First paragraph (Teaser):

This is the third part of the booklet From Nationalism to Internationalism. We will publish it in six parts. This booklet tells the story of an activist over a period of about 35 years. He has been well acquainted with Maoists having been a militant founder of the Maoist group In Struggle! (En Lutte!) This booklet is his political autobiography and his self-criticism.

Internationalists Communists of Montreal (ICM)

http://www.cmaq.net/en/node/38437 First part
http://www.cmaq.net/en/node/38799 Second part

Rest of the text:

October 1970 Crisis

On October 5th, James Richard Cross, British diplomat, was kidnapped.

October 8th, over the air broadcast of the FLQ manifesto.

October 10th, the government of Robert Bourassa refused all negotiantion.

An hour later, in St-Lambert, Pierre Laporte was kidnapped by members of the Chénier cell, the Rose brothers, Francis Simard and Bernard Lortie.

The latest of the FLQ’s demands included the reading of the manifesto and the reinstatement of 66 workers from Lapalme who were still fighting to get their jobs back. This involved 450 truckers from Lapalm, a private company from which the federal governement had withdrawn a significant postal transport contract. These were workers who had been ruthlessly laid off by the federal government without compensation. The liberation of political prisoners had been abandoned. But these new demands were still too much for the State.

In the evening of October 15th, the army in the streets, the Quebec government rejected the conditions of the FLQ and offered the conditional liberation of five political prisoners, while allowing the abductors to leave the country. Bourassa called upon Ottawa to invoke the War Measures Act. The next day, for the first time in Canada, Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau, declared the War Measures Act in peace-time. These two kidnappings provided the State with the excuse to arrest almost five hundred people.

I was still active, as a Maoist, in Sherbrooke to help with the publication of L’Estrien Rouge.

Thursday, October 15th, while passing out leaflets denouncing the arrests, we’re arrested on autoroute 10 of L’Estrie. The police search the engine, the suitcase… our leaflets are on the back seat. The cops don’t see them. We’re allowed through and continue on our way to Sherbrooke.

That evening at the Paul-Sauvé Center an assembly of 3000 nationalists supported the FLQ’s manifesto.

October 17th, police recovered the body of Pierre Laporte.

October 18th, we had leaflets left over, and as I hated to waste anything, we headed back to Sherbrooke. We went there as two couples – my partner and I and another couple. We made it to Sherbrooke, taking minor roads as the highways were watched more closely.

We hand out our leaflets at U of Sherbrooke’s student residence. At the last room, we’re apprehended by plainclothes police. We’re arrested, and we ask the cops what would happen to our partners. The cops assure us they have nothing against them, that they are free to go.

Three weeks later, still in jail, I find out that half an hour after our arrest, our partners had been arrested while waiting in the car for us. We were sent to the Sherbrooke jail, the women to Tanguay prison in Montreal. In Sherbrooke, they forcibly fingerprinted me after twelve attempts and then sent us to Parthenais Prison in Montreal for three days. To show how scared they were of us, I was handcuffed and shackled (something usually reserved for the most dangerous criminals) with Lori Rice for the entire trip from Sherbrooke to Montreal. After three days in Parthenais, they sent us back to Sherbrooke.

For three whole weeks, no radio, no TV, no newspapers, no contact with lawyers or our parents. The War Measures Act allowed for three weeks of this. We were also kept completely isolated from ordinary prisoners. There were about ten arrested with us in the Sherbrooke region. Each day, some were released. After three weeks, I found myself alone with Mo.

As for the people who had been arrested, to give an idea of the extreme measures taken by the state during this “crisis”, among us was this Québécois just back from the United States, who’d just happened to stop in a provinicial restaurant, and then burst out laughing at an article in Journal de Montréal about the death of Laporte. A policeman eating in the same restaurant, managed to overhear this, found it kind of fishy and decided to arrest the guy. It took ten days in jail to find this funny. He wasn’t politicized at all. After three weeks, my anglophone comrade, Lori Rice, was immediately deported to the UK. As for us, Mo and I, we appeared in court every week, but the case was remanded each time. We had been accused of being sympathisers with the FLQ, which was absolutely false.

My parents had gotten this real scoundrel of a lawyer, a rat bag who prided himself on having studied with Jérôme Choquette, Quebec’s Justice Minister. The same Jérôme Choquette who personally opposed granting us bail.

In November, James Cross’s kidnappers were captured. The Castro regime agreed at the time to take them. A few years later, they managed to find refuge in France.

We wanted out of jail. Young and naïve, we decided then to wage a hunger strike to make ourselves heard, while calling on political prisoners of Parthenais to join us, though they refused. We, the two couples, decided stubbornly to go ahead anyway, and embarked on a two-week hunger strike, satisfying ourselves with just water or tea. Of course, we accomplished nothing but the loss of a few pounds. In fact, they threatened to send us to Montreal if we kept it up. And yet we knew of another political prisoner who had staged a hunger strike for forty days only to have tube feeding forced on him. So we dropped the hunger strike.

In December, the other political prisoners finally decided to wage a hunger strike. We’d decided against another attempt, but our two partners decided to give it another shot. The hunger strike ended on Christmas Eve. Again, this pressure tactic accomplished nothing.

The Rose brothers and Francis Simard were arrested December 28th in a hole that they’d dug under the furnace in the basement of Michel Viger’s country home.

Reading Francis Simard’s book, I learned that before they gave themselves up they had negotiated the release of several political detainees who were still imprisoned. Clearly our bail had depended entirely on the capture of Simard and the Rose brothers. So we were out the following day, December 29th.

Subsequently, in May of ’71, they attempted once more to try us all together, the two couples. However, we finally succeeded in getting the trials separated and I was the one selected to appear first. Since I was in jail for another political action that I’ll talk about later, it was Mo, then, who appeared ahead of the other three. Mo asked to go before a jury. We’d all been accused of aiding, supporting, and belonging to the FLQ, which was completely false. We were Maoist sympathizers, and the two women… they’d just had the bad luck of being our mates. The jury acquitted Mo, and once the verdict was reached, some of them even came over to shake my comrade’s hand, right under the judge’s nose. The point the defense had relied upon was that the right to pass out leaflets to inform the public represented a democratic right.

In the leaflet from the CPC (ml), they said that there had been hundreds of arrests, that people had been beaten, that one day this would cost them dearly and that the people would end up revolting. When one is attacked with guns, then the only defense against those with guns is with guns of your own. This text reflected the adventurism typical of Maoists, an adventurism completely cut off from the working class. CPC (ml) based itself on a quotation from Mao "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. " which doesn’t belong in the corpus of Marxist theory. Working class consciousness is the determining factor, even if violence becomes inevitable in the process of revolutionary upheaval.

After my release in December, I returned to work (Metals and Alloy) to pick up my last cheque, since after all these incidents, they obviously wouldn’t want to keep me on. When I left, the working language was primarily English. I had not been politically active at all at work, but once the boss found out I’d been arrested on charges of sympathizing with the FLQ, they were so afraid that French had started to predominate in business. The little Francophone bosses, fawning idiots, hailed me as a hero. In January, I was hired as a physics teacher at Cégep de Granby for the winter semester, a position I’d once again lose in the fall as a result of another arrest.

At the time of the trial, right near the Cégep, there had been a dozen workers on strike for nine months at World Wide Gum, a manufacturer of collectible sports cards, like baseball players, for example. They were unionized in the CSN and scabs continued production. The union, as is the "tradition" during long conflicts, kept the workers in an office for days, just to make them earn their meager strike allowance. I supported this strike with cégep students and after having met the representative who was also on strike, we decided to produce a leaflet and to make the round of factories unionized by the CSN to talk about their struggle. At one of these factories, some redneck even tried to run me over in the company parking lot. Thanks to one of the factory workers, I managed to get away.

A week after passing out leaflets at the doors of factories unionized by the CSN, we read in the Granby local paper – la Voix de l’Est – an article in which the CSN denounces us, saying it didn’t need our support.

Our view of unions was similar to that of NEFAC today (Northeastern Federation of Anarchist-Communists): a critique of union bosses and management without really going further.

Yet the union’s role in this struggle was clear: for nine months, they managed to confine workers to an office, prevent any form of active solidarity in the Granby region or amongst other workers unionized with CSN, and to denounce those who openly supported them. Even if this struggle was only of an economic nature, making the plight of the strikers public was just too much for union management. A few days after the appearance of that article in la Voix de l’Est, the strike was over without anyone even knowing the conditions of return. My repeated attempts to contact the representative turned up nothing.

****
Throughout the world, especially in Europe and the USA, there were still especially violent demonstrations against the war in Vietnam. In Denmark, for example, the American Consulate had been set ablaze. In Sweden, Paris, London, embassies and consulates were physically attacked. In response to Mao’s declaration a year before, (People of the world, unite and defeat the U.S. aggressors and all their running dogs!) The Canadian Maoists decided to organize an action to march on the American consulate in Montreal. So, along with students, I plastered the town of Granby with posters and leaflets for this event.

This event took place the 20th of May ’71 and began at St-Louis Square. Nearly five hundred people showed up in Montreal under pelting rain. From the corner of St-Denis and Sherbrooke, police megaphones barked out that the demonstration was illegal, again because of measures passed by Drapeau, Montreal’s mayor at the time. We carried on nevertheless, but at the corner of Sherbrooke and St-Urbain, hundreds of cops were waiting for us. We were armed with the 2 by 4’s we used as poles for the red flags. Confronted with our “insistence” to proceed with the demonstration, the front line of the police fell, but then we were felled by the next. My wife was among the first arrested. They were thrown into a paddy-wagon but managed to escape as the police, in their zeal to let loose with their batons on the protesters, never noticed them take flight. I was arrested with more than sixty other demonstrators. For a week in Parthenais, the judicial authorities refused to grant us bail. Some demonstrators had come from Ontario, but only those who lived in Quebec were able to get bail after a week.

A month later, we had our trial. Police came to testify, their arms in casts, as well as some demonstrators who had been pretty roughed up, themselves. We were accused of taking part in an illegal demonstration which got us a month in jail. However, for those with a criminal record, it was two months, along with a $100 fine. During sentencing (we were tried in groups of five so that the court could get this business over quickly), we had a stupid directive from the CPC (ml), which was to raise our fists. The reaction was swift: an additional fine of $100 and an additional month in jail for those with no criminal record, and two more months for those who had one.

As a cégep professor, I had students who had participated in the demonstration. The police went to see their parents, accusing me of corrupting minors; though I’d been holding meetings in plain view and with the knowledge of their parents and sometimes at their parents’ places. In some cases, parents even supported us, so the attempt to accuse me of corruption of minors didn’t hold water.

So I spent the summer of ’71 in Bordeaux. Politically, the Maoist action had been to play the game of Chinese imperialism that Mao had been developing on the corpses of millions of peasants and workers. Maoist militants were pawns in Mao’s struggle against other imperialist powers, imperialist Russia included. Moreover, Maoists often used the term ‘people’ to obscure the role of the proletariat. The term ‘people’ allowed them to include the bourgeois of imperialist countries dominated, at the time, by American and Russian imperialism.

On my release from Bordeaux jail, with no chance of being hired at Cégep de Granby, I worked as a parking lot attendant, eight to twelve hours a day for minimum wage.

From August 1971 to April 1972, I returned to a semi-clandestine existence, since at the time police were arresting activists for practically anything. In Montreal, for example, the police arrested an activist, took him into the woods in Montérégie and, when he didn’t want to co-operate, plain clothes officers abandoned him in the woods at three in the morning. These were the threats that certain militants were faced with. Living a semi-clandestine existence meant continuing to work, but providing false information for home addresses for the telephone, etc.

In summer 1971, the Communist Party of Canada Marxist Leninist (CPC ML) established in 1970 saw over 90% of its francophone activists quit. The fact that almost all meetings of the party in Montreal were held in English was a key factor. The provocative and adventurist leadership at the May 20th demonstration was another important factor. As with all organizations at the service of capital, the split had not been made on any clear political basis and it was not a matter of factionalism. Years later, I learned that the leadership of the CPC (ml) had plotted the assassination of a supporter, a leader of the faction, but that the right conditions for the plan just never fell into place.

I was active for the few months of its existence, in the Revolutionary Workers Movement (MRO – Mouvement Revolutionnaire Ouvrier), led by Pierre Dupont who, some time after the MRO’s dissolution went back to being a TV journalist with Radio Canada. This small group did not question its Stalinism as rigorously as its Maoist variant had.

In autumn, October 29th, another event unfolded: the great demonstration of support outside the offices of La Presse in downtown Montreal for newspaper workers who had been striking for several months. The demonstration was illegal (same regulation again). More than 15,000 demonstrators showed up. I was amongst them and it provided yet another fine opportunity to observe first hand the rabid lengths to which police will go in dealing with such events. They had probably been ordered to put down the demonstrators and like all repressive forces of the bourgeois state apparatus, they never questioned their orders. It must be said that unlike the nationalist demonstrations in previous years, this consisted primarily of workers, while those between 1968-69 were made up mostly of students and a lot of petty bourgeois. It was quite a battle… 200 arrested, 300 injured and, unfortunately, one fatality: demonstrator, Michelle Gauthier. During the demonstration, protesters caught sight of a student who was an informer. He managed to evade the crowd by jumping into a police car… His sorry hide wouldn’t have been worth much in the hands of the demonstrators. After the violent dispersion of the demo, participants regrouped by the hundreds and every single one would remember one of their own injured by forces in the service of capital.
At the time, I had the opportunity to stay with people from all over the province, through contacts in Hull, Sherbrooke, Quebec City… These people were mainly workers sympathetic to the cause. You could stay two or three days with them, and they’d apologize for not being able to do more at the time. They felt embarrassed that their only way of helping was by putting us up. It was the same with the cab drivers. During a demonstration for example, if you had to make a quick getaway, you could hop into a cab and the driver would be happy to take you for free.

1971-1972 saw the beginning of a form of conditioning and even sabotage of demonstrations by PQ activists. Their intervention consisted of finding solutions within the electoral process: “wait for the elections”, or “the MLAs will take care of it” . Parliamentarism, which was ridiculed in the proletarian milieu, resumed the subjugation of more workers with the rise of the PQ. The diversion of the working class into bourgeois democracy during the last 100 years led to its defeat and its passivity. Elections are a terrain in which the the proletariat has no real place except when it comes time to make an X in a box every four years to put another bourgeois into power. [see A circus of darkness and lies: the National Assembly –Appendix V].

Between ’71-’72, the FLQ virtually disappeared. All that remains is the journal “Nous vaincrons” (We shall overcome) distributed sporadically and clandestinely.

In the course of a police provocation, on the 16th of July 1974, a bomb went off in the hands of agent Robert Samson, just as police were about to secretly plant the device at the Montreal residence of the Steinberg family, owners of a chain of supermarkets where a strike had been raging. Later, in March 1976, during his trial, the agent provocateur admitted to having been involved, on behalf of the RCMP, in other questionable activities. Summoned to explain himself, he referred to “Operation Bricole”, code name given to the illegal entry perpetrated October 7, 1972, at the office of l’Agence de presse libre of Quebec (APLQ) leftist news agency, during which documents had been stolen.

A memorable experience of struggle was the Common Front of 1971-72:

“The principle demand was a salary of at least $100 per week for all State employees. So, being on strike at Cégep Édouard-Montpetit, I kept an ear open for everything that was happening in Quebec workplaces, and realized that the unions were really losing control of workers during this struggle. So, one witnessed occupations of towns, such as Sept-Îles, across the province, the beginnings of workers advisories, occupations of radio stations in order to inform the working class of workers’ demands, calls for solidarity, road blocks, illegal walkouts from factories in support of the public sector, workplace occupations and numerous other demonstrations. [The PQ leader René Lévesque denounced the events of Sept-Îles as festivities. The State managed by the Liberals eventually succeeds in subduing the workers by police repression and several arrests. It wa necessary, howerver, to jettison the ballast: the principle demand, the $100 per week, was won. The three union heads: Marcel Pépin of the CSN, Louis Laberge, mentioned above, the FTQ and Yvon Charbonneau (1) of the CEQ were sentenced to prison. These three convictions enabled the Liberal government to divert the protest struggle calling for their release. In addition, members of the CSN further divided the working class by forming yet another trade union, the CSD. The unions eventually regained ideological control of the movement by the wide redistribution of three booklets: “Ne comptons que sur nos propres moyens”(Do not rely only on our own resources) by the CSN, “L’État, rouage de notre exploitation”(The State, cog in our operations) by the FTQ and the “L’école au service de la classe dominante”(School at the service of the ruling class) by the CEQ. Despite their catchy titles, union ideologues did not basically call into question the dictatorship imposed by the bourgeoisie with its government, its State. In the mid-‘70s, the FTQ became the official trade union branch of the Quebec nationalist bourgeoisie and other plants remained equally nationalistic, but in a more subtle fashion; except perhaps the CSD has opted for the Canadian nationalist bourgeoisie ...
In short, this is not much better!”
Excerpt - From unionism critical critique of trade unionism, Testimony of an angry former trade unionist.

During the Common Front in May, I picketed with my pregnant wife in front of Hôtel-Dieu Hospital and in June of that year, I became the father of a son.

Since the end of the Common Front, activists with no faith in the Parti Québécois realized the need to organize more seriously, to begin the task of politically educating the workers. A multitude of cells and groups, proclaiming themselves Marxist, then sprang up all over Quebec and other provinces. In Montreal, the political action committe (CAPS), predominanated, CAP St-Jacques, for example. These ‘caps’, so-called Marxists were, in fact social democrats. Some of their activists from bourgeois or petty-bourgeois origin even abandoned their studies to become factory workers during the ‘70s. In the factory, they practiced economism “looking up the “political backside of workers” and outside of it they were social democrats.

During ’72, I was a sympathizer of Mouvement Révolutionnaire Étudiant du Québec (Revolutionary Student Movement), which published the journal Le Partisan. As I wasn’t a student, I felt out of place. Most MREQ activists became members of the Communist League which later became the Parti Communiste Ouvrier (PCO) (Communist Workers Party), another Maoist organization. For decades, workers and students were diverted by these Maoist organizations toward ideological counterfeiture that spread, as socialism, State capitalism… And for them, all that these regimes had subjected the workers to was justified.

Unfortunately, at the time, I was still unaware that Maoism was a real trap for the proletariat.

In October ’72, Charles Gagnon published a booklet: : Pour un Parti Prolétarien (For a Workers’ Party). At the time, I considered the publication of this brochure very important, as it would put forward the need for a revolutionary party in Quebec and that one of the first steps would be to start a newspaper to lead the ideological struggle against the dominant bourgeos ideology amongst the working class. The newspaper would publish the achievements of the various revolutions in the world, would include all the struggles that would lead workers in Quebec and Canada and around the world. The leaflet was riddled with Stalinist quotations: Lê Du_n of the Worker’s Party of Vietnam, Foto Cami of the Albanian Labour Party, Charles Bettelheim, French Maoist, as well as quotations from Mao Tse-tung. The party to be created would be of a Stalinist nature with the premise of “socialism in one country”. I was not aware that it was in fact a setback for working class Quebecois who would be drawn later by a future organization of Capital, set up following the publication of this booklet. I’ll get back to this organization later.

****

Some other important events in Quebec and in the world that influenced me

On September 11, 1973, a military coup in Chile was fomented by the CIA, which officially resulted in over 3,000 deaths, though the reality was closer to 10,000 in the months following. December ’74 was the end of the regime of the colonels in Greece.

April ’75, Vietnamese Stalinists took power in South Vietnam, signifying the defeat there of American imperialism and thus, ipso facto, the victory of Russian imperialism.

In May of the same year, the Khmer Rouge (Maoists) took power in Cambodia as well… Thus it was a defeat for American and Russian imperialism for the benefit of Chinese imperialism.

In March ’75, I became a father a second time of another boy.

May 12, 1975, some sixty strikers occupy the #2 plant of United Aircraft (Pratt & Whitney) after sixteen months of strike. The issues are: voluntary overtime, twelve hour days, the cost of living allowance, the reinstatement of a striker, a salary increase equal for all. All these demands were played down to achieve the legal recognition of the union. The struggle is tightly controlled by the union bureaucracy of the FTQ of which Robert Dean is a part, and who would later become future PQ minister. It was also supported by an imposing procession of nationalists, deputies and future deputies and PQ ministers (Robert Bisaillon, René Lévesque, Pierre Marois, Robert Burns, Claude Charron etc.). To such a point that the strikers’ emblem is a fleur de lys of metal, made out of nails that the strikers sell. As a result of this occupation, 34 strikers were severely beaten by police during their arrests. More than 100,000 workers walked off illegally on May 20, 1975 to support them. None were rehired, and in May 1977 (six months after taking power by the PQ), three of them were sentenced to jail terms and fines! This occupation which further isolated a group of workers had once again played the game of union and nationalism.

Thirty years later, the “Communist” party of Quebec and the union bureacracy commenorated the “34 Charlie’s” – 34 workers who were immensely helpful in the struggle of PQ politicians against the Liberal government of Robert Bourassa. A year and a half later, the PQ took power with the support of the FTQ… And the bureaucrat resposnisble for the strike, Robert Dean, was appointed Minister!

In Quebec, there were several Common Front trade unions: the 72 mentioned above and others in ’76, in ’79 and the last in ’82. That year… “the State, then managed by a PQ government, decided to lower public sector workers’ salaries by 20% over a period of three months and to make other cuts in the public service in order to “stabilize” State finances.
…What’s ironic in my case is that I lost my teaching position to end up by accepting a temporary position with the Ministry of Industry and Commerce. The government had claimed that the money saved on the backs of teachers would go to welfare, which ultimately did not happen. However, the budget and number of employees tripled in the Ministry of Industry and Commerce. Aiding capitalism with free trade were the real aims of the Quebec nationalist bourgeoisie… An indefinite strike was voted for in 1983: legal to begin with but that the government would make illegal later on. Despite the illegality, the strike continued nevertheless for another two days. It should also be mentioned that the CSQ at the time, found itself alone during the strike without support of other union centrals. A few months later, it was the CSN that found itself alone after a common front of bosses union. And yet, later in 1999, other union centrales had also let down the Federation of Nurses (FIIQ) during its illegal strike. It was everyone’s turn to play the good and the bad…”
Excerpt - From unionism critical critique of trade unionism, Testimony of an angry former trade unionist.

In 1976, against wage freezes, unions organize a big “bash” a one-day strike with the participation of a million workers across Canada. This is primarily to spread the illusion of union militancy amongst the working class, all the while channeling the energy of the most militant trade unions. Also there is no question for the unions of a general strike after the negative outcome of their grevette (little strike). Their work of sabotage is done.

In France, there was the struggle of LIP. They were watchmakers, who, in response to a plant closure, occupied the factory, locking up the bosses and producing watches for a year! This showed that the working class could easily manage the production of a factory without bosses, as well as a lot of problems in the distribution and sale of their products. But above all, it was a lesson for the workers gained from the failure of a form of autonomist struggle that did not see how capitalist competition could easily crush these little idealistic projects. The bourgeois state is always there to insure that the capitalist class can carry on with their exploitation.

Let’s look at how the leftists of In Struggle! saw this failure: “The struggle of LIP in France… and the struggle of Firestone in Canada were two cases where the Marxist-Leninist theses are altogether verified. The workers movement triggers the fight, it was gaining momentum, it radicalized and questioned the economic and political regime; thanks to their willingness to fight, workers in struggle managed to generate widespread popular support, so much so that the political and judicial powers could not ignore it, that is to say could not stifle it, and that the union leadership was forced to act…”
On the crisis of the Marxist-Leninist movement Charles Gagnon 1981

A project similar to the LIP was set up with the closure of Regent Knitting in Saint- Jérôme. This is the self-managing project of Tricofil in February 1975 that managed to keep itself going until 1982 with the help of the PQ government (sic !). As in all such projects, clashes occur between workers as a whole and those workers appointed as managers. So much so that three workers were fired for union activity. Self-management is synonymous with self-exploitation. The workers of such an enterprise are continually faced with competitive market capitalism. They are abandoning their historic struggle for socialism for a small isolated project in a quest to support the national State. The leftists would have us believe that it’s an "alternative", but that so-called alternative serves to divert the working class from its organization for the total abolition of capitalism on Earth. The working class isn’t corporatist or nationalist, it is internationalist.

Then, there is the election of Ronald Reagan who became president of the United States in 1980. In October 1981, millions upon millions of people around the world demonstrated peacefully against the danger of global nuclear war. In June 1982, a million people demonstrated in New York for peace in front of the United Nations. I’d like to point out here that pacifists have never stopped a war. The only force capable of stopping a war, as history has shown, is the working class when it makes the revolution. For instance, the October insurrection in Russia ended the war. Pacifism is a petty-bourgeois illusion that tends to divert the proletariat from its strict class terrain. It is a tool often used by the bourgeoisie to defend "pacifist" and "democratic" sectors of the ruling class.

In Quebec, from the beginning of the 21st century, pacifists regrouped in the Collectif Échec à la guerre (Collective to defeat the war) denied that capitalism is the cause of war. They validate the electoral circus, calling upon it to withdraw Canadian troops from Afghanistan, a major challenge in itself. To go on promoting bourgeois democracy, they call for more transparency and public consultation on the real issues of this war. The Collective wants to inject a semblance of life to dying institutions.

(1) Was appointed federal Liberal MP, and then rewarded for his services in August 2004 while being appointed ambassador for Canada with UNESCO.

Appendix V

The National Assembly: A Circus of Lies and Hypocrisy

http://www.cmaq.net/en/node/26984