Protest Jason Kenney's decision to bar George Galloway from Canada

George Galloway at University of Toronto Convocation Hall Friday September 16 2005 - 031, originally uploaded by photopia / HiMY SYeD.

Stop Jason Kenney¹s attack on civil liberties.

Dear friends:

By now you will have heard that Jason Kenney, Canada's Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, has banned British MP George Galloway from entering Canada. Galloway is scheduled to speak in four cities during a pan-Canadian speaking tour from March 30 to April 2.

Kenney's decision to ban Galloway is an unprecedented attack on free speech and on the right to criticize our own government's foreign policy. Kenney's office has publicly stated that Galloway will be banned because of his views on the war in Afghanistan and because he represents a "threat to national security".

The ban follows Kenney's recent attacks on Canadian Arab and Muslim organizations and on Palestine solidarity campaigners for their criticism of Israel's war on Gaza and its treatment of Palestinians. In the last few days, Kenney unilaterally cut funding to the Canadian Arab Federation for its immigrant settlement program. Kenney also recently
attacked students organizing Israeli Apartheid Week on campuses across Canada.

Kenney has attempted to silence their voices by accusing them of anti-Semitism, despite the wide range of support and participation of Jewish organizations and individuals in these Palestine solidarity events.

The organizers of Galloway's speaking tour the Toronto Coalition to Stop the War, the Ottawa Peace Assembly, and Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights condemn in the strongest terms Kenney's attack on free speech and our right to criticize our government's foreign policy. We call on all supporters of civil liberties to join us in challenging
these attacks and in reversing Kenney's ban.

In the next few days, we will launch a pan-Canadian campaign to defend free speech in Canada and to reverse Kenney's ban. We call on you to join in this campaign to ensure Galloway's entry into Canada. We must
organize now to ensure that all events where Galloway is scheduled to speak will proceed as planned.

Supporters should continue to buy tickets for these events and to promote them widely.

To that end, we urge you to take the following steps:

Contact Jason Kenney's office to condemn the ban and to demand its immediate reversal:

E-mail: minister@cic.gc.ca ; kennej@parl.gc.ca
Phone: 613-992-2235 (Ottawa office); 403-225-3480 (Calgary office)
Fax: 613-992-1920 (Ottawa office); 403-225-3504 (Calgary office)

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Record numbers in French general strike

Morningstar Online

FRENCH unions kicked off a national strike on Thursday to press the government to boost the minimum wage, increase taxes on the rich and scrap plans to cut public-sector jobs.

At least one million people flooded the streets of central Paris and hundreds of thousands took part in some 200 demonstrations in other towns and cities across the country.

[Unions estimated that more than three million people took part in demonstrations - Guardian.co.uk]

Paris police laid out two routes through the capital for the huge crowds of oil, car, banking, pharmaceutical and retail workers who marched shoulder to shoulder with public-sector employees.

Rail traffic was disrupted and schools, hospitals, the postal service and public transport were also affected, but a law pushed through by French President Nicolas Sarkozy in August 2007 that requires "minimum service" to be guaranteed has limited the impact of the industrial action.

Adding to the social tension, many French universities have been paralysed for weeks due to a strike by lecturers, professors and students against a government assault on the higher education budget.

French unemployment has recently surged past 8 per cent, with more than two million people out of work and another 350,000 set to lose their jobs this year as the market meltdown destroys thousands of jobs in heavy industry and the car sector.

Car industry supplier Rencast, an aluminium founder that employs 850 people in south-eastern France, was officially declared bankrupt on Wednesday, while the tyre manufacturer Goodyear announced plans to slash up to 1,000 jobs.

Unions are calling for an immediate halt to the mass job cuts.

And they are demanding that Mr Sarkozy's right-wing government scrap a 50 per cent cap on income tax.

At least 78 per cent of the population supports the unions' demands, according to a French poll published in the French financial daily Les Echos on Tuesday.

Mr Sarkozy told ministers at a cabinet meeting on Wednesday that he "understood the worries of the French." But in the same breath he claimed that increasing taxes on the rich would only drive them abroad.

Weeks after a strike in late-January saw around 2.5 million people take to the streets, Mr Sarkozy announced measures to help people affected by the financial crisis, including special bonuses for the needy.

But union leaders point out that state support for working people has been dwarfed by the hundreds of billions of euros that Paris has doled out to banking bosses.

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WORLD NEWS

Canada On February 20, 2009, the University of Ottawa banned the posters of Israeli Apartheid Week 2009, following the lead of Carleton University & in blatant violation of free speech. The poster by noted cartoonist Carlos Latuff, depicts an Israeli attack helicopter (labeled “Israel”) firing a missile at a Palestinian child (labeled “Gaza”). Direct toll of the latest war includes: 1373 Gazans, including 417 children, 108 women & 120 elderly, almost 7000 wounded, many maimed for life; massive or substantial damage of 50,000 homes; destruction of hospitals, schools, & almost 100 places of worship. That was only the direct toll of the last aggression against a defenceless population of 1.5 million on a strip of land with an area of 342 square kilometers, or one eighth the area of the City of Ottawa (2,760 sq. km.)


India Communist and regional parties have announced an alliance known as the “third front,” aimed at winning April 2009’s national elections. They are positioning themselfs as an alternative to the ruling Congress Party and its main opposition, the right-wing Hindu chauvinist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).


Venezeula Legislators voted on Thursday to bring all airports, roads and seaports under federal control. Under the new law, states and municipalities can no longer collect tariffs at transport hubs or establish tolls along highways, meaning that governors and mayors will have less money for local public projects. Mr Chavez’s allies won 17 of 22 gubernatorial elections in November. But opposition leaders also gained ground, winning five gubernatorial posts and the Caracas mayor’s office.


UN Gen. Assembly President Miguel D’ Escoto has asked Washington to grant visas to relatives of five Cuban anti-terrorist fighters unjustly imprisoned in the United States since 1998. The document was also signed, among others, by Nobel Peace Prize laureates Rigoberta Menchu and Adolfo Perez Esquivel; American writers Noam Chomsky and by the Mothers and Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina. Gerardo, Rene, Antonio Guerrero, Fernando Gonzalez and Ramon Labañino, internationally known as the Cuba Five, were arrested in Florida in 1998 for infiltrating anti-Cuba right-wing groups that were planning and carrying out terrorist actions against the Caribbean archipelago. The wives have been denied visas to visit their husbands in prison on nine occasions.

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Peoples stimulus package

J. Boyden

(An earlier version appeared in a Feb. issue of Peoples Voice)

Picture this. It is the first day of school for the new semester. As usual, the teacher has written on the board. The headlines are from newspaper: December unemployment highest in 16 years. European Union says deep recession, surging unemployment coming. Recession even hits sports. Economic Crisis Fuels Family Violence.

The teacher turns to the class. What can we do to change this? she asks.

Last November, the YCL was warning about the need to advance a bold "people's alternative agenda," trying to block as much as possible a renewed attack by the Harper Conservatives, which would likely use the economic crisis as a pretext. At the time, I wrote an article in Peoples Voice partly about the positive potential of coalitions -- although I never thought it would happen! -- and promised to present more analysis about the implications of economic crisis for youth and students.

Since then, as we know, September's market meltdown translated into a political crisis. We saw remarkable openings and volatility in Parliament with the temporary eclipse of emperor Harper through a coalition, all prompted by the Tory's arrogant first attempt at a budget. But now, at the time of press deadline (and after an intense full court press by the Conservatives on the Liberals) Canadians are entering into budget-process round two with Harper looking likely to win.

A few weeks ago I received an email from the finance minister asking me for consultation on the 2009 budget. Intrigued, not least about how some Jim Flaherty email-bot got my address, I followed the link. I was given grading options on six vague items and 250 characters – yes, not words but characters, just like text-messages – to add my humble opinion.

Jim Flaherty probably wrote more in his Christmas-present thank you notes with his gilded pen: "Dear Mr. David P. O'Brien, chair of the Royal Bank of Canada. Thanks for the socks. Thank you also, David old chap, for the brandy, cigars and instructions -- er, ahem, I mean consultation -- at your great holiday dinner turkey left-over special."

Or would that be caviar left-overs? Because, as Michel Chossudovsky pointed out yesterday, whatever the budget proposes it will be on top of a "75 billion dollar bank bailout program for Canada's chartered banks, announced, virtually unnoticed, four days before the October Federal election..."

Well, we know whose voices and interests are being heard. On the left, we need to meet the challenge of calling, loudly, clearly, and unshakably, for a profoundly different direction based on people's needs not corporate greed.

And yes, we should ask: is capitalism capable of cleaning up this mess? 

The clear answer is no. As many commentators have noted, not least youth and students, the economic crisis has again brought into sharp relief the colossal inability of capitalism to bring social progress, and the need for socialism.

For example, a fellow activist Steve da Silva says in the latest issue of Basics Newsletter: "While Canadians are clearly not ready for this struggle [...] nothing less than a fully socialist alternative can resolve the contradictions of monopoly capitalism that we’re currently experiencing."

To be sure, Basics is already a lefty blog -- but isn't this, and similar comments in other youth and student publications across the country, a good sign? And doesn't recognition of this urgent, possible and necessary transformation make it all the more important to chart a course forwards? Maybe Canadians are more ready for big struggles, if not revolutionary struggles, than the left sometimes thinks? Shouldn't we talk about what we can do now?

And where would that action plan start except from within the real, existing concrete problems we face today?

The capitalist class is certainly fighting for, and wining, immediate goals. Reminding me of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez's comments in his last televised address of 2008, that capitalism is an "immoral art, science, and technology," even Hustler magazine's publisher Larry Flynt headed to the US Congress earlier this January asking for a billion-dollar bail-out for the porn industry.

Or were they asking for a stimulus package?

But seriously, since all the stimulus packages sound like the familiar broken record where the rich guys make the problem and the working folk pay for the clean-up, lets flip that record. Where would an economic recovery for youth and students start?

For the youth movement, in the YCL's view, such an alternative direction might draw from the Youth Charter that the broad and powerful Canadian Youth Congress proposed, following the On To Ottawa Trek of the Great Depression.

This is no dusty idea. American youth and students are currently mobilizing around a "youth agenda" platform, as have youth and students in Europe, and also Africa. In the end, resistance will be shaped by today's conditions and the requirements for social advance for the all exploited people and oppressed nations of Canada.

This is not the same as replacing the Conservatives with the Liberals, in short. It will require dynamic, broad, and visible opposition in the streets in the coming months.

So it comes down to struggle. To rage, rage even in the darkest moment of the night as Dylan Thomas might say.

Where to start? What about the Canadian Federation of Students' four proposals for "a broader economic stimulus package." Those proposals are: an increase to the Canada Social Transfer for post-secondary education; more graduate student funding under the Canada Graduate Scholarships; greater financial support for Aboriginal students; and a boost in student summer jobs funding.

Could a youth coalition be build around these issues, coupled with the agenda for raising minimum wages that many Canadian Labour Congress youth are putting forward? Could we not pay for this by shifting money from war budgets, military recruitment and the dirty war in Afghanistan and back to the people? That could be in the discussion at the upcoming student anti-war conference co-sponsored by the Canadian Peace Alliance in a few months.

The Sierra youth coalition has also made the link between the catastrophic environmental policies of the Harper Tories and the very salient need for a new approach. Renewable energy, they point out, could create thousands of good jobs.

While the New Democratic Party has picked up many of these ideas in their valid criticisms the budget proposals, Jack Layton also told the workers this week that you will need "to take a pay cut so your friends at the plant can keep their job."

Except he wasn't talking to workers -- he was at the Toronto Board of Trade: "Milton Friedman's `no such thing as a free lunch' is something we should keep in mind as we consider the dire economic picture before us" he said.

Clearly the solution must be bigger than the NDP. We are talking about a people's movement and an escalated struggle.

In this context, is the contribution of the left in wandering around among the people proclaiming 'we told you so'? A glance at many honest writers in the left student press would make you think so. Its justified to look for a culprit, but I'd say our task is to get our hands dirty in building people's forces and helping propose a way forward with pro-people policies that are desperately needed.

After all, we should never celebrate people's suffering. Crisis is a feature of capitalism. If there is an accompanied sustained working class offensive against the system, and progressive forces world-wide are able to grasp the moment and force through major change – that would be cause to celebrate.

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