First of all, it's not about cuts.

The Liberal government of British Columbia lied its way into power. Then it declared war. This is class war, waged by a ruling class terrified and infuriated by any constraint on their ability to suck profits out of the land, the sea, and the people of British Columbia.

The Liberal government declared war on unions. It's banning the right to strike in the public sector, first with transit workers, then with nurses, then with teachers. It imposed contracts, and then turned around and tore them up. It's getting ready to savage employment standards, workers compensation, and so much more...

It declared war on parents in general and women in particular. Education Minister Christy Clark has free daycare, but poor women have been stripped of it.

It declared war on aboriginal people, using the land-claims referendum as an election ploy, and a direct appeal to racism.

It declared war on seniors, with its Pharmacare cuts and yanking their transit passes.

It's declaring war on students, with an explosive rise in tuition fees looming on the horizon.

It's declaring war on every small town in B.C., with the loss of their hospitals, the closure of their highways yards, the transfer of their courthouses, the devastation of their local economies.

It's told the poor they may as well go to jail now, with welfare cuts, with social housing cuts, with the minimum wage slashed to ribbons. Landlords are cheering; tenants are faced with rents they cannot afford or the street.

It's declaring war on children, with reductions in school funding and increased class sizes.

And it's declaring war on just about everyone through health care cuts designed to create a crisis and intended to lay the basis for the destruction of public health and the introduction of health-for-profit.

A government of greed and cruelty...

This is a government of greed and cruelty and violence. It's a government of genteel Point Grey millionaires and regional power brokers who will send the police and thugs to do their dirty work for them, while they cash in. It's a government, above all, of cynics and liars, who chant their mantra of "there is no money, there is no money" at the same time as they're taking the money and lining their friends' pockets with it. The money is there, only they've chosen to skim off $1.6 billion in tax cuts for their friends. The money is there; only they're going to cut revenues by privatizing B.C. Hydro (and make a bundle for more of their friends in the process).

Let's not have any illusions. People are going to die because of this government.

Some will die waiting to get into emergency rooms. Some will freeze to death, living under their truck for shelter. Some will die from tainted water, or from workplace speedup. Some will be shot to death at roadblocks, defending their right to lands that were never ceded.

We're at war, because the Campbell government has declared war. Mind you, it has no mandate whatever to do what it's doing. This government was elected with a rigged system that saw a 59% majority (with a small turnout) turned into 97% of the seats. But even allowing for that, Gordon Campbell was only able to buy his way into power because he ran on a highly developed programme of conscious, premeditated, deliberate lies. He lied about cuts to social services. He lied about layoffs in the public sector. He lied about tearing up contracts. There is even delightful taped footage of Campbell lying about whether he would lie to us once he got into office. This government has no legitimacy. It did not run on the platform of union-busting and social destruction that it's now implementing. It lied its way into power. It has no mandate. We are not bound to the results of an election won by fraud.

Gordon Campbell has declared war, and like it or not, we have to recognize that reality. We can fight, or we can surrender and place our selves at the mercy of these lying, fraudulent, rip-off artists.

We want to fight!

We have to respond as decisively and firmly as our enemy in Victoria. We need to match the ferocity of the attack by organizing the largest, broadest, most diverse and most militant coalition seen since the Solidarity movement of 1983. Hell! Since the unemployed mobilizations of the 30's! Since the mobilizations of workers and their allies during the first decades of the 20th century that won the things Campbell wants to take away. Such a coalition has already begun to form in the Lower Mainland. For it to meet the challenges facing all of us, a number of issues need to be dealt with successfully.

What sort of coalition do we need to build?

We need an inclusive coalition. We have to build an opposition incorporating every group and organization, every social movement and every community possible. We need to reach out to every union, and every unorganized workplace. We need women, First Nations, gays and lesbians, anarchists, faith communities, poor people, environmental activists, tenants and others all around the same table, planning with one another, learning from one another, and over time coming up with a common programme of demands.

It needs to be a democratic coalition. Its structures must allow for the full participation of all activists interesting in organizing against the Liberal attack. These structures must be designed to facilitate the fullest freedom of speech; every voice must be heard in order to make it possible to figure out how to chart the way forward. Every individual and group active in building the coalition must have the right to distribute their literature and argue for their positions to be adopted by the entire coalition. And, of course, the coalition should function on the basis of democracy. Where possible, decisions should be adopted by consensus; where it is not possible to arrive at unanimous agreement, decisions should be taken by majority vote.

It needs to be a united coalition. We will need to develop an overall set of demands that can unite all sectors of the opposition to the Campbell regime, and especially that can bridge the divide between unions and all the other groups affected. This has to be accompanied by developing a genuine unity in action between all these groups, including a clear agreement by all participants on what would constitute an outcome acceptable to all. This means rejecting any concessions the Liberals may make to one sector to split our opposition, like Social Credit did with the Kelowna accord. Our goals and our strategy have to be worked out with everyone sitting around the same table. It is very significant, and quite ominous, that this has not happened so far.

The coalition we need to build has to be a militant coalition. It's no longer legal for a nurse or a teacher even to go on strike in British Columbia. Clearly, any successful fightback that will have any chance of defeating Campbell's attack will require forms of struggle that go beyond the limitations of the laws our enemy will pass. The debates we will need should not be whether any given tactic is legal or not, but whether it is effective - whether it really puts the heat on Campbell, whether is helps us unify our ranks or not, whether it increases our ranks or not, whether it helps us to reach out and draw others into opposition or not.

The BC Fed Programme is weak but it is a beginning.

Despite serious weaknesses and omissions, the B.C. Federation of Labour's "Alternative Programme" provides a starting point for a programme of struggle. It currently reads as follows:

"A practical eight-point program to boost the economy, while protecting health, education and public services

The glaring weaknesses of the Fed's 8-point programme include an absolute silence on women's demands, as well as issues affecting seniors (bus passes, Pharmacare cuts), the poor (thousands being cut off welfare and privatization of social assistance), tenants, students and others. These silences will need to be addressed in developing an adequate Action Programme. But the real problem here doesn't lie with the Fed's programme, because it can be revised, added to and strengthened.

The real problem is that at this point there is no reason at all to believe that the leadership of the B.C. Federation of Labour intends to conduct any sort of a serious fight.

A ghost from the past

There are two spectres confronting us. One you can see, and he's Gordon Campbell.

The other is Jack Munro.

If we are to have any hope of organizing a successful fight, if we are to make any attempt at mounting a serious resistance, we have to confront the legacy of Solidarity. The 1983 Kelowna Accord and the sellout of the social movements (and the unions) carried out not just by Jack Munro but by the leadership of the B.C. Federation of Labour created scars that still exist today. That betrayal created a level of suspicion and distrust (especially among community organizations and public sector unions) that has never gone away. The lesson of that struggle was that despite all its rhetoric of solidarity and militancy, the then leadership of the Fed was perfectly willing to sell out its allies in the community organizations (and its own union members, laid off by the thousands) at the first possible opportunity.

This mistrust is only compounded a thousand-fold when history is clearly already beginning to repeat itself:

• For example- instead of starting to develop demands, programme and strategy through the direct participation of all the affected groups, union and non-union, the Fed unilaterally wrote its own programme. As an afterthought, there was some consultation with some handpicked groups. This is not the way to build an alliance of equals.
• For example- the slogan of the B.C. Government and Service Employees' Union ("The Cuts Go Too Deep") implies that some cuts would be acceptable, and is clearly intended to signal to the Liberals that some sort of "compromise" can be worked out in the back rooms.
• The February 23 demonstration against the budget at the Legislature in Victoria is inaccessible to most people in Vancouver, yet leaders of the union movement are arguing against a simultaneous demonstration in Vancouver for the thousands who can't get on board the ferries to show their opposition.
• Worse, these same leaders want to delay any Lower Mainland demonstration until some vague time in the future ("maybe May"), instead of reaching out now to the thousands of people, previously inactive or even former Liberal supporters, who are rallying and organizing across the region.
• There is nothing coming from the leaders of the Fed to explain to everyone the ferocity and determination that will be required to carry out this fight with any hope of beating off Campbell's offensive. Their silence here speaks volumes. This hesitancy and equivocation spells defeat if we don't take steps to oppose it. The Fed leadership is pinning all its hopes on the ballot box, first in the municipal elections next November and then provincially, four years down the road.

There is no point fighting unless you fight to win...

War has been declared. We have to act on that.

A few token rallies now will do nothing to stop Campbell. We have to organize the largest, most militant response that B.C. has ever seen. It has to involve mass demonstrations, and if the teachers can get out 11,000 by themselves we should be trying for much, much more. It has to involve community organizing. (Look at how they're organizing to defend Delta Hospital if you want a positive example.) It will have to involve every form of militant action, including boycotts, occupations, blockades, legal and illegal strikes. We need to develop a concerted plan to make it impossible for Gordon Campbell to implement his attack. We need to be prepared to disrupt this government economically and politically in order to prevent it from trashing our lives with measures it has received no mandate to introduce. And we need to do all this in the framework of preparing the material conditions, and above all the unity, that will make it possible to launch a political strike against this government, and to shut down the economy and infrastructure of B.C. until Campbell's campaign of repression is halted.

There is nothing in the current conduct of the Fed leadership that gives the slightest indication they are interested in organizing such a fightback. There is nothing in their history to make us hold our breath waiting. So we'll have to do it ourselves.

For militant opposition, independent from the bureaucracy...

Just because the Fed leadership doesn't want a militant fightback doesn't mean that union militants or union locals or even whole unions don't. We've seen the teachers fighting, and we've seen the nurses too. A recent Vancouver District Labour Council/community meeting showed a deep sentiment among labour activists as well as community groups for a Vancouver demonstration soon. Demonstrations are being organized and committees are being formed across the province. There are plenty of folks out there to provide the skeleton of a province-wide network to push for a militant plan of action that can win. We need to be in touch with each other, to organize, and to act.

Who are We? What do we want?

The analysis above has been prepared by the Vancouver branch of the New Socialist Group, a small organization of revolutionary socialists. We are offering it up for debate and comments. If you agree with most of it, we would like to hear from you. We want to help build a network of activists across the province that can work together to develop and push for the most militant and effective tactics in defeating the offensive launched by the Campbell government.