SPC Reports May-July 2019

[Socialist Party Head Office]

THE SOCIALIST PARTY OF CANADA
worldsocialism.org/canada | spc@worldsocialism.org | twitter.com/spc_news
PO Box 31024 Victoria B.C. Canada V8N 6J3
Secretary’s Report for June 2019
Email Report
– WSP (India) EC meeting minutes No. 199, Sunday, May, 2019 received with thanks.
– Comrade Shenfield and Ames spoke by telephone earlier in May noting joint work possibilities within the parameters of
vast distances between members and practical organizing. Agreement on member training in research-based article writing and co-writing, pooling funds for all international companion parties to draw upon, social media and fundraising training, using free platforms like SLACK – https://slack.com/intl/en-ca/ – to facilitate international collaborative initiatives and themed article and video production(s). It was felt that targeting for a co-sponsored conference and/or organizing meeting in Toronto or Chicago as yet was premature, and needs careful planning and stepped developmental approach to be most effective. Advertising in select journals, with or without funding assistance from the SPGB, should similarly follow a trial and measure method to see what is effective and what is not.
– Stephen Shenfield forwarding email from Robin C0x suggesting the WSPUS attend a large conference called Socialism2019 planned for July 4-7 in Chicago to distribute leaflets, participate in discussions, and host a table with our literature. Information is at socialismconference.org. Comrade Shenfield suggesting SPC members join with US Comrades for this work.

Secretary’s note – the SPC could subsidize and / or fund members to support this work should we decide to attend. It appears to be too late to request presenting the Socialist case as we view it without markets, money or government, and the conference in the main looks to be widely reformist in character. Nevertheless, the engagement may prove worthwhile for the funds spent. Interested Comrades needing subsidy / reimbursement please forward to spc@worldsocialsim.org for GAC carrying.

Good of the Movement
– Next Toronto Branch of the Socialist Party of Canada public meeting Wednesday, 26 June 2019, 6:30pm to 8:30pm. Upcoming Toronto meetings https://web.facebook.com/Toronto-Branch-Socialist-Party-of-Canada-1120836671294008/ & https://www.worldsocialism.org/canada/.
– Submissions open for the Summer 2019 IMAGINE – Comrades, forward articles and / or ideas for topics to
spc@worldsocialism.org.
– SPC enquiries independent web forum: https://www.reddit.com/r/Canadian_Socialism/
– New – Full archive from the bound official two volumes of Socialist Fulcrum 1968-1984
http://libcom.org/library/socialist-fulcrum-socialist-party-canada
– Seeking editorial collaboration and assistance re: new pamphlet and/or article series: Progressive Thought and
the Materialist Conception of History. Contact Dylan: worldsocialismbc@outlook.com.
General Administrative Committee
– We have heard no protestations to Jeff Spicer’s nomination by the May 24th cut off date, and welcome Jeff as our latest member to our General Administrative Committee.
One GAC seat still remains open, so interested members please forward your nominations (self or otherwise) with
a brief profile explaining a bit more about yourself or your nominee. Please forward all nominations to spc@worldsocialism.org.
Dues – $25 per year. All Party activities are voluntarily run; dues offset costs of postage, photocopies, public meeting expenses, internet services, etc. Dues waivers available for low and unwaged members.

Food for Thought – views & contributions to spc@worldsocialism.org
● I recently had the displeasure of reading Kevin Kwan’s very successful novel,”Crazy Rich Asians”. It’s well wrote, but the content must surely disgust anyone with a social conscience. The two main protagonists, Nick and Rachel, who live in New York, fly to Singapore for a wedding in Nick’s Family and enter a world where money is everything and values which have no relevance to it are meaningless. A guy who makes $800,000 a year is spoken of like he is a panhandler on Broadway. Women think nothing of flying to Paris to buy a gown. There are many other examples, but these two are typical. There is also snobbery from the old rich to the new, but how did the old rich make their money in the first place? Through the importation of Opium into China, where millions live on less than a buck a day; and although Kwan doesn’t say it, the greatest drug dealer of all was a lady whose 200th birthday people are presently celebrating, Queen Victoria, who ordered it. So much for capitalism’s set of values.

● Early in May, underwater explorer Victor Vescovo’s submarine went to the bottom of the Pacific’s Mariana
Trench, seven miles below the surface of the ocean and as deep as anyone can go. What do you think he found? No it wasn’t a sign saying ,”Killroy was here”, if that’s what your thinking, it was candy wrapper, in other words garbage.
Vescovo and his team did identify three of marine animals but could not escape man made havoc that can kill species faster than we can discover them. A report released by the United Nations in May claimed that human actions have,”severely altered”, 66 per cent of the world’s marine environments,
threatening one third of all marine mammals with extinction. We had better do something about it before its too late and it won’t be done in a society that puts profit before care.

● On May 17 the Toronto District School Board released a list of hundreds of high school classes that will be cancelled this fall because of the provincial governments funding cuts that will boost class sizes and eliminate teaching jobs. A total of 313 classes will be cut, some of them grade 12 credits that students may need for post secondary studies and 304 classes will run with many more students than usual. This will also reduce the number of courses that can be offered. Student trustee Amin Ali, a grade 12 student, ”I’m very, very, worried, I don’t think the provincial government has thought through this at all”. I think they have; their job is to run capitalism as best they can, and if money is tight save it wherever they can. Of course some folk will suffer, but that’s life under capitalism.

● May 15 was the centenary of the Winnipeg General Strike, when approximately 30,000 workers went on
strike. For the next six weeks the strike nearly paralyzed the city’s population of 175,000, most of whom were
sympathetic. It was mainly about the recognition of union rights and collective bargaining and was conducted in a
very responsible way. The strike committee asked the civilian police, hospital and power workers to remain on the job. The strike leadership were mostly British born workers such as James Winning, Robert Russell and the S.P.C.’s. Bill Pritchard. The city’s business community retaliated by bringing in scab labour who clashed violently with the strikers. The most famous incident was on June 21 when the Royal North West Mounted Police attacked strikers marching in the Downtown area. Two people were killed and many were injured by the goons the RNWMP had hired as,”special
constables”. A photograph of a streetcar being overturned was
included in press reports as the work of strikers whereas it was the action of the scabs. Near the end of the strike the mounties arrested 12 of the strike leaders at night, ran them out of town and incarcerated them at the Stony Mountain Prison. Most
received prison sentences. If the strike proved anything it proved that in industrial action by a minority the capitalist class will always have the upper hand.

● The provincial office tasked with preventing occupational injury, illness and death in Ontario will see $16 million in cuts this year, despite the fact that it is not taxpayer funded. The Ministry of Labour’s prevention office budget will drop more
than $119 million in 2018 to $103 million, new budget estimates released by the Ford government show. The bulk of the cuts will affect research projects on issues like  occupational disease as well as the province’s independent health and safety associations which provide ministry approved training and support to workplaces across Ontario. Critics say the cuts make no sense because the prevention offices costs are fully reimbursed by the provincial workers’ compensation board and are not born by the general public. Could it be that the capitalist class, through its executive committee, the Ontario government, pay the bulk of taxes, not the general public, and therefore are trying to cut corners? Whatever the reason might be, one thing is for sure – there will be more injuries at work.

● An article in the Toronto Star of May 11 focused on exactly who owns land in England. Guy Shrubsole, a writer and environmentalist, has gathered data by bothering public bodies with freedom of information requests and searching through title records in the government’s Land Registry. He
concluded that in England, a country of 56 million people, half the country belongs to 25,000 landowners, some of them corporations. Shrubsole began documenting England’s estates after the referendum on Brexit in 2016. Finally after all his research, he asked a good question, ”If Brexit means taking back control of our country, then I’d like to know who owns it?”

● At last the deadlock has been broken. On May 17 Canada and the U.S. removed tariffs on each other’s steel and aluminum products. The press is raving about tens of thousands of Canadian workers having secure jobs and tens of billions of dollars coming to Canada in cross-border trade – yadda,yadda, yadda – ain’t capitalism wonderful? – and it opens the door to ratification of a new free trade agreement. However exciting all this is, it’s still life under capitalism so there must be a catch. Trade experts call it a trap door. If there is a sudden
surge in cross-border sales, the importing country can challenge it and slap on a tariff. The other country can retaliate, but only within that particular industry. To this writer it sounds nuts, but where is it written that capitalism
and sanity go hand-in-hand?

Socialists Readings in the Modern Rage
– Edgar Hardcastle Archive 1900-1995  https://www.marxists.org/archive/hardcastle/

– Archive of Socialist Studies https://archive.org/details/socialiststudies
https://libcom.org/library/socialist-studies

– Producers and Parasites (1935). By John Keracher.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/keracher/1935/producers-parasites.htm

– History of the Socialist Party of Canada (1973). By J. M. Milne
http://www.socialisthistory.ca/Docs/SocialistParty/HistoryofSPC.pdf

– W.A. Pritchard address to the jury in the Crown vs. Armstrong, Heaps, Bray, Ivens, Johns, Pritchard, and
Queen: Indicted for seditious conspiracy and common nuisance, Fall assizes, Winnipeg, 1919-1920. Winnipeg:
Defense Committee, 1920.
http://peel.library.ualberta.ca/bibliography/4627.html
– Socialist Studies http://www.socialiststudies.org.uk/ | Marxian Economics YouTube Channel
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXq0kw9sU6xvrr34yezA_Tw
Archive of Socialist Studies (except no. 36): https://1drv.ms/f/s!AvbgU4NFjvNHgV9xDR5_Om8AtJjF
Two volume archive of Socialist Fulcrum 1968-1984: http://libcom.org/library/socialist-fulcrum-socialist-partycanada
Kenworthy, John Coleman (1900). The Anatomy of Misery: Plain Lectures on Economics.
https://archive.org/details/anatomyofmisery00kenw
– History of Economics: A Scientific Investigation into the Political Economy and Its Swindler ‘Economics’
published. 50.00 Rupees/CD$1-1.50. Contact http://www.worldsocialistpartyindia.org for more information to purchase.
– Red Lion Press:
 Revolutionary Socialist: Life of the Socialist Party of Canada and the OBU, 1910-
1922.
 Thinking: An Introduction To Its History and Science.
 Method in Thinking: An Introduction to Dialectics.
Inquires to the publisher: https://web.facebook.com/search/more/?
q=Larry+Gambone&init=public
– Rosa Luxemburg on Socialism (2019). The Socialist Party of Great
Britain. £4.00 https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/product/rosa-luxemburg-onsocialism/
Socialist Party of Canada 2019 Calendar £19.25:
https://www.zazzle.co.uk/socialist_party_of_canada_2019_calendar-158951425439478504
Greatest Impossibilists 2019 Calendar £19.25:
https://www.zazzle.co.uk/greatest_impossibilists_2019_calendar-158115142299860432
For socialism, contributing members of the SPC . . .

[Socialist Party Head Office]

T HE SOCIALIST P ARTY OF CANADA
worldsocialism.org/canada | spc@worldsocialism.org | twitter.com/spc_news
PO Box 31024 Victoria B.C. Canada V8N 6J3
Secretary’s Report for July 2019
Email Report
– WSP (India) EC meeting minutes No. 200, Sunday, June 2nd 2019, received with thanks.
– Shannon Kennedy re: WSM Website Content 2019-07-02
– Dear Comrades,
As per resolution 2(b)i of the June EC meeting, it has been put to the Internet Committee and our Companion Parties to discuss what content we wish to be present on the new WSM website once we have begun work on it. I shall be forwarding your contact details to the Internet Committee once all parties have responded so that we may work together on this issue.
On a separate issue, in regards to the funding request that was made previously, the EC shall be making a decision this coming Saturday, and in advance of this, I would ask what legal boundaries there are surrounding receiving money from a political party oversees into Canada.
Yours for Socialism, Shannon Kennedy, General Secretary
Good of the Movement

– Upcoming Toronto meetings https://web.facebook.com/Toronto-Branch-Socialist-Party-of-Canada-1120836671294008/ & https://www.worldsocialism.org/canada/.
– Last call for submissions for the Summer 2019 IMAGINE – Comrades, forward articles and / or ideas for topics to
spc@worldsocialism.org.

– SPC enquiries independent web forum: https://www.reddit.com/r/Canadian_Socialism/
– New – Full archive from the bound official two volumes of Socialist Fulcrum 1968-1984
http://libcom.org/library/socialist-fulcrum-socialist-party-canada
– Seeking editorial collaboration and assistance re: new pamphlet and/or article series: Progressive Thought and
the Materialist Conception of History. Reply to: spc@worldsocialism.org.

General Administrative Committee
– One GAC seat remains open: members please forward your nominations (self or otherwise) with a brief profile to
spc@worldsocialism.org.

Dues – $25 per year. All Party activities are voluntarily run; dues offset costs of postage, photocopies, public meeting expenses, internet services, etc. Dues waivers available for low and unwaged members.

Food for Thought – views & contributions to spc@worldsocialism.org

● The Hamilton Spectator newspaper will close its printing and mailroom operations on August 24. Printing work will be transferred to TC Transcontinental Printing and other external printers owned by, that champion of the underdog, the Toronto Star. The move is expected to save the Spectator between 4 and 6 million dollars annually. This means that 73 full time and 105 part-time workers will be laid off. To quote, Torstar executive, John Boynton, “The Spectator is a strong news brand with a great history and a great future” – try telling that to the folks who will get laid off.

● The City of Calgary is studying the effects of widespread wildfires on drinking water, which some researchers
say has been overlooked and misunderstood until recently. Water treatment engineers and hydrologists employed by the City said that as climate change has increased the number of wildfires in Canada and that scientists are starting to realize that fires can have a significant effect on drinking water years after the fact. After a fire, rain and melting snow wash ash and other debris into the water, often leading to more sediment, changes in the concentration and type of dissolved organic carbon, and phosphorous. This may lead to different methods of treatment, though at present they are not sure which methods, but are sure that failure to solve the problem would be injurious to people’s health. Harpreet Sandhu, Calgary’s
leading watershed planner, said that: “Though Calgary has multiple sources of drinking water, they are increasingly
at risk due to the changing climate.” The answer should be obvious, stop climate change – and there’s only one sure
way to do that.

● Two million people thronged the streets of Toronto on June 18 to welcome home the victorious Toronto Raptors who had defeated Golden State 114-110 to win the NBA Championship. This was the greatest outpouring of joy Toronto has ever seen, far eclipsing VE Day and the Blue Jays win in the world series. It will seem petty and pretty – bad that is, if anyone should carp or criticize such happiness, but the point is to understand it. Such fantastic joy could not merely because The Raptors had won or because it was the first time a Canadian team
had won the NBA, or even that it was a victory over Canada’s
neighbours to the south, who not everyone likes. No Siree, there’s more to it than that. We live in very uncertain times; just about every one of those Two million has his or her worries, whether it be the fear of a layoff, a rent or mortgage default, the car being repo’d, getting accepted into college, paying the tuition fees if you are, health problems etc. etc. So let them forget it all however briefly in one wild delirious day and look forward to the day when we can see it all again, when Socialism is established.

● The capitalist class in Canada has made it’s bid to be, ”top of the world.” On May 23 Canada submitted 1,200 pages of scientific evidence to the U.N. in its attempt to prove the continental shelf from the high Arctic Islands extends more than 200 nautical miles from its shore. It includes a contested section of sea floor that stretches from the top of Ellesmere Island along the undersea ridge to the pole and more than 200 kilometers past it. The trouble is that Russia says the same undersea ridge originates from its continental shelf. Therefore it argues all of the sea floor alongside the ridge from the Russian coast to just past the pole belongs to it. The Danes say the ridge is part of Greenland so they have a P.O.V.” All the countries involved recognize that there will have to be boundary negotiations at some future point,” said, Michael Byers, professor of international law at the University of British Columbia. This doesn’t mean it will be settled amicably. The melting of ice in the Arctic means it will be easier to drill down and get the mineral wealth there, which inevitably means the capitalist class of different countries will want as much as they can get. So it’s a conflict just waiting to
happen.

● On May 29th an all-party committee in Ottawa issued a report on the metal health issues facing Canada’s farmers, many of whom are regular working joes. The report, based on testimony from producers, mental health experts, and government officials, said farmers struggle with many problems, such as market volatility, debt, long work days, the effects of climate change, loneliness, intimidation, cyber-bullying and threats from people who take issue with their occupations and practices. The committee made ten recommendations, including, ”Ensuring the government considers and mitigates any potential impacts from new policies on the well being of agricultural producers.”
That’s what I like about capitalism – it’s so conducive to good mental health.

● Nearly a trillion dollars were moved by Canadian corporations to offshore places, including tax havens,
through legal tax avoidance schemes in 2016. They moved as much as $25 billion from domestic tax coffers, according to a new study by the Parliamentary Budget Office. These findings which were released on June 19, by the Canada Revenue Agency that said uncollected taxes are about $26 billion
each year. The PBO analysis focuses on legal tax avoidance, while the CRA focuses on illegal tax evasion. Together, the two studies suggest Canada is missing out as much as $51 billion in uncollected taxes annually. To quote, Toby Sanger, of Canadian’s for Tax Fairness,” Canadians are being robbed of investments to health care, child care, education and green infrastructure, all of which the government could afford if it were to get serious about cracking down on tax avoidance.” The SPC have always said the capitalist class pays the brunt of
taxes to administrate capitalism, but that doesn’t mean they won’t try to get out of it.

● For some time Vancouver and Toronto have had a lack of affordable housing, now politicians in Montreal are facing the same situation. The growing demand for homes in cities has pushed the cost of housing to amazing heights. But Montreal Mayor Valerie Plante has a plan to deal with it. She calla it the 20-20-20 plan which will commence in 2020 – no kidding! It will require 20 per cent of units in new housing projects to be
social housing, 20 per cent to be affordable housing, and 20 per cent set aside for family housing. Already there is opposition; Andre Boisclair, CEO of the Urban Development Institute of Quebec, warned, ”The plan would increase housing costs that, according to one study, could be as high as 16 per cent.” Once again the upholders of capitalism try to solve one of its many problems. It will be a good laugh watching them fail.

● Almost one-third of all Toronto Transit bus and streetcar routes exceed the agency’s crowding standards at some point during a typical week, according to the latest statistics provided by the Transit Commission. The figures show that in the first three months of this year 41 bus and eight streetcar routes were overcrowded at some point, some as much as 22 per cent. Lawrence Lui, a senior service planner at the TTC, said,” The goal is to provide safe, comfortable and reliable
travel for our customers, but for the moment the TTC lacks the resources to eliminate crowding”. Of course it does, buddy, because we live under capitalism where resources are limited for all but the super-rich. Speaking from experience I can say that standing on a crowded Toronto streetcar ain’t a lot of fun. Mostly the crowding would be in the rush hour, which with the tremendous and positive changes a Socialist Society will engender will be eliminated and all travelling will be purposeful and fun – not a waste of material and social resources maintaining the wages system.

● On June 20, Ontario Premier Doug Ford demoted Finance Minister, Vic Fedeli to the Ministry of Economic Development, and Lisa MacLeod from Social Services to Tourism and Sports. Their places will be taken, not that it means much, by Rod Phillips and Todd Smith. No ministers were dumped, but 12 were moved, Fedeli and MacLeod, being the biggest surprises, and six new portfolios were added. Fedeli’s demotion was probably the result of an extremely unpopular budget which Ford had approved and Macleod’s because she defended cutbacks to autism services. In other words they were
doing the job that Ford had told them to do, but if course it couldn’t be his fault. Ford’s comment was, ”Our message wasn’t getting out”,which is pure genius. To attempt to run the affairs of capitalism successfully is like trying to navigate a sailboat through a hurricane.

Socialists Readings in the Modern Rage
– Edgar Hardcastle Archive 1900-1995 https://www.marxists.org/archive/hardcastle/
– Archive of Socialist Studies https://archive.org/details/socialiststudies
https://libcom.org/library/socialist-studies

– Producers and Parasites (1935). By John Keracher. https://www.marxists.org/archive/keracher/1935/producersparasites.htm
– History of the Socialist Party of Canada (1973). By J. M. Milne http://www.socialisthistory.ca/Docs/SocialistParty/HistoryofSPC.pdf
– W.A. Pritchard address to the jury in the Crown vs. Armstrong,
Heaps, Bray, Ivens, Johns, Pritchard, and Queen: Indicted for
seditious conspiracy and common nuisance, Fall assizes, Winnipeg, 1919-1920. Winnipeg: Defense Committee, 1920.
http://peel.library.ualberta.ca/bibliography/4627.html
– Socialist Studies http://www.socialiststudies.org.uk/ | Marxian Economics YouTube Channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXq0kw9sU6xvrr34yezA_Tw
Archive of Socialist Studies (except no. 36): https://1drv.ms/f/s!AvbgU4NFjvNHgV9xDR5_Om8AtJjF
Two volume archive of Socialist Fulcrum 1968-1984: http://libcom.org/library/socialist-fulcrum-socialist-partycanada
Kenworthy, John Coleman (1900). The Anatomy of Misery: Plain Lectures on Economics.
https://archive.org/details/anatomyofmisery00kenw
– History of Economics: A Scientific Investigation into the Political Economy and Its Swindler ‘Economics’
published. 50.00 Rupees/CD$1-1.50. Contact http://www.worldsocialistpartyindia.org for more information to purchase.
– Red Lion Press:
 Revolutionary Socialist: Life of the Socialist Party of Canada and the OBU, 1910-1922.
 Thinking: An Introduction To Its History and Science.
 Method in Thinking: An Introduction to Dialectics.
Inquires to the publisher: https://web.facebook.com/search/more/?
q=Larry+Gambone&init=public
– Rosa Luxemburg on Socialism (2019). The Socialist Party of Great Britain. £4.00 https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/product/rosa-luxemburg-onsocialism/
Yours for Socialism, SPC contributing members . . .

• This reply was modified 4 years, 9 months ago by Socialist Party Head Office.
• This reply was modified 4 years, 9 months ago by Socialist Party Head Office.

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