I've been watching Canada for a long time because my father was born there and
we visited his family in Montreal throughout my childhood. It's a gentler, pale
reflection of the US. It very much always identified as part of the British
empire. And like the US, its sick elderly people are segregated in inferior
care facilities, care for by the poorly trained, poorly paid members of the
society.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Roger Loran Bailey
(Redacted sender "rogerbailey81" for DMARC)
Sent: Sunday, May 17, 2020 10:33 AM
To: blind-democracy <blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [blind-democracy] Northern Lights from SA Canada: We Won’t Go Back!
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!
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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
