Is anyone in Ottawa marching through Centretown today? If you try, will you end up fighting PSAC marshalls? What would JB McLachlan do?
As much as Ottawa needs a counterprotest and should have had a major action within days of the far right's arrival, it is a travesty that today's march is starting at Lansdowne Park instead of a downtown location by the transitway where more people could get to it directly and where the counterprotest actually needs to be in the streets.
If the march is not going right in front of the Convoy occupiers and reclaiming those streets with a real show of force, then what is the point?
For those not familiar with Ottawa, Lansdowne Park is over 3km down Bank Street from Parliament Hill. Bank passes right through the heart of Centretown where the Convoy occupations are located.
But without publicizing the march route, PSAC - with help of ONDP caucus members and "progressive" city councillor Catherine McKenney - have decided the entire march today will be 3km in length. And my sources confirm there is absolutely no intention of marching through Centretown - which is absolutely necessary after all the many ugly incidents in Centretown. The march will stay in Glebe and not go north of the 417 into Centretown.
But is this a surprise now? After helping to spike the initial counterprotest organizing effort and neutralizing that initial ad hoc organizing committee, PSAC and the NDP is leading this defanged action and is deploying union marshalls to police it.
This despicable and shameful turn of events is the glaring in-your-face proof of the necessity of an independent labour left, especially in Ottawa and bigger cities where the weight of the "progressive" staffers and bureaucrats - NDP, labour and NGOs - are a regressive political force that routinely salt the soil from which effective democratic resistance to the far right, union-busting and permanent austerity can grow. (Staffers in the trenches with members and who maintain their principles know exactly what I am talking about)
These "progressives" have folded like cheap umbrellas in the face of a very mild show of force from a fascist-led protest movement that has yet to embrace real street violence. But the left, since the NDP's neoliberal turn in the 90s, has largely continued to believe the NDP is a place where the left can grow - even though every left effort since the Waffle has been contained and defeated. Since then, the NDP has moved ever rightward, embracing wage controls in the 1970s, missing the boat on free trade in 88, embracing neoliberalism in the 90s, and in this pandemic backing up Trudeau's massively corrupt CEWS business wage subsidy and shitty federal "paid sick days" program CRSB. It is a pipeline-backing, prison-building, permanent austerity party in power.
There is much to be said about what we are doing and not doing on the left. The pandemic and this political crisis has exposed our deep weaknesses. We have lost this round and it will be an even deeper defeat if we can't even claim to have marched through Centretown.
The left must break with the so-called progressives who are now functioning as a 5th column for an elite that is moving right. A new foundation must be laid.