Not all was internal reorganization at
the CPC convention earlier this month.
_ Important resolutions were passed on the
political situation in Canada and the world.
First on the agenda of special resolu-
tions was a resolution called “After Meech
Lake,” which dealt with the national
aspirations of working people in Quebec
and in the First Nations and the constitu-
tional crisis that has boiled over in Canada
after Meech Lake.

Convention delegates supported the
call to “promote an understanding in the
working class and democratic movements
of the link between the fight for a new
political relationship among Canada’s na-
tions and the fight against the neo-conser-
vative agenda of the transnational corpora-
tions.” This would include convening
Tepresentative forumis within each of
Canada’s nations that would determine
what their desired relationship would be to

the rest of Canada and that representatives
from each of these meet in a constitutional
forum to negotiate a new constitutional
relationship.

The resolution included a call to “ex-
pose and oppose all forms of bigotry, na-
tional chauvinism and racism as part of the
struggle for a new constitution,” and to
“work to further the party’s theoretical
analysis of the national question taking
into account the specific conditions of
Canada, including the aspirations of
people of colour and new Canadians.”

Barb Cameron, member of the central
committee and delegate to the convention,
argued that this was an issue where the
party could make a real contribution to
Canadian politics. The resolution was
eventually referred to the incoming central
committee to form the basis for a party-
wide discussion.

Aspecial resolution on aboriginal rights

condemned the decision to use the police
and the army against the Mohawk people
at Kanesatake and Kahnawake and called
for a public inquiry into the attacks on the
areas of Mohawk territory. The resolution
also demanded all charges against the
Mohawk and their supporters be dropped.

The resolution requested that the CPC’s
Aboriginal Commission “draft a statement
on the current struggle for aboriginal
rights, for wide distribution by the party or
the Aboriginal Commission to develop a
policy which would call for a democratic
constitutional process.”

An emergency resolution supporting
the demand of the women’s movement to
commemorate Dec. 6 as a country-wide
Day of Remembrance for all victims of
male violence against women was also
passed with unanimous support at the con-
vention. Dec. 6 was the day in 1989 when
14 women were gunned down by Marc

Lepine at the Universite du Quebec a
Montreal.

The recriminalization of abortion that is
impending with the passage of Bill C-43
was also highlighted and the convention
unanimously resolved to put its “full sup-
port behind the right to defeat Bill C-43 in
the Senate.” The resolution backed the Na-
tional Day of Action on Choice Oct. 13.

The convention also extended its sup-
port to the Canadian Union of Postal Work-
ers in their upcoming struggle against
Canada Post and the Crown corporation’s
relentless drive towards the privatization
of the Post Office. The resolution pledged
to do its utmost to mobilize all Canadian
workers to rally in their support.

Other resolutions on lesbian and gay
rights and on the situation in the Middle
East were referred to the incoming central
committee when the convention ran out of
time.

Convention is about ‘reaffirmation of socialism’

“As the main force for revolutionary soc-
ialism in our country, we are faced with the
greatest challenge of our almost 70 year
existence. Can we adapt to the new world
and the Canadian situation? ... we can and
we must,” George Hewison told the dele-
gates as he opened the 28th convention of
the Communist Party of Canada in Toronto

- Oct. 5.

Hewison’s remarks began one of the
most critical conventions in the party’s his=
tory — a convention coming at a time of a
global crisis facing socialism, the collapse
of the Communist parties in Eastern Europe
and a fervent ideological debate unmatched
on the left since the Russian Revolution of
1917.

“Can we tell the people that we have
drawn the appropriate lessons and that our

vision of socialism fully accords with the
fundamental interests and aspirations of the
Canadian people?” Hewison asked. “With
our previous world-view in disarray, with a
certain concept of socialism so discredited,
with a theory of the vanguard party which is
so much a part of an unworkable and un-
desirable model of socialism, it is important
that we stand before the working class with
the utmost candour and place before it at

~ least a preliminary orientation; a perspective '~

of socialism if you will, until a new fuller
party program can deal with, and start to
overcome, the many theoretical misconcep-
tions and their practical consequences of our
old program and constitution, while retain-
ing all that is useful.”

Hewison said that the convention marked
a climax of an unprecedented debate within

Judy Rebick, president of the National Action Committee on the Status of
Women, commended Communists for their work with NAC over the past
several years and called on the CP to make the fight for full women’s equiality
a priority as she addressed delegates to the CP convention in Toronto Oct. 5.
In a break with past practice, the convention did not schedule speeches from
representatives of fraternal parties and focussed on leaders of movements in
Canada, including CUPW president Jean-Claude Parrot.

‘The left, including the socialist and

Marxist left, exists everywhere across
this country —and our destiny is

tied up with it.’

— George Hewison

the ranks of the party about its future. Ac-
knowledging the intense atmosphere of the
past year, much of it created by debate
around the proposed document, The Com-
munist Party and the New Decade, Hewison
said he hoped the days of the “last word” are
gone and that deep, on-going and principled
debate would occur as a key to the creative
development of theory as a guide to action
and of renewal.

“The (New Decade) document will give
us an indispensible orientation to transport
us from ideological and political stagnation
that awaits us if the pull of certain past
practice and habit prevents us from renew-
ing sufficiently to adapt to the turbulent and
rapidly-changing present.

“There are important voices in our party
which say that the leadership is moving too
fast; that alternatively the membership has
been bombarded in a flood of paper, or
ignored; and that we need time to absorb the
content of renewal. There are other impor-
tant voices, especially from activists in mass
movements, which say that the leadership is
allowing the pace of renewal to lag badly,
compared to the objective urgency sur-
rounding the party and that a faster pace of
renewal is needed if the party is not to be-
come a historical relic.”

In this climate of intense debate, it was
the task of leadership, Hewison said, to put
before the membership what it sees as the
correct path ahead and that if agreement
could be reached on the main character of
renewal, then The Communist Party and the
New Decade and The People’s Alternative
would be the vehicles to unite the member-
ship on the road to renewal.

“The left, including the socialist and
Marxist left, exists everywhere across this
country. And our destiny is very much tied

up in it,” Hewison said. “Today the soil in
the labour and people’s movements is ripe
with opportunities for Canada’s party of
socialism.”

He said there were hundreds outside the
immediate ranks of the party who had a large
stake in the outcome of the convention. He-
wison argued that not just the Communist
Party but the entire left in Canada was facing
an ideological onslaught centering on the
charge that “socialism is dead.” But the
attacks of international capital make the
need for a Canadian party of revolutionary
socialism greater than ever, he argued.

Such a party, Hewison said, would be
based on the liberating role of the working
class, on internationalism, the science of
Marxism, and would have the widest inter-
nal democracy in arriving at decisions while
maintaining the maximum of unity in carry-
ing those decisions out.

“We need our friends and our friends
need us,” he said. “The socialist left in the
labour and people’s movements is both part
of the amorphous category known as the left
within the labour and people’s movements;
and itself is amorphous and developing, as
those in the thick of the struggle can testify.

“This part of the left has been growing as
the movements grow, and experience and
consciousness reveals the need for funda-
mental change. We are starting to find the
ways to work with the socialist left but the
ties are still too limited, too spontaneous, too
limited to individual communists.

“Thus this convention is about the reaf-
firmation of socialism in Canada in new
conditions, and flowing from that the
renewal and growth of our party. Both issues
are inextricably linked to practical steps and
new forms for left unity,” he said.

Pacific Tribune, October 22, 1990 +7

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