YCL-LJC Message to RebELLES Conference: Unite to defeat Harper, Fight for full equality!

Dear delegates,

Your meeting this weekend – the 2nd Pan-Canadian Young Feminist Gathering, “Notre Révolution Féministe, Our Revolution Is Now,” organized by the RebELLES Movement – is a significant event for young women, and the youth and student movement across the country.

This gathering comes at a crucial time.

On the streets of Latin America, Europe and the Arab world, people are marching in resistance to imperialism – especially young women. The people of Wisconsin, with labour, women and youth at the core, showed North America can fight. The fires of struggle are burning.

RebELLES also takes place during an economic crisis where women are being hit hardest, and just weeks after the catastrophic election of the Harper Conservative majority government. We now face the most pro-war, pro-corporate, homophobic, racist, anti-women, and anti-people government in history.

We are in an emergency situation.

While opposition Bill C-389 (adding gender identity and gender expression as prohibited grounds for discrimination and harassment in both the Canadian Human Rights Code and the Criminal Code) passed in the house, it died with the election. The last years of Tory rule aggressively attacked child care, aboriginal women, women’s programmes and pay equity. They threatened reproductive rights. Tory foreign policy attacked women globally – in Afghanistan, Palestine, Libya, Haiti, Colombia, Honduras, and elsewhere.

Now, as a majority government, the possibility is all but gone for the New Democrats and the opposition parties to block the Tory agenda of sexist G20-style “law and order”, militarism, unemployment, and vicious “austerity” budgets. The focus of resistance is therefore the extra-parliamentary arena. This is where the next battles will be fought, and where victories can and must be won.

Canadians have not shifted right — most voters including the women and the youth, opposed the Tories. The real majority is in the streets, on our campuses, in the workplace and our communities. Harper has no mandate!

Young women must be an essential element of the fight back against the Harper Tories, the right-wing, and the big business agenda they represent.

The hard work of women made the National Action Committee on the Status of Women, a major coalition of equality-seeking groups in English-speaking Canada, into a powerful political force. The pro-corporate Chrétien Liberal government of the ‘90s slashed NAC’s funding. This attack continued and led to NAC’s demise and has weakened the fight back.

The coming together of the RebELLES, the Ad Hoc Coalition for Women’s Equality and Human Rights, the growing Marche mondiale des femmes, the Sisters in Spirit campaign, No One Is Illegal, and the recent mass outpouring of women (especially youth) saying no to violence against women in the SlutWalks (responding to a police officer telling students that the best way to avoid getting raped was to avoid dressing like a “slut”) – these are all welcome new developments and must go further.

We must bring together these threads of resistance.

The needs of the broad majority of the young women can never be divided from those of the working class, aboriginal people, (im)migrants, students, seniors, queer people, farmers, and all the people on the road to a better world. We need a massive campaign to build a People’s Coalition for a genuine alternative to corporate greed.

Ideas like the Charter of Youth Rights campaign, (demanding the rights of youth to democracy; a good, quality job; accessible, free education; full equality; peace; a healthy environment; justice for Aboriginal peoples and Quebec; and democratic culture and leisure) could unite the youth and student movement in a powerful force, taking on policies for real change and confront the system, pushing for a counter-offensive for the rights of youth against corporations.

History is not on the side of patriarchy and capitalism. It is on the side of freedom, equity, peace, ecology, and the people. We remain committed to joining with all those fighting immediate struggles today, while championing a better future for all. For us, that means socialism!

On behalf of the Young Communist League we express our solidarity towards your meeting and its important work and look forward to the outcomes of your discussions.

Central Executive Committee, YCL-LJC
www.ycl-ljc.ca ycl_ljc@ycl-ljc.ca

YCL CEC on Election and Youth

Struggle and resistance 

is the way forward!

The results of the 2011 Federal election are a call to action for the youth and student movement. It is time to pick up our picket signs and banners for major mobilization against the extremely dangerous Harper Conservative majority government.

The Conservatives have no mandate from the young people, nor from the people in general, to accelerate their pro-capitalist, anti-peace, anti-environment agenda – and this must not pass! In confronting our emergency situation, young people should take heart in the fact that Harper won the support of less than 25% of registered voters.

The election has also shown how flawed the Canadian voting system is. The situation calls out for mixed-member proportional representation. 

Thomas Walkom: What does the NDP Stand for?

Reprinted from the Toronto Star
See also this article.


The Liberal Party is under the spotlight and deservedly so. It is confused and rudderless. It appears to have no aim other than winning power. It lacks a reason for being.

All of this was made starkly clear in the federal election. What is less obvious is that the New Democrats — ostensibly major winners on May 2 — suffer similar problems.

To rain on the NDP parade might seem churlish. Yes, the New Democrats won big. Yes, they finally made a breakthrough in Quebec. Yes, party leader Jack Layton ran a skilled and graceful campaign.

But who are they? What direction would they take if they did win power?

We know that the NDP isn’t a socialist party. It hasn’t been for decades. But is it a social democratic party? If so, what does that mean in 2011?

The ideological uncertainty of the NDP has heightened under Layton’s leadership. As a young, municipal politician, Layton didn’t shy away from controversy. In 1984, he was famously arrested for handing out pro-union pamphlets in Toronto’s Eaton Centre.

But by 2003, the grand gestures were gone. Instead, he won his party’s leadership by promising to be practical, to win more seats and to increase the NDP’s appeal among younger voters.

In all of these areas he has succeeded. His optimistic message of practical solutions for working families resonated particularly well in this campaign.

Yet at the same time, the overall direction of the NDP under Layton has been harder to pin down. His parliamentary caucus does back the Canadian Labour Congress’ call for a vastly improved Canada Pension Plan. But otherwise, labour seems largely invisible — this in a party the unions helped create.

Certainly, there were few hints of either labour or the left in the party’s 2011 election platform.

In fact, the central economic theory behind that platform was a very conservative one: The best way to create jobs is through tax cuts for business.

The only difference between this position and that of Stephen Harper’s Conservatives was that Layton focused on small rather than large business.

In the Commons, all parties are opportunistic. But the NDP under Layton has been unusually so — attacking the government at every turn without attempting to determine if its various critiques contradict one another, settling for the easiest or most popular position rather than one best aligned with its principles.

The NDP had little to say in 2005 when Canada decided to send troops into Afghanistan’s Kandahar province. Only when opposition started to mount publicly did it come out against the war.

Similarly, and with almost no debate, the NDP joined other parties in quickly approving Harper’s decision this year to make war on Libya.

In 2005, it sacrificed the very national child care scheme it had long advocated in order to bring down Paul Martin’s Liberal government.

If the NDP had a coherent overall game plan, none of this might matter. Democratic politics is complicated. Even Harper’s Conservatives take one step back for every two forward.

But Harper also has something larger in mind. He wants to transform Canada into a different kind of society, where collective action through government is minimized, where markets rule and where individuals are given freer rein to accumulate as much as they can.

Does the NDP these days have an overarching notion of where the country should go and how it can get there? If so, I don’t see it.

Rather its aim seems merely to become the Liberals. This, as the Liberals themselves have demonstrated, is not enough.

Thomas Walkom's column appears Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday.

Israel kills 10 and wounds 112

Hundreds of members of the Union of Lebanese Democratic Youth participated in the “March of Return” towards the occupied Palestinian territories, on Sunday May 15, where several buses took off from Beirut and its suburbs, Sidon and Tyre and arrived at Maroun al-Ras, the village on the borderline in the south of Lebanon along with a big number of Palestinian, Lebanese protestors.

The number of participants in the march was about 30,000 Palestinians and Lebanese participants in a prominent sign of how deeply rooted is the Palestinian cause in the minds and hearts of all freedom fighters. But the Zionist occupation forces - as usual - committed a horrible massacre against the unarmed participants and met their stones with live bullets and snipers that hit them with directly and deliberately one by one. As a result 10 martyrs fell among the participants and about 112 were wounded, including Comrade Arabic Al-Andari with a bullet that hit him directly in his lower leg.

Comrade Arabic Al-Andari, former secretary-general of the Union of Lebanese Democratic Youth was immediately transferred to a hospital in Bint-Jubail and then to the American University of Beirut Medical Center where he had a surgery to remove the bullet from his foot and his health condition is now stable.

In this context, the Union of Lebanese Democratic Youth confirms its affirmative position concerning the Palestinian cause and its struggle and reassures its full commitment to it regardless of the sacrifices and despite the horrible massacres committed by criminal Israeli forces. ULDY will always direct its struggle for the freedom of Palestine as it always did.

Viva Palestine

Union of Lebanese Democratic Youth
The Executive Bureau
Beirut, May 15, 2011