The scurrilous and racist attack by Conservative MP Derek Sloan, who suggested in a video on Tuesday that Dr. Theresa Tam “work(s) for China” and should be fired from her job as Canada’s Chief Medical Officer of Health, is hate speech that should be followed up with charges under Canada’s hate speech laws.
After an intense 40-day election campaign, neither Big Business political party has won a majority in the new Parliament. Pending final counts, voters have elected 157 Liberals, 120 Conservatives, 32 Bloc Quebecois, 24 New Democrats, 3 Greens, and one independent – Jody Wilson-Raybould in Vancouver Granville. The Communist Party of Canada, which ran 30 candidates on a platform to “Put People and Nature Before Profits,” saw the most positive response to its campaign in many years, despite a near-total blackout by the corporate media.
The Communist Party of Canada is a registered political party with a 95 year history of fighting for peace, democracy, and socialism. Our party was the first political party in Canada to call for proportional representation. We maintain that any discussion about electoral reform should begin with scrapping the anti-democratic “Un-Fair Elections Act” imposed by the Harper Conservative government, and building from the principle of making every vote count.
In convening the Special Committee on Electoral Reform, Parliament mandated the committee to (1) “study of viable alternate voting systems to replace the first-past-the-post system”; (2) “examine mandatory voting and online voting”; and (3) “assess the extent to which the options identified” would advance democratic principles. This brief presents the perspective of the Communist Party of Canada towards these questions and associated matters, and our policy on electoral reform.
The 38th Central Convention of our Party follows a major political upheaval in the recent federal election, and a new escalation of the global economic crisis which emerged in 2007-08. Initially, the Canadian economy was buffered to some degree by exports of fossil fuels and other natural resources, and because Canada’s megabanks were somewhat less exposed to the collapse in value of leveraged (re-packaged) debt. Now, the dramatic collapse in energy prices and the Canadian dollar are causing new job losses and rapid increases in the cost of imported products. The working class is paying a heavy cost for the turmoil of the capitalist system.
Keynote address delivered by Elizabeth Rowley, leader of the Communist Party of Canada at the occasion of the Parties 38th Central Convention in Toronto.
Comrade Chair and Comrades:
We open this convention with a warm welcome to all of the Delegates and Alternates who have traveled from all over Canada to attend this 38th Convention of our Party, which takes place just one week short of the 95th anniversary of our Party’s birth on May 28, 1921.