The Red Review | Issue #17 (February 2025)
The Trudeau Legacy
by Gary Porter
Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau announced on January 6, 2025 that he would resign effective when the Liberal party had selected a new leader. The Governor General granted his request to prorogue Parliament until March 24. All bills before Parliament, for example the bill to increase capital gains tax inclusion rates, have died on the order paper.
Now there will be a rapid leadership contest to settle on the next ruling class politico who will lead the principal party of the Canadian bourgeoisie. Red Review will have more to say on that subject. But here we discuss the legacy of Trudeau and his 10-year term as Prime Minister.
In 2015 as Trudeau and his new cabinet, over half female, came striding up the driveway to the Governor General’s mansion, Rideau Hall, to be sworn in, there was a feeling of relief in Canada- the end of the reign of the autocratic and deeply racist Stephen Harper. Trudeau spoke of a future in Canada of “sunny ways”. We will look at a few examples on key issues, to assess how Trudeau performed?
51st State? No thanks!
by Barry Weisleder
The Canadian ruling elite is imperialist in its own right, commanding some of the biggest corporations in the world, particularly prominent in the fields of banking, mining, energy resources, forestry, retail and manufacturing. Unsurprisingly, American Capital covets that wealth as Washington's share of global production and its military heft declines relative to other powers. That reality is the background to threats issued by U.S. President Donald Trump to "annex by force" Greenland and the Panama Canal, and to absorb by "economic pressure" the Canadian state and its riches.
A major menace is the 25 per cent tariff that Trump threatens to impose on all imports from Canada to the USA. He proposes to enact similar tariffs on goods from Mexico, and to further increase such taxes on trade with China and other countries which do not accede to his often unspecified demands. However, curbing 'illegal' migration and the passage of illicit drugs at border points are often mentioned, along with demands that Ottawa spend more on its military and its charter membership in NATO.
Behind the Dismemberment of Syria
by Barry Weisleder
In mid-December 2024 a stunning series of events unfolded in the already fragmented state of Syria in West Asia. The dictatorship of Bashar al Assad suddenly fell to a motley coalition of military forces, including former affiliates of Isis, led by Ahmed al-Sharaa. Assad ignominiously fled to Moscow. The insurgent fighters, so-called 'rebels', are backed by Turkiye, Washington and the Zionist state. For fifty years, the Assad family ruled Syria, favouring the relatively privileged Alawite religious sect over other branches of Islam. Bashar, son of Hafez al Assad (president from 1971 - 2000), violently suppressed a democratic internal uprising in 2011 -- part of the inspiring Arab Spring that flowered from Tunisia to Egypt, and beyond.
To be clear, while the Assad regime was starved by severe U.S.-imposed economic sanctions, it fell also due to its own criminal deeds. It shocked the world with the horrific anti-civilian weapon known as "barrel bombs". It filled its nightmarish prisons with political dissidents, starving and torturing them. It turned to the mass production and sale of addictive drugs to circumnavigate economic sanctions and keep the regime financially afloat.
The Role of the Pro-Israel Lobby
by John Clarke
Toward the end of October, the fervently pro-Israel B’nai Brith Canada issued a “Seven-Point Plan to Combat Antisemitism” claiming that anti-Jewish sentiment has “risen exponentially” since October 7, 2023. The proposed plan is, predictably, focused on stifling disagreement with the political ideology of Zionism.
On the heels of this initiative, the Trudeau government launched an “IHRA Handbook” that seeks to extend and strengthen the role of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism in a range of areas, including law enforcement. This infamous definition, as Independent Jewish Voices has put it, “equates criticism of Israel and of Zionism with antisemitism using this logic: antisemitism is hatred of Jews; Jewish identity and Zionism are inseparable; anti-Zionism is therefore a form of antisemitism.”
The New Denial of Imperialism on the Left
by John Wilson
The following is a review of The New Denial of Imperialism on the Left, by John Bellamy Foster, Editor, Monthly Review, November 2024.
In the beginning of the article, Foster states: "It is a sign of the structural crisis of capital in our time that not since the onset of the First World War and the dissolution of the Second International - during which nearly all the social democratic parties joined the inter-imperialist war on the side of their respective nation-states - has the split on imperialism on the left taken on such serious dimensions."
“Denial of imperialism dates back to the Fabian Society in Britain and was reflected in the social chauvinism of the main European social democratic parties at the time of First World War.” After the Second World War period, various national liberation struggles inspired Western socialists to adopt strongly anti-imperialist stances. This began to fade in the aftermath of the anti-Vietnam war movement in the early 1970’s.
Unify the Political Left without Sidestepping the Needed Debates!
by Bernard Rioux
Bernard Rioux is well known as the editor of Presse-toi à gauche! But his activist journey began more than 50 years ago. We asked him to talk to us about his experience in all these years of activism in the Quebec left. This is not only a personal assessment, but also the assessment of an activist generation.
André Frappier - Can you tell us about your early youth, what influenced you culturally and politically?
Bernard Rioux - I was born in 1949 in Matane. My childhood took place on a farm, in a self-subsistence economy. I was associated with farm work from a very young age. My maternal grandparents lived with us, uncles and aunts as well: a real extended family. My father had married his neighbor. Over the years, the parents of my father and mother had given parts of their land to their children. Thus, along five or six kilometers of Boulevard Desjardins, there were many cousins all part of an extensive family group.
66th Anniversary of the Cuban Revolution
We salute the 66th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution on Jan. 1st! A revolution that has been heroically steadfast in its principled selfless internationalism and where the heartbeat of the revolution has always been and will always be with the humbles of the world!
The march of the Combative People on Dec. 20 in front of the U.S. Embassy in Havana where 500,000 Cubans came together in Havana- as well as other cities across the island- to condemn the genocidal blockade of Cuba and the its inclusion in the "state sponsors of terrorism" list by the U.S. government; president Miguel Diaz-Canel Bermudez addressed the united masses: