With the economy in a tail-spin, suddenly our generation is asking ‘what kind of future does the system offer us’? It is our evaluation that young people are very quickly becoming more open to different and bolder ideas.
This context also shows the validity of our priority areas of struggle – jobs, education, and peace.
Literally millions of young people will soon be looking for summer jobs. Over the next week, 300 youth employment outlets will open across the country for youth. Yet youth unemployment is skyrocketing to the highest levels in over a decade. First it was Quebec and Ontario, where youth unemployment is almost 20%. Now BC and Alberta have seen a spike – 80 and 112% -- respectively in EI collection. The situation is no better in the Prairies. And in the East Coast, most young people have to leave the region just to make a living.
Not one CEO has been asked to return a penny of the $3 billion slush-fund Prime Minister Harper’s 2009 budget created, but the government dares to demand workers and retirees return pension benefits and slash wages!
Clearly, youth and students’ stakes are on the same side of the table as the industrial workers, and diametrically opposed to the CEOs. The Central Committee should instruct the Executive to move the League into this fight back with renewed energy and audacity:
- Convene a cross-Canada English-language conference call of youth workers;
- Asses the situation and foster comrades deep engagement in local activities such as Employment Insurance petitions, or minimum wage;
- Support the proposal of the joint meeting with the Communist Party to publish a youth-oriented leaflet;
- Ensure Rebel Youth and Jeunesse Militante are tools in this fight.
Students will return to school with either stagnant public funding in the case of secondary education, or higher fees in the case of post-secondary. Ontario is pushing towards the highest tuition in Canada. Charest’s Liberal’s are fighting hard to raise Quebec’s fees astronomically. The re-election of Campbell’s Liberals in BC will not correct the sky rocketing tuition in that province – in fact, the opposite. In some universities, the complete failure of the market has reaped a devastating harvest, as for example at the University of Toronto $1.3 billion has been lost in endowment funds.
In this context the YCL must not stand on the side-lines:
- Convene a conference call of all university student activists including Quebec;
- Convene a conference call of all high-school activists including Quebec;
- Experiment with an online email-based YCL student newsletter aimed at student activists across the country, especially around meetings of the CFS
- Experiment with tools like YCL high school newsletters, such as deepening the struggle for access to post-secondary, or generating protest around reactionary and anti-socialist curriculum in high schools;
- We should discuss especially the choices facing student activists: is it fair to say, for example, the CFS is sliding towards advocacy?
If young people needed to see demonstrated willingness by youth and students to voice loud and noisy opposition, just look at the anti-imperialist efforts of our generation. Responding to Israel’s terrorist war on the Palestinians in January, demonstrators flooded the streets – the largest Palestinian solidarity actions recently.
Canadian-launched Israeli Apartheid Week actions are now held across the country and internationally; but the Harper Conservative government, with Zionist youth, University administrations and a major Canadian newspaper, has harassed these campus efforts – illegally fining and expelling students, investigating pro-Palestinian teachers, banning a poster by cartoonist Carlos Latuff, and baring British MP George Galloway.
The youth have also mobilized and protested George W. Bush visiting Calgary and Toronto, and in strong condemnation of the genocide of the Tamil people, and meeting should add our voice in deploration.
These developments, and the continued need to focus on the war Afghanistan and military recruitment, mean that the Central Committee should instruct the Executive to re-convene the YCL Peace conference call, which has been largely inactive for a year.
Comrades,
We can’t be tired now, as campaigners, as activists, and as an organization – from the club level to our central YCL leadership meeting at today. As we did at our last CC, I think the starting point for discussion about local action needs to be our role, which derives from a reading of the young people’s consciousness and militancy.
I think that while most young people recognize the basic roots of this crisis, it’s a whole different question if they see a way forward. It is not an easy question!
Those who orient, correctly, towards Harper’s Tories as being the main vehicle of the corporate agenda seem confused by how to combat his superman-like rebound with the passage of the 2009 budget. “There are so many issues, how do we get young people engaged?” But we’re not going to find a magic glowing green jar of kryptonite that will stop the Conservatives or the forces behind them.
Consider the immediate struggle that is going on around Employment Insurance today. The main openings lie in such agitation, education and engagement where young people are in struggle. Left and progressive youth organizations, not least the YCL, can make very constructive interventions both on the level of ideas, and in mobilizing more people into the fightback.
As one commentator said recently, “the relationship between the ideas and the muscle to enforce them is a dialectical one” like, as the saying goes, being able to fart and chew gum.[3]
Can we do this as an organization?
We’ve seen the crisis already have severe repercussions in Parliament. First, the coalition government skirmish against the Harper Conservative’s last winter. Now, an impending clash over Employment Insurance.
No vehicle exists inside parliament that can defeat Harper and bring the kind of bold new direction that’s needed. Opposition will likely grow from the existing resistance and form something new. The YCL needs to support and foster alliances within and beyond the youth movement, including with labour, that can shift the power of big business by uniting all students and young people who are suffering the consequences.
Today’s meeting with discuss the YCL convention. In my opinion the ensuing months and the convention discussion are a seminal opportunity to examine and debate fresh and original proposals about such alliances.
To conclude, comrades – in the Executive’s view, the stakes are high. We fully concur with the sentiments expressed at last winter’s international meeting of Communist and Worker’s parties:
Humankind is passing through one of the most difficult and complex moments in history; an economic global crisis that simultaneously coincides with an energy and food crisis and a serious environmental crisis; a world of deep injustices and inequalities, wars and conflicts. The scene is of an historic crossroads, in which two contradictory tendencies are being manifested. On one side lie great dangers to peace, to sovereignty, democracy, to peoples and workers' rights, and on the other side lie immense potential for struggles and the advance of the cause of emancipation of workers and peoples, the cause of social progress and peace, the cause of socialism and communism.[4]
The only road forward is fighting for our rights and our needs.
Thank you.
[1] YCL-LJC Central Executive Committee, “Warm Militant Greetings on May Day,” May 1/09
[2] Communist Party of Canada Central Committee, “Unite for Jobs and Peace,” Jan 09 [online] p. 4
[3] Gregor Gall, “How to fart and chew gum,” The Morning Star, April 23/09
[4] Meeting of Communist and Worker’s Parties, “Sao Paulo Proclamation: Socialism is the Alternative,” People’s Voice Newspaper, Dec 1/08.
