By Joel Bergman
September 23 2008

With a shaky economy and the federal election looming, the average student or worker has many questions. Who should we support in the coming election? Which party is going to best fight for our interests?

The Conservatives, the Liberals, and the Bloc Québécois are obviously out of the question. These parties are the parties of big business, controlled by corporations and directed to serve their interests. Over the last few decades we’ve seen endless privatization, gutting of our social services, and destruction of our environment in the name of private profit by all of these parties. We’ve seen them cut corporate taxes again and again, and then complain that there is no money to fund our education and health care systems, while at the same time giving their corporate backers billions in tax cuts and spending billions on the war in Afghanistan.

This brings us to the New Democratic Party. According to the federal party constitution, the NDP is a party that stands for free health care, free education, protection of the environment and an end to poverty through the implementation of democratic socialist principles. It is a party that has no corporate interests inside the party and is directly tied to the majority of the workers’ unions in this country through affiliation. The workers in these unions elect delegates to participate in the democratic decision-making within the party.

So far, in the NDP campaign, discussion has centered around the problems we are facing and who is to blame. “I’ll act on the priorities of your kitchen table not just the boardroom table,” Jack Layton said. “I will stop tax-cuts for companies who don’t need them or who ship our jobs overseas… Instead of a place where growing corporate wealth benefits only the few, we can build a Canada that looks after one another.” This should not be where the party platform ends, but where it starts.

With skyrocketing tuition, an underfunded health care system, hundreds of thousands of jobs lost in the manufacturing, textile and forestry industries, and an increased cost of living all around us, we need real solutions to these problems. Especially in the face of a deteriorating economy that is quickly getting worse, there is no room to move under capitalist economics. The NDP needs to provide socialist solutions to the problems that students and workers face.

We need a government that cares more about the welfare of its citizens than the profits of the ruling class. We need a government that will forgive all student debt and provide free, quality, accessible education for everyone. We need a government that will take control of the oil industry to work towards ending our dependency by investing massively in transit and green technologies. We need a government that will seize the corporations fleeing overseas to prevent further layoffs. We need a government that will allow the workers and the communities to operate these factories democratically in the service of needs, not profit. More importantly, we need an NDP that is unapologetically anti-capitalist and mobilizes the population to defeat the ruling class on October 14.