Draft script for Bianca at CJPME’s 21 January NDP debate

Rob Ashton is not participating tonight—supposedly because he has little to contribute on the fate of Gaza and West Asia, two key issues in contemporary global politics. Does he really have nothing to say about Trump’s fake “peace plan” under which the massacre of the Palestinians is continuing? Or is Rob absent because he does not want to antagonize the Zionist lobby? He has been Canadian president of the ILWU since 2016—a union whose motto is: “An Injury to One is an Injury to All!” This is the attitude exhibited by the solidarity actions of maritime workers in Greece, France and Morocco who refused to handle military cargo bound for the Zionist regime. Is Rob somehow unaware of those heroic actions? Does he not know that Italian longshore workers launched two mass strike actions in solidarity with Palestine on 22 September and 3 October? In my opinion, Rob’s decision to duck tonight’s discussion signals that he is not up to the job of leading a national political party.

Rob apparently decided he could get away with simply saying that he agrees with Heather MacPherson on the issues being discussed tonight. But in fact, Heather’s record is not a good one, although, to her credit, she has at least occasionally described the horrors unfolding in Gaza as a “genocide.” Yet as a member of the NDP’s caucus in parliament, Heather spent a few years propping up the Trudeau Liberal government while it was effectively backing the genocide in Gaza. To my knowledge, Heather has yet to repudiate this mistake. Perhaps she will do so tonight, although I rather doubt it.

The policy of voting confidence in the Liberals was, in my view, doubly treacherous. In the first place, they lacked the political spine to stand up and denounce the pathologically racist policies of the murderous Jewish supremacist Netanyahu government. Secondly, they betrayed the NDP’s historic claim to represent the interests of Canadian workers and other victims of capitalism. The billionaire ruling class has the twin Liberal/Conservative big business parties to serve and protect its interests. The NDP was formed 65 years ago, with the support of the union movement, on a promise of standing up for workers and the oppressed—not as a left prop for a government committed to doing the bidding of the big banks, Bay Street and Wall Street.

Heather McPherson, unlike the other candidates here tonight, was a member of the NDP caucus and doubtless pressured to back the Liberals. But I have not heard anyone repudiate Jagmeet Singh’s policy of turning the NDP into a doormat for the Liberals. In fact, at a public meeting in Toronto in December, Avi Lewis told his supporters that he approved of the “Supply and Confidence” agreement to support the Liberal government. The Liberals of course turned a blind eye to the Gaza holocaust while eagerly echoing Zionist slanders about the “hateful,” “antisemitic” actions of all those who had the decency to denounce the genocidal actions of Israel’s apartheid regime.

To give him his due, Avi has been pretty forthright about calling out the Zionist genocide. Yet, along with all the other participants in the embarrassing “French” debate in Montreal in November, he did not choose to mention the horrendous crimes being committed in Gaza. The organizers of that event excluded my partner and co-thinker Yves Engler who would certainly have raised this issue along with the many other crimes and misdemeanors of Canadian imperialism. But the pro-capitalist NDP brass prefers to avoid discussion of such things.

Every candidate here tonight is doubtless aware that the Zionists managed to cancel two venues Yves had booked in September—one for his campaign launch in Toronto and another in Waterloo. I do not recall any of you having the decency to publicly denounce this anti-democratic behavior. I am sure we are all aware that the Zionist machine via various media allies, including the right-wing Toronto Sun, unsuccessfully attempted to pull the plug on tonight’s debate. These apologists for genocide truly have no shame—and everyone who decided to participate in tonight’s debate is doubtless on their radar.

As many listening may recall, the Canadian Foreign Policy Institute (with which Yves and I have long been heavily involved) held an online rally entitled “Defend Sarah Jama, Stop the attack on Gaza!” a few days after the Ontario NDP shamefully expelled her from their parliamentary caucus. What you may not know is that Avi Lewis explicitly refused and invitation to participate in our webinar and also refused to sign the accompanying public letter defending Sarah. Perhaps he now has some regrets—or perhaps not. In any case his refusal at the time, when it counted, is typical of the political cowardice that has generally characterized the reformist, pro-capitalist leadership of the NDP over the decades. There have been a few—very few— instances when individual party leaders exhibited the courage to tell the truth in defiance of the lying propaganda of the corporate capitalist media. Probably the most important of these was in 1970 when Tommy Douglas opposed the War Measures Act.

Under my leadership telling the truth about the crimes of our rulers, both at home and abroad, will be the norm, not the exception. I will not shrink from branding the Zionist holocaust against the Palestinians for what it is. My campaign platform included a pledge to seriously campaign for substantial “Land Back” to the indigenous peoples of this country and begin to redress the centuries of crimes committed against them. We entitled our program “Capitalism can’t be fixed—Onward to a socialist future.” In it we spell out many of the essential prerequisites for laying the basis for a just, egalitarian socialist society—most importantly the wholesale expropriation of the corporate elites without compensation. Adopting this perspective will put the NDP on an entirely different path—the path of struggle to overturn capitalist irrationality and establish a radically different political system in which working people rule and economic activity is carried out to meet human need, rather than maximizing private profit.