretée du Québec attacked a blockade in nearby Kanehsatake. In the face of potential unrest surrounding Highway 30, the province promised to work with the federal government to provide new crown land as compensation for the appropriation.

While the province's offer appeased the Kahnawake Band Council (Band Councils are the colonially-imposed leaderships officially recognized by the federal and provincial governments), which quickly called off protests, not all community members are happy with it. The Mohawk Traditional Council has opposed the appropriation, asserting that the province has no right to take their land, which is used by the community for hunting and planting. Local farmers, who also face displacement because of the project, have opposed the expansion as well.

This past January Ottawa also offered financial assistance to the controversial Mackenzie Valley pipeline project. The offer was announced by none other than Jim Prentice (apparently funding pipelines is a matter for the minister responsible for protecting the environment) during a meeting with oil company executives. The amount of the offer hasn't been disclosed, but one industry observer estimated it could potentially be as high as $2-billion.

The Mackenzie Valley Pipeline is the largest infrastructural project in Canadian history, with a cost estimated at $16.2-billion and rising. Some indigenous communities have come on board in the desperate hope that it will provide First Nations with meaningful financial benefits without long-term destruction of the surrounding environment. But it continues to face opposition from indigenous activists and communities not sold on the benefits of a pipeline to their cultures and traditional territories.

A dream of government and the oil and gas industries going back decades, the pipeline is expected to spur significant growth in oil and gas and mineral exploration along its route, all of which will inevitably impact First Nation lands in and beyond the Mackenzie Valley delta. As Prentice observed when he announced funding for the pipeline, “it opens up a whole region of the country.” The comment is both racist and telling of the goals of government and industry. It suggests the Mackenzie Valley and the lands adjacent to it are some sort of frontier that have been closed off to people, when in fact indigenous communities have been living there, and interacting with the surrounding environment, for thousands of years. It's only “opening up” the region to large-scale resource development by corporations.

The project has been slowed down by an environmental review and indigenous opposition. But with the recession worsening and the government throwing potentially billions of dollars into the pipeline, the push is on to cut the indigenous “red tape” and get the project going. True to form, Prentice followed up the funding announcement two months later with an attack on the project's review panel in a speech to the Calgary Chamber of Commerce.

And to be absolutely clear, spending commitments for First Nations made in the budget don't make up for the government's continued colonial assault. At $1.4-billion, the Tory spending promise (and just a promise at this point) is just over one-fifth of what was promised by the Liberal government in the 2005 Kelowna Accord, which itself was not a firm commitment on the spending and still wouldn't have gone far enough to improve living conditions in indigenous communities let alone repay these communities for all the wealth that has been made off of them over the last 150 years through the stealing of resources, the forced labour of children in residential schools or the corrupt practices of Indian Affairs. The Tories quickly scrapped the Kelowna Accord after their election in 2006, and now three years later they present a spending plan that doesn't come remotely close to dealing with the poverty, housing shortage and health needs in First Nation communities.

Which Side Are We On?

The Left needs to respond to the economic crisis and the Tory recession plan carefully and responsibly. Simply calling for more stimulus spending and job creation, without consideration of the impact this may have on indigenous communities, isn't good enough. Indigenous demands for self-determination and protection of their cultures and lands must be central to how the Left organizes in this crisis and to what it envisions for a more socially just Canada. We have to be prepared to take leadership from indigenous activists not in the pocket of government and corporations, while making the arguments with non-indigenous people desiring change that the development of a meaningful anti-recession strategy can't come at the expense of First Nations.

In times of economic crisis racism and xenophobia tend to rise, and governments and business leaders are certainly not above playing these things up and exploiting them to advance their agendas. We've already seen large-scale immigration raids at workplaces in the Greater Toronto Area this April. Anti-indigenous racism is quite strong in Canada in the best of economic times, and as economic instability grows it could intensify. The Left has to be strident in its anti-racism, and must make its fight against the government's and business's reactionary response to the recession an anti-colonial one. Only then will we be on the right path to a more socially just future. •

Todd Gordon is the author of Cops, Crime and Capitalism: The Law-and-Order Agenda in Canada. He's currently writing a book on Canadian imperialism. His articles have appeared on Rabble, Znet, The Bullet and in New Socialist magazine. He is an assistant professor of Canadian Studies at the University of Toronto, and can be reached at ts.gordon@utoronto.ca.