My name is Robert Crooks. I am a musician, worker and organizer in Winnipeg, MB/Treaty 1. I am proud to be representing the Communist Party of Canada as the candidate for Winnipeg North.
The most pressing issues that we are confronted with today are the interrelated outcomes of the ruthless pursuit of private profit. Years of large government subsidies to the extractive industries have mandated the state’s armed invasion of Indigenous territories and intensified the climate crisis. The intervention of the Canadian military into nations abroad is an extension of these activities, creating international instability to protect the interests of capital and stay in the good graces of American imperialism. In every major Canadian city, militarized police forces violently dismantle encampments, dispersing the unhoused to new temporary safeholds, to secure the interests of private developers while more than enough housing sits empty accumulating speculative value and pushing up rents.
The financial crisis and the pandemic that served as its impetus have exposed the failures of the capitalist system and the impotence of capitalist political parties to provide solutions. What will the Liberal Party do about those who received CERB in 2020 only to be served insurmountable tax bills in April 2021? What about those who were cut off from their provincial benefits in retaliation for accepting CERB, leaving them with no income whatsoever once their federal relief ran its course? The federal wage subsidy concocted jointly by the Liberals and the NDP failed to prevent lay-offs, but succeeded in transferring billions of dollars of public funds into the hands of big business. And despite the horrors that took place in private care homes in the first wave of the pandemic, Trudeau’s Liberals are now promising to give more public money to the same corporations whose negligence led to these tragedies.
Government after government have sacrificed our rights to housing, health and self-determination to capitalism. How many more times will voters legitimize this decaying system by voting for the lesser evil instead of for their own interests? A vote for the Communist Party on September twentieth won’t bring socialism on September twenty-first. But it will make clear to those in power that more people are ready for a future beyond neoliberal ideology and market-based policies. Now is the time to vote for a future where people are held above private profit. Now is the time to fight for socialism.
