Quiz time

The YCL and Rebel Youth have developed a new quiz as part of our ongoing series to honour the history of our movement. All communists are from the 1920s to 1940s.  Check it out below! or click on the link here.

Newspaper stories telling the history of the YCL during the cold war, 1951-1954

During the cold war the Young Communist League was known as the National Federation of Labour Youth.

One of its main campaign issues was against a nuclear holocaust and third world war, working with organizations such as the World Peace Council and the World Federation of Democratic Youth of which the NFLY was a founding member.

One of its major efforts was petition for the Stockholm Appeal.

On March 15, 1950, the World Peace Council approved the Stockholm Appeal, calling for an absolute ban on nuclear weapons. The appeal was initiated by the physicist Frédéric Joliot-Curie, a nuclear scientist and Nobel Prize winner. The text of the Appeal read:

We demand the outlawing of atomic weapons as instruments of intimidation and mass murder of peoples. We demand strict international control to enforce this measure. We believe that any government which first uses atomic weapons against any other country whatsoever will be committing a crime against humanity and should be dealt with as a war criminal. We call on all men and women of good will throughout the world to sign this appeal.

Here are some newspaper stories from the Pacific Tribune, the west coast edition of the Canadian Tribune; Both newspapers were published by the Labour Progressive Party, as the Communist Party of Canada was then know.

Jules Paivio, last Mac Pap Veteran, dies

Jules Paivio

We reprint this story from the Ottawa Citizen because the celebration of the Mac Paps is part of the 90 year history of the Young Communist League of Canada, being celebrated this year.

Jules Paivio, cartographer, architect, teacher, and Canada’s last veteran of the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), died last week at 97. No bands played. Unconscionable, but there you go. The official silence over the passing of this, the last member of the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion, was in keeping with the public shunning endured for 75 years.

Raised by Finnish parents in Sudbury to believe in justice, liberty and fair play for all, Jules sneaked out of Canada at 19 to join the Canadian Mac-Pap Battalion in Spain. Objective? Stop fascism in its tracks.

One has only to think of the great names of the 1930s — Hemingway, Bethune, Malraux — to understand that the Spanish Civil War turned the world on its end. In total, 1,700 Canadians joined 36,000 other foreign nationals to oppose Hitler’s and Mussolini’s efforts to prop up Generalissimo Franco, the new fascist dictator on the block.

Student organizing in the 1930s and the YCL

The On To Ottawa Trek

In the 1920s, 30s and 40s the Communist movement was under intense surveillance by the political police or Royal Canadian Mounted Police -- we know this because they have made their official secret documents public for this time period. The surveys continued, of course, after the 1940s and actually intensified but the reports from the years before show that the RCMP was already paying very close attention.

Below we present an RCMP report from November 1936, which includes a report about the work of the Young Communist League on campuses and a student conference organized by the YCL at McGill University. No doubt, not everything in this report is true. The informants used by the RCMP often exaggerated the statements of the Communists (saying, for example, that the Communists called for violent and bloody revolution in a public speech) to simply justify their existence as informers and spies. This organizational culture was supported at all levels of the RCMP who always monitored the CPC more closely than the ultra-right groups -- even when Canada was at war with fascist Germany and about to enter into an alliance with the USSR. As historian Chris Frazer writes in the latest issue of The Spark journal:

As chief of the RCMP's intelligence section, Rivett-Carnac argued in early 1939 that fascism was a lesser threat than communism since fascism was a "modified form of capitalism." Rivett-Carnac's opinion corresponded with the anti-communist and anti-labour views of RCMP Commissioner S.T. Wood, who argued later in 1941 that, "it is not the Nazi nor the Fascist but the radical who constitutes our most troublesome problem."[19] Although the charges were never substantiated, as early as October 1939 the RCMP Security Bulletin claimed that "there is more reason to fear ... acts of espionage and sabotage on the part of the Communist Party than from Nazi or Fascist organizations." Source.

The November 1936 report is from a series of security reports that the RCMP issued on a monthly basis. Much of what the YCL is interested in doing, as presented by this report, is anti-fascist work -- or campaigning for peace. At points the language of the document reads as if the informer simply copied the original text in shortened form. The sentence structure and wording is dated and has a kind of 1930s feel, but the thinking of young people at that time shines through.

The report states that student participants came from Queens (Kingston, Ontario) Dalhousie (Halifax, Nova Scotia), McGill (Montreal, Quebec) and Varisty -- which perhaps refers to the University of Toronto, whose student newspaper and sports teams are called that and where the YCL had an established public club at that time (although the word varsity simply means a university sports team or a university).  Two delegations also came from high schools in Montreal.

The conference called on YCLers to continue political and ideological work against "Capitalist ideology and propoganda in schools" but to combine this with immediate struggles and political work like peace, unemployment, youth rights, and united front work with other youth organizations. A strong parallel can be drawn with the work of the League today.

The report calls for "proper combination of broad campaigns on specific issues [...] with careful fostering of permanent student organizations." This approach may have some thing to teach youth and student activists today, with the spirit of Occupy, the "Casserole" solidarity protests, and other spontaneous actions on our campuses and communities. More often than not, these movements unfortunately fail to develop into real organizations and the youth movement swings along, after a few weeks or months, to the next popular issue.

Particular attention was given to the Canadian Youth Congress (CYC). The CYC included progressive religious youth through the Student Christian Movement which was the main social-justice organization on campuses at that time, but also farm youth, the Canadian Cooperative Federation Youth or CCF (forerunner of the NDP), as well as social and sports groups like the YMCA and YWCA (Young Men's and Young Women's Christian Associations). The CYC advocated for a Charter of Rights of the Youth or "Youth Act". It had just held, the year before, a series of protest actions against government policy during the depression -- like peoples courts against Prime Minister R.B. Bennett.

Despite that fact that most university students were not from the working class, interestingly the YCL report does not dismiss political action on campuses. Instead the League states that students are a diverse social group, generally inexperienced, and that schools varied considerably -- depending even on the personality of the school principle (or university President). As a result "no stereotyped formula can be given" but there was a sharp problem of leadership because of inexperience on campuses.

Further discussion

A lot of material is presented here which could be fruitful for further discussion about strategy and tactics.  At this time the YCL itself had only just fought and defeated, with the Communist Party of Canada, an effective ban on the organization. It was still on a precarious edge of legality.  Why would the YCL not want the Student Peace Movement to be an underground organization and forbid that direction?

Why would the YCL want official support of efforts like the CYC and peace clubs but not progressive clubs which are to remain independent?

What do you think about the experience and tactics of the YCL on high school campuses at Baron Byng and Strathcona?

Why do you think they thought it was necessary to write that"the club must neither be a collection of intellectual giants nor ostensibly be interested in nothing but ping pong while in reality acting as a snare for unsuspecting innocents"? What does this mean?

How are "linkages with the labour movement" maintained with YCL clubs in a way that is not "mechanistic"? What do you think about the example at McGill?

What do you think about the proposal for a YCL club meeting agenda on campuses and the idea of "all-talk-no-action"?

Although the story-teller is a police agent, the actual minutes from this meeting no doubt have been long lost. It is, therefore, an invaluable source of information. What we get is not the conference discussion in full, or even the complete final resolution. It is sifted by a police filter from the informant to the official report given here. The reader simply has to trust that most of the document is, more or less, accurate.

At the same time the report tells an important tale not just about the YCL but also the youth movement of the time. The final resolutions of the conference, for better or worse, show the thought-out contribution of the YCL to the students struggle: it identifies key priorities like peace and youth rights; it strives to find the maximum level of unity and militancy in the context; it navigates difficult questions like legality, illegality, and the public presence of the YCL; and it interconnects the youth struggle with other struggles.

The report especially tells its members to strive to work in a way that is not mechanistic or formulaic, to listen to its high school members, and to work in a collective fashion with initiative. Clearly, the League does not dismiss the campuses or reject participation in the political life of students -- even though access to education was much more difficult in 1936 than today for working class youth. And to be sure, campus activities were a relatively lower priority of the League which focused more on young workers. But in tacking the problems of the student movement of the day, the YCL shows its broad sweep of understanding struggle -- a revolutionary perspective of mobilizing the all the oppressed masses of youth in unity with the working class. Clearly the police though this vanguard approach towards the youth struggle in Canada was a real danger.



YCL at McGill

The youth struggle today: reform and revolution, local and general

Based on a greetings given by Drew Garvie on behalf of the Central Executive Committee to a meeting of YCLers in Vancouver, July 2012

Thank you to the Young Communist League British Columbia for having me here today, on behalf of the Central Executive Committee, for your provincial convention which also takes place on the same weekend as Moncada Day.

This is entirely appropriate. Moncada Day celebrates the movement that grew into the triumphant Cuban revolution, which was born on the 26th of July 1953 when Fidel and Raul Castro and around 160 other brave revolutionaries attacked the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba.

This meeting of the Young Communist League comes at a juncture in the youth and student movement when the forces of monopoly capitalism are instituting a strong offensive against the people and the environment through their reactionary, pro-war governments: the Harper Conservatives in Ottawa and their allies, the Clark Liberals in Victoria.

At the same time, the fight back is developing at an accelerating rate.

Signs of this can be seen especially in the youth and student movement. The development of Occupy successfully popularized the struggle of the “99%” against the 1%. There is some increased militancy from the student movement across English-speaking Canada, drawing inspiration from the ongoing historic and massive Québec student strike. The Charter of Youth Rights campaign is emerging.

Quebec, although on the other side of the country, is especially important. The bold unity and sheer numbers of the mobilization has scared the ruling class and sent a call-out for youth to rise-up.


Millions of people are also participating in general strikes and demonstrations in countries like Greece, Portugal, Britain and India.  Much of Latin America continues to advance as an anti-imperialist front.

The revolutionary uprisings across North Africa and the Middle East which started around 18 months ago have not faded away. In Egypt there are continued strikes by factory workers, and street demonstrations by students.


Comrades,

The growing youth resistance has borne-out what the YCL said almost two years ago at our Central Convention, that the youth should take courage at the weakness of capitalism and build the fight back.  We are in dynamic times, with many dangers and challenges but also the potential for a better future for British Colombia and Canada – and resurgent socialism.

We are being told by the corporate media that the economic crisis is to blame for aggressive budget cutbacks.  For example, the recent Harper Budget, the Omnibus Bill C-38.  We are again told that we can no longer afford the social programs that working people have won after generations of struggle.

Governments are broke and there’s nothing they can do about it, except make the working class pay the bill.

This is what people are hearing in British Colombia, in Ontario, in Quebec, but also internationally in Greece, in Spain, in Britain, in Chile, in India, and elsewhere.  It’s a refrain that the pro-capitalist governments, whether they are right-wing or social democratic, basically have in common around the world.

Is it true?

Young workers and student activists can clearly see the dangerous lie to the claims behind 'austerity' when we have a global perspective. Even in a provincial meeting like yours today, it is important that the international and the local are always dialectically connected.

Consider the global economic crisis; the question of war and peace; and environmental struggles. Or the campus struggles today, with the student uprising in Quebec and the challenges for the student movement here in BC.  How is the general connected with the specific?

First, the 'financial crash' or 'long rescission'  or 'slow recovery' or as we have been accurately calling it from the beginning  the capitalist economic crisis.

This crisis was not created by social programs, or by the people.  It was created by capitalism itself. In fact, because of the internal contradictions of the capitalist economy, it operates in cycles of boom, crisis, depression and recovery which is politely re-labeled by economists 'the business cycle'.

And whether in the form of the velvet glove of “welfare state” reformism or the iron fist of neoliberal reaction, the policies of finance capital and its state have merely created new contradictions.

Over the last 40 years, corporate profits have skyrocketed, and big business has paid less and less taxes to the State. By eroding the tax system, keeping wages down, speeding up the working day, busting unions, privatizing profitable parts of the public sector, and breaking into new markets through trade agreements and even war, the capitalists hoped to survive systemic contradictions -- especially falling rates of profit. Because while Capital has made larger and large profits, the rate of accumulation was not rising (as new technologies were introduced).

Capital put the bill in the hands of government and the people, forcing them to borrow from the capitalists. This debt itself became a commodity.  When the economic crisis hit, it was public money that went to try and resuscitate Capital through bailouts -- causing more debt. Who holds this debt? Well the capitalists, of course!

Now we are told it is our duty to feed the machine more.

As the crisis broke in 2007, debt spiked further.  Now, in Europe, they’re back to demand repayment on their loans, that were given to themselves.  This is called 'the Eurozone crisis' but it is really just another example of the global economic crisis of capitalism. Even Prime Minister Stephen Harper quietly said the last Greek election could effect the world -- including Canada.

The Harper Conservatives would like us to believe the economic crisis has really not effected Canada, but you here in BC know otherwise.

The youth movement understands its local struggles clearer and better when it has a 'big-picture' focus.

Capitalism is a system without democratic social planning, which as Engels said produces an “anarchy of capital” which is the cause of the crisis – of misery, exploitation, unemployment, poverty wages, and environmental devastation around the world. It is what the People are up against, but there are alternatives.

Communism and socialism are not words to be embarrassed of.

Capitalism is the real failed system.

And we putting socialism back onto the negotiation table!

Comrades,

At our most recent meeting of the YCL Central Committee we drew the connection between economic crisis and war.

The World Federation of Democratic Youth, the World Peace Council and the Canadian Peace Congress, and the international meeting of Communist and Worker’s Parties have all warned of the increased aggressiveness by imperialism.

As we report in the latest Rebel Youth magazine, a military intervention in Syria is being planned right now by imperialist alliances like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization or NATO.


As we have seen in Libya, Palestine, Afghanistan, Haiti, Colombia, Paraguay, and many other places: the people are not done any favors by imperialist intervention. ‘Regime change’ in Syria would led to a terrible blood-bath and provide a road for imperialism to hit at Iran.

On the way to BC, I saw the Economist magazine in the airport with an article entitled “Syria: the end game”.
How many millions of dollars will be spent on another war? Money that, as your meeting documents say, should go towards BC’s crisis of child poverty – and job creation with good union jobs.

We have called for all peace-loving youth in Canada to support a peaceful and political solution by the Syrian people themselves.

The question of peace is also a challenge for BC young workers and students to address as a movement, and find ways to mobilize opposition in the streets.

Even when these issues seem forgotten, the YCL has a duty to remember the importance of the struggle for peace. The YCL must never abandon the principle of working-class internationalism, the principle that working people of the world must stand united against capitalist wars and for the class struggle.

And so with the question of internationalism we return to the relationship between the specific and the general.

On the other side of the Pacific, there have been tremendous anti-nuclear protests in Japan. The March 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster has lead to the evacuation of close to 2,000 people and over 500 disaster-related deaths, as well as the release of radioactive material into the Pacific. We would like to take the occasion of this meeting to express our solidarity as the YCL with the environmental movement in Japan.

Turning our eyes to home, we also call for the evacuation of all US troops and the closure of the Nanose Military Base which is a weapons testing area for US nuclear submarines.

The environment is understandably of vital important to the youth, because it is a struggle for the future. Climate change, for example, shows clearly the link between the global and the local.

Just a few days ago, scientists announced a rapid and massive thaw of Greenland’s glaciers. After just a small rise in oceanic water temperatures, and this office could be threatened by tidal storm waters!

In this context, we also join with the people’s movements and shout out that militant solidarity can block the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline!

The YCL has a long and proud history of opposing project like this, exporting unprocessed raw materials, which strengthens U.S. imperialism and its Canadian cronies, but fails to create jobs.

It is great to see the youth and student resistance to the pipeline, here in BC!

The cynics and the disheartened progressives who thought that the working class and youth of North America were “hopeless” now have examples in Wisconsin, across the continent in the form of the Occupy movement, and the Quebec student uprising.

The Quebec student struggle is another case where a local struggle is framed in an international context of struggle for accessible education, and then becomes part of that international resistance.

Globally, accessible education is under dangerous attack with the Austerity agenda. Students in Britain and Spain been a part of that renewed militant fight back.

In Chile, students joined a general strike of the miners in the summer, and a political strike was launched to replace the Pinochet-era constitution with a new constitution that would enshrine guaranteed free and accessible education.  600 000 marchers hit the streets in a country of 15 million.  The Young Communists of Chile have been at the forefront of this struggle.

I would like to touch on the Quebec student uprising which is perhaps foremost in our minds in the discussion people`s resistance today.

It is also a topic where the CEC has devoted much attention to, in consultation with the YCL`s all-Canada student working group telephone meeting, which is growing and meets a couple times a month.

We would really like to see the call grow and develop, to include more participating from BC.

One way to get a good handle on how strong a movement is, is to see what the thinkers of the capitalist class are saying about it.  Former advisor to the US state Department on the Quebec student struggle, David Jones has spoken about the Quebec spring. This is not a man who is on our side of the class struggle.

What was David Jones greatest worry?

That "students elsewhere (may) determine Quebec has provided a ‘learning experience.’”

As the YCL, that is exactly what we want: for lessons of Quebec to be shared with other students – and young workers!

We can not simply say – oh, that’s those French speakers. They have a different, culture, history, language, territory and economy, etc.

That is what the corporate media is saying. Quebec is ‘special’ – so the student uprising can not come to BC.

It is striking that when Quebec demands its sovereignty -- which we broadly support, proposing a new constitution on an equal basis with English-speaking Canada, up to and including the right of separation – but when Quebec`s self-determination and the national question comes into question, these factors that make Quebec a nation are suddenly forgotten by the corporate media and Quebec is no longer ‘special.’

However, a communists we know that there is a common class struggle which unites the different nations in Canada.

The fight for accessible education is a class and democratic struggle.

I was in Montreal last May as part of a delegation of student journalists from Guelph, Ontario and we interviewed student leader Gabriel Nadeau Duboise of the CLASSE union. He told me about the repression they have been facing by the police and with Bill 78, but also the slogan – “Student Strike, People’s Struggle.”

The students in Quebec, through struggling for a freeze in tuition fees, have learned a great deal through their battles and are now advancing other people’s movement demands, as their new “Share Our Future” manifesto says. You can read it on our RY blog or in the latest People’s Voice. I would like to quote:

“This is the meaning of our vision, and the essence of our strike: it is a shared, collective action whose scope lies well beyond student interests. We are daring to call for a different world, one far removed from the blind submission our present commodity-based system requires”

This is an important political view for the YCL and also shows the strength of our analysis: that the quantitative struggle for reforms, like accessible education, are necessary because they help build towards a qualitative change in the people’s class consciousness, organization and unity; ultimately it is towards the realizing the necessity of fundamental social transformation and revolutionary change – socialist consciousness.

The struggle for immediate social progress, within the framework of capitalism, and the struggle for making a rupture, a sharp break overthrowing of the system, are objectively linked as a process.
This can be difficult to grasp in the youth and student movement not just because youth (as much as we hate to admit it!) can lack experience with struggle.

That’s true, but it is difficult because it gets at the question of how we understand, as revolutionaries, our basic reality. If reform and revolution are opposite tendencies – ideologically, politically and economically – how can they be a united process?

Reforms are won through the power of the movement. Any fundamental change depends on the mobilisation of the masses of people. Nevertheless, under capitalism reform gains will be temporary and precarious.

Let’s keep in mind Quebec here, which has the lowest tuition fees in the country – this is not the first student strike in Quebec, it is the eight strike. And still the capitalists keep trying to push up fees! While we haven’t seen a significant gain come out of the battle – yet! – the struggle has become a mass and social mobilization far beyond the campuses which maintains, albeit unclearly, a perspective of challenging corporate power.

If the movement, while thick in the action for immediate reform battles, can maintain a revolutionary qperspective of class struggle and overcoming capitalism it will intensify the militancy of the working class.

And that is the kind of position the youth and student movement needs to be in – militant and united.

Conditions are always changing. The earth spins around on its axis, marking each day. It may seem that day after day, or year after year, life is the same. But life proves Marxism`s claim that the capitalist system is unsustainable and crisis-ridden. The moment we are living in is making history. Political ‘ruptures’ have been breaking out around the world – take the Arab spring – and the strength of the movement and its leadership is often decisive.

Perhaps it is too early to judge the results of the Arab spring in Egypt and Tunisia, but we can see how true this strategic perspective is, by remembering the first successful socialist revolution in North America – in Cuba.

The Moncada day we are celebrating this weekend set the revolutionary process into action in Cuba.  But the main demands of the youth who stormed the barracks were free and fair elections. Just a year before, in 1952, US-supported dictator Fulgencio Batista had organized a coup and rigged the elections. And so, disguised as businessmen interested in Clay Pigeon shooting, a group of young radicals came together under the leadership of Fidel, Raul and others, training at the University of Havana.

In the short term, their raid was tremendously unsuccessful. It did not start an uprising. Instead, many of the youth and students died. Fidel, Raul and the rest of the rebels went to prison. But we know the rest of the story. A mass movement of the Cuban people against Batista developed with force, conditions changed and a crisis developed.

Facing armed insurrection that had liberated most of the island, as well as a mass uprising and a general strike, in January 1959 on New Years day Batista fled into exile (to eventually settle in fascist Portugal). And the revolutionaries lead by Fidel and Che marched into a celebratory Havana!

After the overthrow of Batista, the Cuban revolution kept advancing. It developed into a socialist revolution and the Cuban people built the first free territory in the Americas.

By celebrating Moncada, we remember that the Cuban revolution was made possible by the people’s struggles that came before, and took many hard years of organization and work. The small immediate battles and the big sweeping changes were not separate, but in a contradictory relationship together.

The YCL is a unique group in the youth and student movement because it ‘gets’ this unity of reform and revolution.

While we don’t try to impatiently impose our demands on the youth movement, we don’t sit on the sidelines or simply ‘go with the flow.’  We are not compliant or complacent with the situation today where many movements have adopted tepid demands without a common strategy (other than voting NDP).

The vanguard role of the YCL arises in action, working in the political direction of the Communist Party of Canada, and applying that strategic direction within the youth and student movement of unity and militancy.
What can be learned from the Quebec student movement by student activists in English speaking Canada and BC?

This is an important question for your meeting to discuss.

In our statement for the Feburary 1st “Education is a Right” cross-Canada day of action, the YCL made a criticism of the current tactics of the Canadian Federaton of Students or CFS, in a constructive and respectful way.  We called these protests an excellent step in the direction of developing into a truly broad and united fightback.

In other words, February 1st fell far short of being what was necessary but could have been a good start.

Afterwards, in People`s Voice, we said the poor turn-out was a ‘wake-up call’ exposing the ‘lack of an action plan’

We called for ramping‑up actions on campus. Sit ins. Occupations. More rallies. [and] bringing the struggle into the community and winning the moral support of the public which, at least in sentiment, is probably already there - but not yet in a visible way that cannot be ignored.

Our policy is for a united and militant student movement that moves the campuses into action and reaches out beyond, to stand with the struggles of labour and other people`s struggles.

Our current policy in the student movement is that:

1. The student movement and the CFS needs an escalating plan of action for a broad and united fight back;
2.  This struggle should open a broad democratic debate about free, accessible, quality, public, not-for-profit education;
3. That the political reason for the student movement’s struggle must be brought into the hands of the members themselves through democratic empowerment;
4. The student movement must urgently find unity with Quebec and Aboriginal students, and it must be on the basis of their rights to sovereignty and self-determination as nations;

Since the CFS Day of Action, Quebec has exploded. We must say that the solidarity movement in Canada has really been outstanding – but not with any help from Mulclair`s NDP! – but now each point on this list, which may have seemed abstract in January, is very concretely on the table.

The Charter of Youth Rights campaign compliments this perspective on unity.

In addition to free education from cradle to grave (including childcare) the YCL also demands abolishing student debt, grants not loans, kicking military recruitment and research of our campuses, restoring and expanding funding to education including Aboriginal education, and a living stipend for students.

Winning these demands is not a question of magic structures or magic leaders but finding the way to organize for a major battle, drawing hundreds of thousands if not millions of students into struggle.

In such a battle a student strike would be, as we said in January, the most effective way to put moral pressure on the government. It should therefore be part of the student`s arsenal.

But here is an important point.

Beyond the debate about tactics we think there is an ideological battle here, which is also observable in the Labour movement.

On the one side are the strategies of ‘lobby or wait until the Election and vote NDP’ and right-wing social democracy.

On the other side are the left and progressive forces that are calling out for action.

We are not in the arm chair on these questions, we are in action.

The CEC and the YCL student conference call helped support and organize the recent “Student Solidarity Tour”, bringing Quebec activists to 9 cities in Ontario, largely organized by our comrades on the ground and comrade Ryan from YCL Hamilton who is also a member of the Central Committee.

This was a very positive step forward for the League in Ontario as well as Centrally and had a significant impact on the situation in Ontario.  It was the first time that CLASSE leaders and the Canadian Federation of Students were connected on a project as large as this, from Ottawa to Windsor.

Turnout to the events were very good and CEC member and leader of the LJC-Q, comrade Marianne Breton Fontaine had a chance to address about a thousand Ontario student activists with our call for unity and militancy as the way forward.

This was built from other work including the “student activist conference” the YCL CEC and the LJC-Q convened in Montreal in January. Could we do the same thing with a YCL young workers conference?

This weekend, many of our activists are in Toronto at “student strike training workshops” which Marianne will be presenting at. Over lunch, the YCL is holding a special fraction meeting of all our members attending the conference , to coordinate our contribution.

To update you on other activities across the country, the YCL-Ontario just finished their convention a month ago.  14 delegates from 4 clubs were in attendance and dealt with over 60 amendments through thorough debate and we elected a renewed leadership with a PC of ten comrades, including young workers and student activists from our new clubs in Ottawa and Windsor. I was re-elected as the Ontario YCL organizer.

The YCL also had a visible presence through participation in the Toronto Pride parade which concluded the convention weekend.

Rebel Youth, after a delay in printing which some of you in this room will know about directly, has come out with a double issue, which features the Quebec student strike and is in colour.  It is being well received as the youth movement is eager to learn about what is really going on in the streets of Montreal and Quebec city.

I am happy to see that your meeting will be discussing contributions from British Colombia to our magazine and we do need help making sure that issues are produced more frequently.  Above all, we need participation and involvement in the commission, and building the magazine among young workers with new subscriptions.  Our magazine should be at the centre of our agitation, organizational and educational work of the League across Canada.

In Cuba solidarity – which we should draw extra attention to this weekend as it is the anniversary of the July 26th movement and the storming of the Moncada Barracks which marked the beginning of the Cuban revolution – we have sent two members of the YCL on this year’s Che Brigade, including Central Committe member Dan Mozarowski, and will be using this participation to strengthen our solidarity work.

We will be visiting Nova Scotia this Fall for a school, and have started organizing efforts to grow the League on the East Coast.

We need to prioritize more the work of young workers who are being hit hard by the economic crisis.
Where we are visible, active and working collectively as the YCL we are growing, sometimes significantly.

The current economic and political conditions have caused more and more young workers and students to look for alternatives to cut-backs, privatization and austerity.  We have answers to the questions that are now being raised.  The case against war, poverty, misery, environmental devastation, unemployment, exploitation and oppression is really the case for socialism.

With these thoughts, comrades, I think I will conclude.

I also should mention that next year will be a special occasion for the YCL, the 90th anniversary of the League and our founding in 1923.

Our 90th anniversary will be a special occasion that we will have to celebrate in some way as we mark 90 years of fighting history for young workers.

Again, good luck with your work today and we hope your debates are fruitful. As our slogan says:
The Youth are the Future, The Future is Socialism!