Northern Lights from SA Canada: We Won’t Go Back!
https://socialistaction.org/2020/05/14/northern-lights-from-sa-canada-we-wont-go-back/
by BARRY WEISLEDER
World War I spawned the Russian Revolution, the Winnipeg General Strike,
and spurred union recognition. Following World War II, out of the debris
of fascism and holocaust, the welfare state emerged. What will be the
legacy of the COVID-19 pandemic? Qualitatively enhanced social
responsibility, or regression to capitalist austerity?
Sombre facts define the dawn of a new era. The current plague, the
fourth in two decades, won’t be the last. It plunged the world into a
Great Depression. Stock markets tanked. Unemployment skyrocketed. As of
April 18, six million Canadians have applied for emergency federal aid.
It’s unprecedented.
The reflex of the vast majority of people is to seek remedial action
from….who? Giant corporations? Big banks? The Business Council of
Canada? No. They expect the government to act, to cushion the blow, to
spend massively so that lives may be saved.
Reform-minded journalists, like Erica Ifill and Les Whittington, writing
in The Hill Times, separately intoned: “Market fundamentalism is dead.
We are all socialists now.” It is a gross exaggeration, to be sure. So
then, why does it resonate with millions?
Because capitalism is revealed as a feckless and fraught system that, if
it continues, dooms humanity. The private profit world order has
shrivelled biodiversity, pauperized billions of people and is speeding
the train to climate catastrophe. In response to enormous pressure from
below, bumbling capitalist regimes either improvise massive (but
inadequate) social income programs and slowly move to restore health
care services that should never have been cut, or they just deny
pandemic reality.
A case in point is the scandalous situation in long term care
facilities. Nearly half of Canada’s COVID-19 deaths occurred in nursing
homes, where aged and vulnerable residents live and eat in close
proximity to each other, and where staff have been carriers or become
infected. At one care centre in Dorval, Quebec provincial health
officials forcibly entered to discover many seniors utterly abandoned,
de-hydrated, and laying in a fetid swamp of their urine and feces.
Quebec and Ontario requested the Canadian Armed Forces to send medical
personnel, in an effort to save imperilled folks from a grisly end.
In late April, the Ontario Nurses’ Association won a temporary
injunction at the Ontario Superior Court. It gives nurses the right to
decide which personal protective equipment (PPE) is needed when working
in long-term care homes with COVID-19, and the power to enforce
infection control measures, such as keeping residents with COVID
separate from those not infected, in places like Eatonville Care Centre
in Etobicoke where dozens of seniors have died.
But questions persist. Why is the long-term care sector so unregulated?
Why was inspection of facilities so radically reduced in recent years?
Was the top priority profit maximization? Is that why most personal care
workers are paid low wages, limited to part-time hours, without
benefits, without sufficient protective gear, forcing many to labour in
multiple settings, even at the risk of spreading disease? Could this
infernal arrangement be the result of political lobbying by the major
shareholders of Katasa Groupe Developers, which owns Maison Heron in
Dorval, or Revera Inc., Extendicare, Centric Health Corp., Sienna Senior
Living, and Vigil Health Solutions, just to name a few of the largest
players in the field? Moreover, why the hell is any long-term care
service in the hands of private, for-profit operators? The sick and the
aged no longer produce surplus value. Does that make them expendable?
The demand for nationalization here is obvious. It coincides with the
demand for public ownership of major enterprises, including the
pharmaceutical industry, Big Oil and Gas, giant banks, and the telecoms.
Urgently needed is democratic control of the land development and
construction firms (to enable the creation of social housing on a mass
scale), monopoly retail chains (for re-distribution of their
super-profits), and agri-business (to prioritize healthy food and
ecological farming methods). Sharing the trillions in wealth of the huge
mining and forestry firms, and reducing the military to a domestic
disaster relief and rescue role, will fund free public transit, free
post-secondary education, along with a generous reinvestment in public
health and schools.
On April 8, the Toronto Star, Canada’s largest circulation daily,
editorialized for an “industrial policy”. It pointed out that a
commitment to “free markets and unfettered globalization…left Canada
scrambling for crucial medical equipment, relying on factories halfway
around the world.” The Star rarely misses a chance to wrap its tepid
reform policy in the Canadian flag. Really needed is a democratically
planned economy, with workers’ control extending from Canada, to the USA
and the world. Clearly, the prospect of a global socialist revolution is
not imminent. But the idea of it is glimmering on the horizon, born of
necessity, as the working class grapples with the pandemic, and prepares
for its aftermath.
The present crisis is pregnant with opportunity and danger. Recall that
the Chinese character for ‘crisis’ expresses both meanings. On the one
hand, emergency measures give Capital and the far-right opportunities to
rule by decree, step up racial profiling and confinement, and bolster
fascist mob violence (evident in India and the USA). They may make
border closures permanent, and violate labour agreements, Indigenous
rights and environmental regulations. Depression can be used as a weapon
to curb demands for equality, including between the global North and
South, and to privatize more public services.
At the same time, the survival of capitalism requires collective action
(bailouts, stimulus measures) that business is not normally willing to
concede. This creates an opportunity for workers who understand that
instead of trying to save the capitalist economy, just to have it repeat
the post-2008 scenario, we should fight to transform the economy. We
should strive to confront the health and climate crises with democratic
and socialist policies.
How? Build on the Canada Emergency Relief Benefit. Act on palpably
reduced air pollution by rapidly replacing carbon fuel with green energy
generation. See the industrial re-tooling that now manufactures more
ventilators and PPE as an irreversible step towards planned production
to meet human needs, not private profit. Turn government subsidized
research for a COVID-19 vaccine into a publicly-owned pharmaceutical
industry. Demand permanent Basic Income for all, regardless citizenship
status.
Homeless people are being allocated rooms in empty hotels. Free
childcare is provided to front-line health workers in need. Why just
now? Good quality housing, food, childcare, education and transit – we
now know that these are rights and necessities, not privileges. They
must be enhanced, made permanent. It’s time to organize in work places,
unions, NDP associations, social justice movements and in local
communities to demand rapid progress, to insist on revolutionary change.
The prime directive is simple: We Won’t Go Back!
Related Articles
--
___
Steven Pinker
“It's natural to think that living things must be the handiwork of a designer.
But it was also natural to think that the sun went around the earth. Overcoming
naive impressions to figure out how things really work is one of humanity's
highest callings.
[Can You Believe in God and Evolution? Time Magazine, August 7, 2005]”
― Steven Pinker
