Canadian elections herald a dramatic intensification of class conflict

That this is so is demonstrated by the concerted campaign that Canada’s corporate elite has mounted to shift politics far to the right and the anti-democratic methods it has used in pursuit of this aim.

In its most recent phase, this campaign has involved an unprecedented attempt to manipulate the electorate. The corporate media has served as a chorus for the Conservative Party in framing the 2006 election as a referendum on Liberal government corruption. This has gone hand in hand with its whitewashing of the political record of Stephen Harper, the neo-conservative ideologue and close Bush ally, who leads the Conservatives. Harper’s new Conservative Party combines the right-wing populists and religious fundamentalists of Preston Manning’s Reform Party with the remnant of the Progressive Conservative Party that most faithfully articulated the views of the Bay Street financial elite. Yet the media has proclaimed the Conservatives a modern, moderate, mainstream party.

In a rare moment of candour that sprung no doubt from excitement at the prospect of a Conservative election victory, Globe and Mail columnist Margaret Wente affirmed this week that beneath Harper’s “newly genial demeanour beats the heart of a deep-blue conservative.” His “dream is to shrink central government, privatize as much as he can get away with, and hack away at the incomprehensible system of income transfers that sucks money from the haves to the have-nots. ... [If Harper] has his way, his incrementalism will eventually reshape Canada as profoundly as did the creation of the welfare state.”

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http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/jan2006/cana-j21.shtml