My interview with Tom McConnell of CKTB 610AM as the Communist Party candidate for St. Catharines in the Ontario provincial election
Surprise Attack! Revolution carried through by small conscious minorities
Kabul in the Republican Revolution of 1973
Thursday, May 31, 2018
Wednesday, May 30, 2018
Few attend lackluster St. Catharines riding debate (Ontario Provincial Election St. Catharines Riding)
https://www.stcatharinesstandard.ca/news/niagara-region/2018/05/30/few-attend-lackluster-st-catharines-riding-debate.html
Few attend lackluster St. Catharines riding debate
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There were few fireworks during a sparsely attended all candidates debate for the provincial riding of St. Catharines Tuesday evening, with candidates hewing closely to scripted talking points and party platform planks.
About 50 people showed up to the Greater Niagara Chamber of Commerce hosted debate< at the St. Catharines Collegiate to listen to Liberal Jim Bradley, NDP candidate Jennie Stevens, PC hopeful Sandie Bellows, Green Party candidate Colin Ryrie, Communist candidate Saleh Waziruddin and Jim Fannon from the None of the Above Party.
Libertarian candidate Daniel Tisi and Cultural Action Party of Ontario candidate Duke Willis did not attend the debate.
Libertarian candidate Daniel Tisi and Cultural Action Party of Ontario candidate Duke Willis did not attend the debate.
The candidates were asked about the opioid crisis, affordable housing and health care among other issues.
Speaking mostly in generalities and not facing any cross-examination of their answers during the hour-long debate, the candidates rarely mentioned the focus of the provincial campaign - the party leaders. Bradley did not mention Liberal leader Kathleen Wynne, while Bellows and Stevens only referred to PC leader Doug Ford and NDP leader Andrea Horwath twice each and only in passing.
The candidates also largely avoided attacking the platform of their opponent's parties. Bradley, without mentioning the NDP or Tories, warned of the possible deleterious effects deep tax cuts would have on health care while Fannon urged voters to cast a ballot for anyone other than the three major parties.
Waziruddin got the most enthusiastic response from the small audience when he said the Tories' health care plan is like Donald Trump tax returns: "It might never be released."
The only direct interaction between candidates came after a question on health care when Bellows said the Tories had learned from past health care cuts made the last time they were in power and noted the "NDP made cuts too."
"Remember Tommy Douglas? He's the reason you get free hip replacements. We didn't cut," said Stevens, referring to late Saskatchewan premier and federal NDP leader who is considered the father of Canadian universal health care.
Voters to go to the polls on June 7.
Tuesday, May 29, 2018
Communist party represented in St. Catharines riding (Niagara This Week)
NEWS
Saleh Waziruddin one of 12 Communist candidates in provincial election
Tuesday, May 29, 2018
Saleh Waziruddin will once again be carrying the Communist party banner in St. Catharines.
The St. Catharines resident has previously ran twice in the riding provincially and federally, and continues to be passionate about the party’s platform and advocate or change.
“I am running because we need MPPs who represent the majority of us conscripted into poverty and unemployment, starting with defending and extending the new minimum wage and labour standards” said Waziruddin.
“The Liberal government has already taken away holiday pay from part-time workers, saying it's not fair to full timers, but that's not true — it doesn't affect full-timers,” he added. “If you work you should be paid for the holiday, that's the point of having stat holidays.”
He is also advocating for the elimination of “deeming” deductions of minimum wage from injured workers' compensation because they are assumed or “deemed” to working a minimum-wage job.
Waziruddin has also set his sights on reform to the Niagara Peninsula Conservation Authority board. He says the board should be replaced, part of a special resolution the Communist party called for in June 2017.
“They're supposed to be protecting the environment,” he said, adding they appear more focused on economic development. “They're giving away land which will choke off the few remaining wetlands we have left in the world. By treaty obligations there is supposed to more consultation with First Nations, which has not been done.”
Waziruddin encourages residents to familiarize themselves with the party’s plan at http://communistpartyontario.ca. From electoral reform job creation, to expanding health care to include full coverage of services such as dental care, vision care, pharmacare, mental health care and long-term care, to developing a new funding program for a proposed, single, secular public school system, he said there are many planks that appeal to electors in Ontario. There is also a pledge to build 200,000 affordable housing units over four years, the introduction of free public child care available 24 hours a day, transit expansion and enhanced municipal funding.
The party, he said, will finance its platform through doubling the corporate tax rate, which Waziruddin said would still be low for industrialized countries, and restoring the corporate capital tax which was dropped to zero in 2010.
“Instead of giving away the wealth we create to corporations which were sitting on the money instead of investing it, we should take it back for our basic needs,” he said.
Waziruddin says he hopes residents will see the benefits of a Communist choice at Queen’s Park.
“Look at our platform. It’s policies which take care of all peoples’ needs,” he said, adding voters who want to “make their vote count” should look to the Communists.
Wednesday, May 16, 2018
My 2 minute spot on YourTV Niagara after the St. Catharines Ontario Election debate
YourTV Niagara (formerly Cogeco) excluded me again from the main debate after including me in an earlier election. They gave me a 2 minute spot which aired immediately after the debate where I was able to raise many of the issues I am campaigning on.
The 2 minute clip is also on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYtSyjHImEE&t=45sWednesday, August 2, 2017
Letter to the People's Voice editor on Jeremy Corbyn, Bernie Sanders
Your June 16-30, 2017 issue editorial “New Hope for Working People” says Jeremy Corbyn “campaigned as a socialist” and notes the “continuing popularity of Bernie Sanders”.
I went through the Labour Party Manifesto for 2017 and found, though it has many good things, it has no socialism. They promised to reverse some privatization. The investment bank they proposed is based on private capital. They promised promoting cooperatives and worker buy-outs, which are short of ownership by the working class as a class i.e. through the state. Even the Communist Party of Britain, which I think would be in the thick of it, has not said Corbyn campaigned as a socialist.
As for Bernie Sanders' popularity, alas Donald Trump enjoys continuing popularity as well. Bernie Sanders has endorsed Donald Trump's policy on North Korea, has demonized the elected leaders of Venezuela and Syria as “vicious dictators”, and uses air quotes when mentioning Israel's human rights violations. I think air quotes should be reserved for any suggestion that politicians like these are “socialist”.
Closer to home, the BC Greens have already told the BC NDP that card-check union recognition will “never happen”.
The myth that “working people reject the concept of socialism”, which your editorial said was “decisively disproven” by the Labour Party's performance (though it was a loss) in the UK election, and perhaps also by the NDP-Green Party accord (though the Liberals won the most votes), was disproved much earlier by veritable socialist revolutions in Russia and Cuba, among other places, and the popular support they enjoy. However, though it was disproved long ago, I think we will find this myth still has some life left, despite Corbyn, Sanders, and the BC NDP-Green accord.
Saleh Waziruddin (St. Catharines, Ontario)
Friday, March 17, 2017
Statistics Canada report released on IWD breaks down the gender pay and employment gaps
(Slightly edited from version published in the People’s Voice newspaper, March 17, 2017)
by Saleh Waziruddin
Even if women worked the same exact same jobs as men 77% of the gender pay gap would persist, according “Women and Paid Work”, a Statistics Canada report by Melissa Moyser (PhD) published on International Women's Day as part of the series “Women in Canada: A Gender-Based Statistical Report”. Women are paid 87 cents for every dollar men are per hour, but this would be as much as 97 cents if women were paid the same as men within the same occupation (not just industry). In manual labour jobs men are paid $7.24/hour more than women, but even in predominantly female jobs women were paid $4.60/hour less than men for the same work.
The report recognizes that most of the gender pay gap is from patriarchy directly, much more than from the gendering of labour under capitalism into predominantly male and female jobs and industries. This is also confirmed by a 2015 study by Tammy Schirle which showed the gender pay gap between provinces was mostly due to the gap within the same occupation in each province rather than the difference between provinces in industries and jobs. A 1996 study by Michael Kidd and Michael Shannon showed the more detailed the job classification that statistics are taken from, the greater the gender pay gap, and concluded that the gap cannot be explained by the individual or personal characteristics of the workers themselves, suggesting it is due to patriarchy directly.
The Statistics Canada report also shows that in large cities high day-care costs are directly associated with large gender employment gaps. Toronto, with the highest day-care costs in the country, had a gender employment gap of 12.6%, and in Vancouver (one of the highest day-care costs) it was 11.8%. The effect is more obvious when we consider Quebec has a low-cost publicly subsidized childcare program, with Montreal having an employment gap of 6.4%. In Ottawa the employment gap is 7.3% but across the river into Quebec the gap is only 2.6% in Gatineau.
Women had twice as many absences from work as men because of family responsibilities. Over the working life this adds up to an average of one and a half years away from work for women but only eights months for men.
Three quarters of part-time workers are women, and one quarter of them said caring for children was the reason they are not full-time vs only 3.3% for men. The proportion of workers working more than one job within each gender has flipped from 1976. Workers with multiple jobs went down by almost half from 2.8% to 1.7% for men but for women this almost doubled from 2.8% to 4.5%. Almost 40% of women with multiple jobs have a part-time as their main job, but this is less than 20% for men.
The report also shows the importance of access to post-secondary education for women's equality. The gap in employment rate between having a high-school vs a college degree was 13.8% for women but just 8% for men.
Statistics Canada found the gendering of jobs is uneven and has gotten worse since 1976. Women who work are twice as concentrated into predominantly female jobs than men are into predominantly male jobs since then. The proportion of women who are in predominantly female jobs has almost doubled since 1976 from 35% to 60%. In computer science jobs the proportion of women has actually decreased since 1987.
Women are more likely to work in jobs with the lowest 20% of wages than in jobs with the top 20% of wages, and the opposite is true for men. Even when they require the same skill level (education and training), predominantly male jobs have higher wages than predominantly female jobs, often by more than $4/hour.
The report recognizes that men in predominantly female jobs are often in a “glass escalator” (“glass” because it is “invisible”, “escalator” because men are promoted even when they don't want to be). This phenomenon was first recognized in a 1992 paper by Christine Williams, and subsequent research shows this mainly applies to white men, heterosexual or not openly queer, with citizenship. At the other end of the spectrum the statistics for women's wages don't reflect the lower wages due to inequality of women of colour, openly queer women, transwomen, and non-citizen women. This means the inequality within predominantly female jobs is even higher than it already appears from statistics which look at gender without further breaking down by race, sexuality, citizenship, or transgender status.
A 1996 comparison of the gender pay gap between Canada and Australia in another paper by Michael Kidd and Michael Shannon showed that the gap was much narrower in Australia, both due to a stronger labour movement but also because equity was driven pro-actively rather than case-by-case as in Canada. At the time of the study 80% of Australian workers' wages were covered by decisions made by federal tribunals.
A 1994 study by Denise Doiron and Craig Riddell found that the decrease in the gender unionization gap in Canada between 1981 and 1988 prevented an increase in the gender pay gap for all workers (with or without a union) of 7 percent. This means without the increased unionization of women relative to men, all women would have a gender pay gap that would have been worse in 1988 (and possibly now) than it was back in the early 1980s.
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