15) CHALLENGES AT THE POLLS - AND AFTER

(The following article is from the May 16-30, 2009, issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $25/year, or $12 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $25 US per year; other overseas readers - $25 US or $35 CDN per year. Send to: People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 133 Herkimer St., Unit 502, Hamilton, ON, L8P 2H3.)

Youth Fightback column, by Johan Boyden

It's a tale of two elections. Nova Scotians are beginning the brisk walk to the polls. On the other side of the country, BCers have just cast their ballots for a new government.

     What's at stake here for young workers and students?

     The new context is the economic tsunami. The economic crisis is connecting young people's struggles, sharpening awareness of a common threat, while not hitting everyone the same way.

     On the east coast, the crisis comes after the collapse of fisheries and a mass exodus of workers to western Canada. Nova Scotia's unemployment is third highest in the country, second only to PEI and Newfoundland. For many young workers, prospects of even raising a family in their home province are bleak.

     In BC, corporate purses have swollen with the Olympics construction boom. It is a false economy. No matter how much relief this has granted (temporarily) to some young workers, the cost of living is extortionate and minimum wage is the same or lower as the Maritimes. And there are countless untold personal work-place disaster stories.

     Take the young man I met yesterday. He works in the technology sector. A few months ago his employer's doors were locked. Everyone was fired, but the company is still trading on the stock exchange.  On the street we would call this criminal. On the other side of the gilded doors at the top of the elevator, the suits call it "venture capital." The company's entire goal was to capture investment, not sales.

     Consciously or not, young voters are grappling with these challenges when they decide to hit the polls - or stay home. Vancouver youth can name more Canucks players than politicians, but that isn't the main point. From conversations I've had during the BC election, there is a polarization. If it were up to most young people, Campbell's Liberals would be out of the playoffs. It would be bizarre to ignore that sentiment.

     I suspect similar winds are blowing across Nova Scotia. In both these elections the main danger is from political parties which express the interests of the ruling class. Electorally, the only force that might block them is the NDP - which has so compromised itself that, despite all rhetoric, it is difficult to even call them a party of the left.

     This is an inadequate configuration for the militant kinetics of people's politics needed to advance a pro-people agenda with the teeth to confront big business. For that we need something new, building from the existing struggles in the streets, and reaching towards a broad powerful people's coalition with labour at the core, with an electoral "reflection."

     From Nova Scotia to British Columbia, that process will be a complex fight, building unity through struggle. This is already true of the young worker's demands for a higher minimum wage, or the student's struggle for accessible education.

     In Nova Scotia (with the highest tuition in Canada) only the Conservatives have so far released a specific election platform on student issues. They dangerously call for tax credits to support students.

     In BC, the Canadian Federation of Students has condemned the Liberals. Since taking office in 2001, tuition fees have skyrocketed from $2,500 to over $5,000. BC ranks dead last in the provision of non-repayable student financial aid. Per-student funding in BC is now 14% below 2001 levels.

     In this context, the BC CFS sensibly stated that the NDP's tuition freeze proposal "does not go nearly far enough." Just look to Manitoba. Students are mobilizing en masse to block significant tuition hikes; even when an NDP government campaigns on a tuition freeze, it does not necessarily deliver.

     The many honest NDPers and sympathizers in the youth movement, aspiring to a socialist vision, will have to decide: continue playing by the rules their party sets with its claim of a monopoly of the left, or unite with other progressive forces, including labour, the women's movement, Aboriginal peoples, Communists, and progressive Greens, including in the electoral arena.

     As a Young Communist League member, I speak as an unabashed red and a supporter of the Communist Party. But whatever your affiliation, we as youth and students can never surrender our independent banners and "contract-out" all our political work to one political party.

     However we read the political topography after these elections, that's our challenge.

     (Boyden is the General Secretary of the Young Communist League of Canada.)