In Ontario election, Communists put forward a program for working-class youth

Comrade Cashton Perry, member of the Central Committee of the YCL-LJC, gave a speech on February 18 as the Communist Party candidate for Ottawa Centre, at a rally at the Happy Goat Cafe alongside former General Secretary of the YCL-LJC and current Secretary of the Communist Party Ontario Committee, comrade Drew Garvie.

Hello friends and comrades, my name is Cashton Perry, and I’m the candidate in Ottawa Centre for the Communist Party in this election. I am also the organizer of the Young Communist League club in Ottawa. I am a manufacturing worker and graduate of the welding program at Algonquin College. My candidacy comes with a very direct understanding of the issues of working-class youth. Although I may not have a formal education in politics, I have, as any good YCL member has, learned to struggle, and struggled in order to learn. What has been made clear to me, and we aim to make clear to all working and oppressed people, is that politics is not a game for the rich and “educated”, it is a struggle between classes for the victory of their interests. This means that workers, whether or not they like it, whether it is “their thing” or not, must be engaged in this struggle, and must always strive to learn to better their chances in the struggle, unless they hope to face more of the same exploitation day after day, intensifying as the  previously won protections we enjoy are stripped away from us by our exploiters. This is why I, as someone who is merely a worker who understands our common interest, and is willing to fight, is running in this election. 

Putting forward a working-class perspective

We are living through what is commonly recognized as many simultaneous crises, from the cost of living, to the climate, to the disastrous state of our healthcare, education, and transit systems, and war.

In Ottawa, we are well aware of the failures of the so-called “public private partnership” model which the line 1 LRT is under, leading to constant service disruption and unreliability. This is on top of ever increasing fare costs, some of the highest in Canada, with simultaneous cuts to transit budgets. 

Our colleges and universities are suffering from chronic underfunding, with Algonquin College planning on cutting more than 30 programs recently and even planning on closing their campus in Perth by next year. Carleton and uOttawa are facing similar struggles with budgets, with talk of potential doubling of average class sizes at carleton. Meanwhile, students are burdened with an average of $30,000 of debt after leaving post secondary, as funding for education has been shifted to students, as well as institutional investments, some of which are complicit in Israeli apartheid, land theft, and genocide. 

To make it through these crises and to solve them leaves little room for error in our understanding. We must not make the mistake of treating all of these as separate crises where tweaks in policy in each area will solve them all individually, we must understand them as each being a particular expression of the general crisis of capitalism. This in turn means that our solution must be to take on not only the immediate effects of the crisis, fighting against the recent attacks on the rights of the masses to a decent life and planet, but to look forward to replacing the system which inevitably causes these crises, capitalism, and its highest stage, imperialism. This begins with putting forward a People’s Alternative that comprehensively shifts the balance of power away from the corporations, landlords, and the rich, and towards the working class and its allies. 

Getting organized

During this election our role is to put this platform to the workers of Ottawa, the peace movement, the student movement, and all who are oppressed by this system, in order to expand what is seen as possible, and to use this moment to agitate and organize those who are fed up with more of the same pro-corporate policies coming from the current big parties. There is a current political volatility, with Trump’s open hostility towards the national sovereignty of many countries including Canada, which has exposed the subservience of the Canadian capitalist class and their parties to U.S. imperialism. This must be an area where we very clearly distinguish ourselves, being a party of the working class, which is the only class that can lead the fight in not only obtaining real Canadian sovereignty on all fronts, political, economic, military, etc. but is objectively allied in the struggle for the sovereignty of indigenous nations against the monopolies and the Canadian state.

We must do this, first, by leaving all coercive trade agreements, alliances, or other instruments which bind us to US imperialist interests, this means leaving NATO and NORAD, and the USMCA. Secondly, we must put under public ownership industries which, under private, for-profit ownership, are unable to expand and serve the needs of the people, but also are at risk of cutting thousands of jobs as a response to Trump’s tariffs, primarily natural resources, energy production, steel, and auto manufacturing. This is the only response which can guarantee that the interests of the working class are put above the multinational corporations. This must be put forward as not only a possibility, but a necessity given the trajectory of an imperialist U.S. in decay lashing out for any final scraps of profit it can secure, with Canada in its crosshairs. 

While it is very important to understand what policies we are fighting for, and to accurately understand how to solve the crisis facing us, it is equally important to make sure that these policies are not left in our pamphlets or on our website. Our party does not stop its work when the elections are over. We must continue to build the working-class movement for the overthrow of the capitalist system at all times, because it is pushing against us with much more force at all times.

Youth turning to the party, renewal

I believe it is representative of a larger shift in consciousness that our party is growing younger. Young people are becoming aware, in the best of cases with the help of the YCL-LJC, that there is no more room for politics of despair. An apathetic, nihilistic, or defeatist approach to politics will not do us any good. We need to get organized, and fight for our future, to fight for socialism, and that’s exactly what our party aims to do.