Upcoming Provincial Election Aims to Deliver New Brunswick to the United States of North American Monopolies - TML Correspondent in New Brunswick - An election is scheduled in New Brunswick on Monday, September 22, 2014. In Canada as in other capitalist countries, elections are held to sort out contradictions in the ranks of the rich and strengthen the rule over the people and society. This is also the case in New Brunswick, where even the overwhelming dominance of one particular monopoly group -- the Irvings -- does not alter the basic truth of the competition within the ruling circles for domination. At dissolution of the Legislature in Fredericton late last spring, the Progressive Conservatives led by David Alward held 42 seats, the Liberals under Brian Gallant 13 seats, the NDP under Dominic Cardy, the Green Party under David Coon and all other registered parties, zero seats. At the close of candidate nominations on September 2, five parties -- the Conservatives, Liberals, NDP, Green and Peoples Alliance -- had fielded candidates. There are six fewer seats in the Legislature: 49 instead of 55. The Conservatives, Liberals and NDP are each fielding a full slate of 49 candidates. The Green Party is fielding 46 candidates and the Peoples Alliance, 18. In addition, nine independents are in the running.[1] Overwhelmingly, the media coverage of the election campaign has consisted of variations on the theme of what team and leader will pull the rabbit out of the hat on election night, according to 1,001 speculations as to the meaning of these numbers. Meanwhile, much evidence or many reminders of the peoples spontaneous movement in directions not helpful to the interests of the rich are throughly buried, recalled only fleetingly and indirectly in the form of platform proposals advocating greater scrutiny of police arrests during demonstrations, etc. As little as possible is mentioned about the months-long standoff between the indigenous Mikmaq First Nations of Kent and Northumberland counties and the RCMP in eastern New Brunswick, or the fracking exploration of deposits of shale natural gas in the general vicinity of Rexton, NB by SWN Resources which sparked this struggle.[2] Also remaining unmentioned was the massive participation of large numbers of unemployed miners, fishermen and forestry workers in numerous demonstrations protesting cuts to employment insurance in northern New Brunswick and the neighbouring Gaspé region of eastern Quebec.[3] Strengthening the impression that there is nothing of political or economic consequence going on in what the tourism brochures call Canadas Picture Province, the current election campaign has been dominated by set-piece repetitions of official policy positions of the parties participating in the elections. From the facts presented in the monopoly media during elections, one would never guess that the rich have a strategy and there is a fight in their ranks over how it is to be implemented. The relevant and most essential current elements of this strategy are as follows: The rail and ship transport of crude oil cargoes for refining into petroleum products at the Irvings 300,000-barrel-a-day facility on Courtenay Bay at East Saint John -- the highest-capacity oil refinery in Canada -- will enjoy priority and minimal regulatory interference from the next administration in Fredericton. The rail transport arrangements that contributed to the Lac Mégantic disaster back in July 2013 have remained in place, unaffected by the explosion or the collapse of the Irvings main railway partner MMA, which declared bankruptcy shortly after the Lac Mégantic disaster. The completion of the liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal on tidewater (the Bay of Fundy), at Coleson Cove near the Irving oil refinery, will put Saint John on the map as never before as one of the first, modernized Atlantic coast LNG terminals within six days voyage of LNG terminals on the Atlantic coast of western Europe. These connect to the gas pipeline network of the European continent. In the course of the deepening conflict between the U.S. and Russia this spring and summer, the Obama Administration rashly promised that the Americas could replace the Russian sources of natural gas that currently turn the wheels of industry in Norway, Sweden, Germany, Italy and France (to name a few). The Irvings role in these particular energy corridor arrangements are one piece of a much larger system and network of energy corridors that run the length and breadth of Canada, the United States and Mexico. This collection of energy corridors forms the backbone of transport, industry and energy supplies for the entire United States of North American Monopolies. Irving Familys Influence and Control over Politics and the Economy In New Brunswick, the monopoly bourgeoisie is led (or overwhelmed in this case) by the Irving family. The Irvings actually maintain two corporate HQ. From Saint John, NB, they direct all their industrial interests: - in oil refining and tanker fleets; - English-language daily newspapers across the province of New Brunswick; - commercial English-language radio and TV; - commercial trucking fleets; - thousands of kilometres of railway track in the U.S. state of Maine and the Canadian provinces of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia; - shipyards in Nova Scotia involved in offshore oil rig servicing, including the Halifax Shipyard which is the construction centre for the coming generation of warships for the Canadian and U.S. navies; - and forest products. Meanwhile, from Hamilton, Bermuda, the family trust set up by the founding patriarch K.C. Irving is managed. According to the Globe and Mails annual Report on Business listings, the Irving family is the second-wealthiest, by corporate assets, in Canada, after the Thomson family. The Irvings raise up and destroy political party leaders and their parties as their interests require. These leaders and parties may be provincially-based or New Brunswick representatives of the main federal parties. The main tendency consistently since the early 1950s has been to support the federal Liberal party and its New Brunswick wing. Exceptionally, they supported the anti-Ontario factions of the Diefenbaker Conservative administrations and the anti-Quebec wings of the Mulroney Conservative administrations. Currently they continue to support the Harper Conservative majority government, which awarded them a 20-year shipbuilding contract in October 2011 -- shortly after the federal election in which Harper finally won a parliamentary majority -- to produce 23 warships for the Canadian navy as part of the National Defence Procurement Program. Meanwhile, the Irvings have been positioning themselves to benefit in the event of a Trudeau Liberal victory in the federal election expected in October 2015. The Irvings also strongly supported the current provincial Conservative government of David Alward. This departure from backing the provincial Liberals was the result of the last provincial Liberal governments unsuccessful attempt to sell the provincial electric power monopoly NB Power to Hydro Quebec. Such a sale raised a prospect that was anathema to the Irvings, who have enjoyed decades of special arrangements with NB Power that delivered its industries megawatts of power priced far below its actual cost of production. In the current campaign, they have swung again behind the Liberals. Notes 1. The Liberal opposition has been polling 25 percentage points ahead of the Alward government since the election was called. Similar to the Dexter NDP governments reaction to strong Liberal opposition polling against it in Nova Scotia last autumn, the sole hope of the incumbent government in Fredericton at the moment (two weeks from Election Day) is that the electorate gives it a second term. The NDP provincial government of Darrell Dexter tried to convince itself that since no Nova Scotia government over the previous 150 years had ever been defeated on its second appearance at the polls, it would magically capture a second term in office. The McNeill Liberals not only defeated them but left them in third place behind the Conservatives. The number of seats at the dissolution of the Legislature as well as polling numbers are no longer relevant to predicting the results of an election. Today, the two-party system which provided a parliamentary equilibrium of exchanging one party for another when the people got fed up, no longer functions. Elections are disinformation campaigns which micro-target voters and fail to gauge the popular will so as to transform it into the legal will. In British Columbia, the party-in-office was able to stay in power despite an initial groundswell of opposition at the time the election was called, in favour of the larger of two opposition parties, the NDP. In Ontario, such a bogeyman was created of the Hudak Conservatives that the labour movement could not rally behind a program to hold all parties in check with a minority government and the Liberals were elected with a majority. As in Ontario, Quebec went into an election supported by a minority representation in the National Assembly. In Ontario, the governing party was six seats short of a majority, while the Marois PQ government was nine seats short of a governing majority for passing its legislative program in a 125-seat National Assembly when it called the election last spring. The focus of media coverage at the time succeeded in diverting people from looking beneath the isolated development of bourgeois parties, leaders and their campaigns, at the actual program they were interested to implement. 2. For more detail, look for the articles filed from Rexton by Miles Howe at mediacoop.ca. 3. After the Harper Conservatives won their first parliamentary majority in the October 2011 federal election, the federal government was confronted with evidence from across the country that its biggest so-called job creation program -- comprising many local initiatives left unfinished or unlaunched under the preceding Liberal federal government of Paul Martin -- made no dent whatsoever in the established pattern of declining full-time employment in all sections of industrial production.
Posted on: Sun, 07 Sep 2014 19:04:55 +0000
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