Fighting Climate Change – Beyond Canada’s Carbon Tax

Free Transit Ottawa (FTO) organized a public meeting on March 18 on the theme “Fighting Climate Change: Beyond the Carbon Tax.”

The event was cosponsored by a range of local climate-justice movements: Ecology Ottawa, Horizon Ottawa, Justice for Workers, Fridays for Future and CAWI (City for All Women Initiative).

Speakers on the introductory panel were Emma Bider of Climate Justice Ottawa, Angella MacEwan of CUPE and the Green Economy Network, and myself representing Free Transit Ottawa.

The following text is based on my remarks. – Richard Fidler

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Climate change is the most visible, most threatening expression of a larger, planetary ecological crisis, the result of a fossil-fueled economic system with its pursuit of endless growth which ensures that the exploitation of natural resources (both renewable and non-renewable) exceeds the carrying capacity of nature.

Our approach must be commensurate with the structural challenge that crisis poses to the way society is organized if we are to halt and reverse the ecological catastrophe toward which we are now hurtling – and which is fueled by our dependency on fossil fuels.

Globally, we are still fighting even to win recognition of the need to end fossil fuel dependency. The major achievement of the recent COP 28 conference – the 28^th annual meeting of the UN conference parties since the Kyoto conference in the mid-1990s – was, for the first time, a consensus agreement that we must “transition away” from fossil fuels if we are to attain the international goal of “net zero” carbon emissions by 2050.

Is this happening? The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, in a recent study,[1] reports that half of the oil consumed by humans has been burned in the past 27 years; half of the gas in the past 21 years; and half of the coal in the past 37 years. As a result, half of the world’s 1.77 trillion tonnes of energy-related carbon dioxide emissions have been released in the past 30 years. Fourteen per cent have been emitted since the landmark Paris Agreement of 2015.

To date, renewable energies like wind, solar or thermal, have not made much of a dent in energy consumption or per capita fossil fuel use. Renewables have “only served to increase overall energy consumption.” In 2022 fossil fuels still accounted for 82.9 per cent of total world energy consumption.

But emissions from carbon production and use are destroying the global climate. So we have to find and develop renewable and substitute sources of energy. And, equally if not more important, find ways to eliminate much inefficient and socially undesirable consumption of energy. And adapt our societies to be less reliant on the market forces that drive production and consumption under our fossil-fueled capitalism, with their attendant growing social inequality and deterioration of public services.

Where is Canada in all this?

Canada is the world’s fourth-largest oil producer. More than half of its production is exported. Canada gets 90.8 per cent of its primary energy production from fossil fuels (54 per cent from oil, 31 per cent from natural gas, six per cent from coal). The remainder comes from hydro, nuclear and renewables sources.

The federal government’s Emissions Reduction Plan, the latest iteration of its Pan-Canadian Framework on Green Growth and Climate Change, promises to reduce emissions by 40-45% below 2005 levels by 2030 – and to net zero by 2050.

The Plan includes a forthcoming cap on oil and gas emissions; a green buildings strategy; and the creation of clean renewable electricity grids. But it also features promotion of electric vehicles (mainly cars) and extensive funding of new (and so far undiscovered or unproven) technology such as carbon capture and storage or direct air capture, allegedly to “offset” continued extraction of oil and gas.

And then there are the new pipelines and liquified natural gas (LNG) plants, built to export Canada’s increasing fossil-fuel extraction for many years to come. [Consumption of exported gas is not included in Canada’s emissions statistics.] The government-owned TMX pipeline project has cost some $35 billion to date. The LNG plant in Prince Rupert, fed by the controversial Northern Gateway gas pipeline, has cost $40 billion to build. Four more LNG plants are in the works.

Much of the federal Plan is left to the provinces and private business to implement, with dubious results. In Ontario, Ford ended a slew of renewable energy projects and is increasing the province’s reliance on natural gas. Alberta’s Smith has sharply curtailed renewable energy projects. British Columbia’s NDP government is pursuing LNG expansion and overseeing a dramatic ramp-up in natural gas fracking. In Newfoundland and Labrador, oil and gas now account for about 25% of the province’s gross domestic product, and the province aims to double oil production.

Still central to the federal Plan is the carbon tax or its counterpart in B.C. and Quebec, cap-and-trade. “Putting a price on pollution,” says the Plan, “is widely recognized as the most efficient means to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.” Producers and consumers alike are subject to periodic graduated carbon price payments in the hope that, through market forces, increased costs will promote more climate-friendly expenditures.

However, we need to be clear. Regulating emissions is an alternative to planning and quantifying the needed cutbacks in fossil fuel extraction and development. As many critics have noted, carbon pricing doesn’t even regulate emissions, it just puts a price on them based on an arbitrary calculation, the “social cost of carbon,” that tends to ignore the “externalities” — the cumulative emissions, feedback loops, and (in the case of carbon trading credits) the disproportionate impacts of climate change on countries in the Global South. For business, carbon pricing is just a cost of doing business. And it will always be limited to ensure that Canadian businesses are not disadvantaged by competitors’ prices and to avoid economic disruption that would motivate greater market intervention.

For consumers, however, carbon pricing tends to download moral and financial responsibility on households that burn fossil fuels for heating or transportation. The feds have tried to offset public resentment over the tax through rebates for 80% of consumers. And, more recently, public opposition has forced them to exempt Maritimers from the tax on home heating oil, and to remove the tax from farm fuels. Yet the government still insists that carbon pricing will reduce Canada’s carbon emissions by up to one-third by 2030.

Clearly, the overall objective of Canada’s official climate plan is to retain fossil fuels as Canada’s primary energy source for as long as possible, using market-based “offsets” and carbon trading to achieve “net zero.” Not surprisingly, many Canadians are resentful at moves to make them help pay for these anti-ecological and antisocial policies and programs.

What’s the alternative?

In his recent book A Good War: Mobilizing Canada for the Climate Emergency, [2] Seth Klein argues convincingly that we need a radically different approach. He contrasts Canada’s listless response to today’s climate crisis with the massive mobilization the country experienced in WWII. That included adoption of an emergency mindset, mandatory measures, a reconfiguration of industrial production (e.g. jeeps and tanks, not cars) and above all no reliance on market forces; real planning, nationalizations (about 50 Crown corporations), and spending what it took to win.

A comparable mobilization is needed now, Klein urges. It would start with a national needs inventory as the basis for coordinating mass production of the equipment needed to realize our new GHG reduction targets. New factories would be built, as needed, to produce solar panels, wind turbines, electric heat pumps and electric busses at a mass scale. (The technology already exists.) A clear wind-down pathway would be adopted for all fossil fuel extraction in Canada, guided by a robust just transition plan for existing fossil fuel workers and communities that currently rely on these industries.

Along with a ban on new fossil fuel infrastructure, we need to develop a massive green public infrastructure plan, involving all levels of government. Billions of dollars would be invested in renewable energy, building retrofits, high-speed rail and expansion and electrification of cross-country railways, mass public transit, along with electric vehicle charging stations and methane capture from farms and landfills.

And because even under the best-case scenario a certain amount of global warming is already locked-in, Klein reminds us, we also now need to undertake major investments in climate adaptation and resilience infrastructure, with a focus on ensuring that vulnerable communities are better protected from climate disasters and related events (forest fires, extreme heat events, flooding, etc.). We also need to significantly invest in forest management that will lessen wildfire risks to rural and Indigenous communities, while providing thousands of sustainable jobs in resource-based communities. We need a large-scale program to repair and enhance Canada’s natural climate sequestration systems — helping nature suck carbon from the atmosphere. That includes an extensive reforestation program, and of course the preservation of existing old-growth forests.

Klein then adds an important point. As advocates of a Green New Deal have emphasized, he says, “we need more than just direct climate infrastructure investments — we also need large-scale investments in social infrastructure and the caring economy.”

“That means investments from all levels of government in zero-carbon public and non-profit housing — a bold commitment to build hundreds of thousands of new units of non-market housing. And it means federal and provincial funding for universal, public, accessible, quality child care and home care for seniors and people with disabilities. These are public services that are already virtually carbon-free and would represent a major enhancement to household affordability.”[3]

Finally, we need to set in law and regulation clear dates by which certain things must happen. “Clear targets … — embedded in law and well publicized — will send a much stronger signal to the market than any form of carbon pricing. They communicate to businesses and consumers that they must reorient their plans accordingly. If effectively enforced, these targets will push manufactures, builders, installers and extraction companies to make investment plans that align with these dates.”

That said, I would note a few things Klein overlooks. His national perspective must be supplemented by an international dimension. This means solidarity with climate-justice struggles in the global South – the peoples who are primary victims of global warming – in opposition to unequal trade relations, super-exploitation of their labour, and the pillage of their natural resources by transnational capital, and for relief from illegitimate debts. It means collaboration with countries like China in developing global trade in alternative energy resources and technologies.

Indigenous people are prime targets of attempts to coerce or coopt them into “partnering” with corporations and governments in the capitalist exploitation of their lands and resources. Solidarity with their struggles for self-determination and autonomy is essential.

The transition is itself a source of supplementary emissions that must be offset if the carbon budget is not to explode. Yet we need to reduce global energy consumption, that is, reduce productive and/or transport activities. This means challenging the capitalist growth imperative.

Does this mean de-growth? Some production or services should not degrow but be suppressed, ASAP: coal facilities and mines, oil extraction, weapons production, the advertising industry, plastics, pesticides, etc. But others should grow – such as renewable energies, organic agriculture, and essential services (education, health and culture).

Overall, this points to the “system change” that our movements have counterposed to climate change. Strategy, programs oriented to satisfying social, community needs, not subordinate to profit motive. And that, if I may say so, is a huge difference from the analogy Klein makes with the World War II mobilization. Then, ruling elites united in leading the national war effort. That unity was in their class interest.

Today, we have no such cross-class unanimity. Instead, we face what some critics call a “regime of obstruction” based on a matrix of corporate and financial control of our political and economic processes, the news and other cultural media – its power centers a combination of Calgary-based petroleum interests and Toronto-based finance and banking.[4] It’s a structural problem. To resolve it, we need to build alliances, coalitions of workers, farmers, indigenous communities, racialized minorities, students, youth and poor against the entrenched fossil oligarchy. And link decarbonization with opposition to capitalist austerity.

A key challenge – Restructuring transportation

If we break down Canada’s GHG emissions by sector, more than half are in fossil fuel resource extraction (25%) and transportation (28%).[5] How might the alternative strategy outlined here work in transportation, a service that along with housing and healthcare is integrally important to the day-to-day experiences of the people in our local communities?

Topping Seth Klein’s list of measures to get our transportation sector to carbon-zero is (and I quote) “expanding public transit, including a plan to make public transit not only more accessible and convenient, but also dramatically more affordable (minimally, that means free public transit for lower-income people, but could well involve making transit a ‘free’ publicly paid service, just like health care).”[6]

That is what we in Free Transit Ottawa propose: making public transit accessible to all, at no user charge, just like public schools, most health care, fire services, bike paths and sidewalks. A radically improved public transit system, which would be a major step toward fighting poverty and social exclusion, would also be the biggest single measure we could take to combat climate change.

What about trucks and cars? Rail expansion could reduce much highway trucking, and urban trucking can be electrified. As for cars, the private vehicles that have shaped the design and culture of our cities for more than a century – contributing to urban sprawl, loss of greenspace, wetlands and agricultural land, higher costs and waste of time for daily commuters, etc. – it is necessary not only to put bans on the manufacture, sale and advertising of new fossil fuel-burning cars, but to replace them through expansion of electrified urban public transportation and inter-city rail.

That was the point made by the workers at GM’s auto plant in Oshawa, which the company closed in late 2019 after more than 100 years of operations. Green Jobs Oshawa, the campaign led by Unifor Local 222’s political action committee, called on the federal government to take over the plant as a publicly owned enterprise and convert it to electric vehicle manufacturing, with a focus on the production of vehicles for government truck fleets such as those of Canada Post – following through on the postal workers’ union proposal for making the post office a hub for electrification and local community banking and home services.[7]

Far from replacing cars, however, Ottawa and some provinces are simply planning to electrify them. They have already arranged to invest some $50 billion on the construction of three giant factories – two in Ontario, one in Quebec – to manufacture batteries for EVs. Critics question the need for such giant subsidies to the foreign companies in question when they might well invest in battery production without the subsidies. We might ask, as well: what if such sums had been spent on expanding and electrifying urban public transit? And what about the environmental cost of extracting the minerals needed to produce these batteries? Can we really hope to reduce carbon emissions through massive development of mining, among the most energy-consuming and polluting industries?

Finally, we must bear in mind that the campaign for free and improved public transit will face serious opposition from property developers who own large tracts of land on the edges of cities, the oil and auto industries, other business sectors that favour low taxes and limited government, and the politicians who represent them.

To achieve free and accessible public transit, we will have to build a movement powerful enough to overcome this opposition. That movement will be centred on those who are transit dependent as well as environmental activists, but must also include a wide range of working and professional people, including those in Ottawa who currently work for the public transit utility, OC Transpo.[8] To build it, we will need to engage in educational activities as well as struggles for immediate reforms that lower the cost of public transport and/or increase its accessibility – joining existing struggles and initiating new struggles.

Ultimately, we need a different kind of government with the political will to lead, coordinate and consolidate the transition, a government based on the support of the victims of climate change, not its perpetrators.

 

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[1] David Hughes, Getting to Net-Zero in Canada: Scale of the problem, government projections and daunting challenges (CCPA, February 2024).

[2] Seth Klein, A Good War: Mobilizing Canada for the Climate Emergency (Toronto: 2020).

[3] Ibid., pp. 183-184.

[4] Shannon Daub, Gwendolyn Blue, Lise Rajewicz, and Zoë Yunker, “Episodes in the New Climate Denialism,” in William K. Carroll, Regime of Obstruction: How Corporate Power Blocks Energy Democracy (AU Press, 2021), p. 226.

[5] Followed by industry (14%), electricity (11%), agriculture (9%), residential buildings (6%) and non-residential buildings (4%).

[6] A Good War, p. 187.

[7] Delivering Community Power, https://www.deliveringcommunitypower.ca/.

[8] The OC Transpo union, affiliated with the Amalgamated Transit Workers, has publicly supported the work of Free Transit Ottawa. The national union is sympathetic as well. “ATU Canada advocates for fares to be affordable for all, and advocates for progress toward creating a fare-free transit.” https://www.atucanada.ca/blog/free-public-transit-canada.

That other 9-11: The coup that ended Chile’s Popular Unity government

By Richard Fidler

This year, on September 11, we mark the 50^th anniversary of the coup in Chile. The violent military overthrow of the Popular Unity government put an end to a turbulent experiment in the parliamentary road to socialism initiated with the presidential election of Salvador Allende just three years earlier. The coup government headed by General Augusto Pinochet launched massive and deadly repression and inaugurated the capitalist world’s first major wave of neoliberal economic “reforms,” many of which remain in force today.

It seems appropriate to look back at the Chilean experience – the first breakthrough for the Left in Latin America after the Cuban Revolution of 1959 – and to think about the lessons to be learned for today’s Left and progressive movements. Allende’s electoral base, the Unidad Popular (UP), or Popular Unity, was a coalition of his Socialist party with the Communist party and several much smaller parties around a programmatic agreement that promised “revolutionary changes” to “liberate Chile from imperialism, exploitation and poverty.” And it pledged to do this in full respect for and compliance with the country’s parliamentary, legal and other institutions.

For an initial balance sheet, I recommend an important article by Ralph Miliband first published in the 1973 edition of Socialist Register. Miliband was a prominent sociologist and author of numerous books on socialism and politics, including Parliamentary Socialism and The State in Capitalist Society. His essay, too lengthy to be reproduced here, merits reading in its entirety. But here is a brief excerpt, from its concluding section, on “the question of the state and the exercise of power.”

It was noted earlier that a major change in the state’s personnel is an urgent and essential task for a government bent on really serious change; and that this needs to be allied to a variety of institutional reforms and innovations, designed to push forward the process of the state’s democratization. But in this latter respect, much more needs to be done, not only to realize a set of long-term socialist objectives concerning the socialist exercise of power, but as a means either of avoiding armed confrontation, or of meeting it on the most advantageous and least costly terms if it turns out to be inevitable.

What this means is not simply ‘mobilizing the masses’ or ‘arming the workers’. These are slogans – important slogans – which need to be given effective institutional content. In other words, a new regime bent on fundamental changes in the economic, social and political structures must from the start begin to build and encourage the building of a network of organs of power, parallel to and complementing the state power, and constituting a solid infrastructure for the timely ‘mobilization of the masses’ and the effective direction of its actions. The forms which this assumes – workers’ committees at their place of work, civic committees in districts and sub-districts, etc. – and the manner in which these organs ‘mesh’ with the state may not be susceptible to blueprinting. But the need is there, and it is imperative that it should be met, in whatever forms are most appropriate.

This is not, to all appearances, how the Allende regime moved. Some of the things that needed doing were done; but such ‘mobilization’ as occurred, and such preparations as were made, very late in the day, for a possible confrontation, lacked direction, coherence, in many cases even encouragement. Had the regime really encouraged the creation of a parallel infra-structure, it might have lived; and, incidentally, it might have had less trouble with its opponents and critics on the left, for instance in the MIR, since its members might not then have found the need so great to engage in actions of their own, which greatly embarrassed the government: they might have been more ready to cooperate with a government in whose revolutionary will they could have had greater confidence. In part at least, ‘ultra-leftism’ is the product of ‘citra-leftism’.

Salvador Allende was a noble figure and he died a heroic death. But hard though it is to say it, that is not the point. What matters, in the end, is not how he died, but whether he could have survived by pursuing different policies; and it is wrong to claim that there was no alternative to the policies that were pursued. In this as in many other realms, and here more than in most, facts only become compelling as one allows them to be so. Allende was not a revolutionary who was also a parliamentary politician. He was a parliamentary politician who, remarkably enough, had genuine revolutionary tendencies. But these tendencies could not overcome a political style which was not suitable to the purposes he wanted to achieve.

Miliband focused his analysis on the trials and tribulations encountered by the UP government as it sought to pursue, and then retreat from, its reform program in the face of strenuous and mounting opposition by Chile’s capitalists backed by Washington. Writing from afar, he was unable to assess the reactions among the popular forces that constituted the government’s social base. That, however, is the subject matter of a remarkable study of “constituent popular power and the politics of conflict” in Chile from 1970 to 1973 that – in the words of its author Franck Gaudichaud – are “keys to understanding a thousand days that shook the world.”[1] Gaudichaud’s text, adapted from his doctoral dissertation under the supervision of Michael Löwy, is a detailed analysis of the forms of “popular power(s)” created in their struggles by the workers, peasants and “pobladores” of the shanty-towns during the UP regime.

This research shows that at the heart of this period of social confrontations and political upheavals, various attempts at what we have proposed to call popular constituent power arose. A notion defined as ‘the creation of social and political experiments of organized counter-power and counter-hegemonies’ leading to ‘new forms of popular collective appropriations’ and ‘a calling into question – total or relative – of relations of production, forms of work organization, social and spatial hierarchies and material or symbolic mechanisms of domination’. It is precisely in the specific (and historically determined) configuration taken by these forms of popular power that the true originality of the Chilean process, its transformative capacity and its historical force are located. This, beyond the unprecedented nature of Allende’s project of transition to socialism or a supposed intangible stability of the democratic institutions of the ‘compromise State’. And it seems to us that there is here a path worth taking, to explore, in the study of other great political crises or Latin American revolutionary processes.

If we examine the various facets of this collective turmoil which mobilized several tens of thousands of employees, pobladores and left-wing activists, we see the emergence of a ‘grammar of protest’ little known to Popular Unity. This idée-force is that of popular power, but in this turbulent sky, one star shone more brightly than others: that of the industrial cordones.[2] Certainly, ‘the theme of the industrial cordones refers to one of the most important and successful experiences of Popular Unity, perhaps approaching one of the most realized utopias of Chilean socialism: that in which the workers built themselves as an historical actor with strong collective economic and political responsibility within the ongoing process. Appearing most of the time on the outskirts of the major cities, these are territorial bodies of class coordination, bringing together the unions of several companies in a specific urban area, with the immediate aim of realizing demands such as the extension of the nationalized sector, workers’ control of production, the self-defense of factories, the increase in wages or even, in the medium term, the establishment of a new institutional architecture, based on municipal and provincial popular councils. The cordones thus draw a new topography of struggles in urban areas, alongside other actors in the social movement. They gradually anchor themselves in a city in struggle and territories appropriated by and for massively mobilized popular classes.

A militant in the Chilean process in the early 1970s was the Peruvian peasant leader and ecosocialist Hugo Blanco, who died this year at the age of 89. Released from prison in 1970 by Peru’s revolutionary military junta, Blanco made his way to Chile. He authored many articles on the grassroots mobilizations and political conflicts under the UP government. Some were translated and published in English in Intercontinental Press, a socialist newsweekly published in New York City.[3] They provide insightful analyses into the class dynamics of the events, and can be accessed on line. Here is a representative sample:

Chilean Workers Organize Distribution, April 23, 1973 https://www.themilitant.com/Intercontinental_Press/1973/IP1115.pdf#page=16&view=FitV,35

Right Wing in Popular Unity Consolidates, April 30, 1973 https://www.themilitant.com/Intercontinental_Press/1973/IP1116.pdf#page=12&view=FitV,35

Fascist Threat Mounting in Chile, May 7, 1973 https://www.themilitant.com/Intercontinental_Press/1973/IP1117.pdf#page=8&view=FitV,35

The Sharpening Struggle in Chile, May 28, 1973 https://www.themilitant.com/Intercontinental_Press/1973/IP1120.pdf#page=12&view=FitV,35

Fascist Provocations, Labor Unrest in Chile, June 4, 1973 https://www.themilitant.com/Intercontinental_Press/1973/IP1121.pdf#page=11&view=FitV,35

Chilean Workers Organize to Meet the Rightist Threat, June 11, 1973 https://www.themilitant.com/Intercontinental_Press/1973/IP1122.pdf#page=18&view=FitV,35

The Workers’ Cordones Challenge the Reformists, June 18, 1973 https://www.themilitant.com/Intercontinental_Press/1973/IP1123.pdf#page=12&view=FitV,35

The Role of the Cordones Industriales, November 26, 1973 https://www.themilitant.com/Intercontinental_Press/1973/IP1142.pdf#page=19&view=FitV,35

Also worth reading:

Allende’s dream, Pinochet’s coup and Chile’s present By Carmen Aguirre.

People in Chile never stopped resisting the dictatorship that began 50 years ago, or seeking to revive the social reforms of the 1970s. A childhood in exile has made it impossible for me to forget that.

This article, published in the Toronto Globe & Mail September 8, is remarkable not least because it is almost unique, amongst the coverage of Chile’s coup in the business media, to remind us of the complicity of Pierre Trudeau’s government in related events before, during and after the Pinochet coup.

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[1] Franck Gaudichaud, Chile 1970-1973, Mille jours qui ébranlèrent le monde (Presses universitaires de Rennes 2013, free on-line since 2017). In French only, at present.

[2] The Spanish word cordones could be roughly translated in English as “lanyards,” that is, interlaced bodies of workers in different workplaces or geographic units.

[3] As a staff writer for Intercontinental Press in the early 1970s, I met Hugo Blanco for the first time in 1974, in Italy, at the Tenth World Congress of the Fourth International.

Canadian Left Responses to War in Ukraine – a Provisional Balance Sheet

By Richard Fidler

February 24, 2022 marked the opening of a new phase in the developing reconfiguration of global capitalist and popular forces. Russia’s massive invasion of Ukraine, the prompt mobilization of resistance by Ukrainians, and the quick shift toward public support for NATO in much of Europe, confronted the international Left and progressive forces with some major challenges. The Left in Canada was no exception.

“This conflict will change everything,” wrote Quebec socialist Pierre Beaudet in a memo to the solidarity organization Alternatives that he directed, just days before Beaudet’s sudden death March 8. “As in any important debate, there are theories, strategic issues, choices to make in our practice.”

Beaudet pointed to some key features of the new situation:

1. Russia’s determination to prevail, its denial of “the very reality of Ukraine as the sovereign state and territory of a people with the right of self-determination,” risked a long war in which “resistance to the aggression is the only outcome on offer.”

2. Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin’s approach “borrowed from the tradition of the USSR under Stalin in imposing a centralizing and repressive state along with attempts to carve out a place in the global arena.”

3. The post-Soviet expansion of NATO, and Washington’s failures in its intervention in the Middle East and Central Asia, prompting Putin’s belief that this was now the time to strike a major blow in Ukraine, where Russia had already annexed Crimea in 2014 and supported pro-Russian separatists in the east.

“Now that Russia has attacked, there is no turning back. Either Putin wins his bet by the subjugation of Ukraine, which would allow him to ‘entrust’ to a new government the job of ‘re-establishing order.’ Or the situation will drag on into an endless conflict – unless Russia decides to wage war in the cities even if it means destroying them, with their people, as was done in Syria.”

The result will be “an immense realignment of priorities and strategies.

“NATO, its relevance diminished in recent years, will return in force. The member states will be required to increase substantially their military spending and become directly involved in the strategy of counter-attacking and weakening Russia….”

4. The Canadian government will follow the U.S. line, as always. Military spending will surge, financed by severe cutbacks in other expenditures. Fossil fuel export projects – perhaps “the LNG project designed to bring Alberta’s gas through Quebec” – will be relaunched as part of the “war effort.”

5. “We act in solidarity with the Ukrainian resistance that aims to re-establish an inclusive and peaceful sovereignty without abuses of national minorities. Our solidarity can be exercised in the area of humanitarian assistance” which “must not be reduced to meet Ukraine’s needs.”

6. Russia’s invasion was a “blatant violation of the UN Charter and international law. The United States and their NATO allies, including Canada, have plunged us as well increasingly into this war by a flurry of sanctions and outrageous statements.” A peace process must include the United Nations, and not be left to the major protagonists like the European Union and NATO.

The analysis was prescient. With hindsight, we can think of some elements that can now be added. However, Beaudet’s argument had the virtue of centering our response on the need to support Ukraine’s defense of its territorial sovereignty and self-determination.

In the 18 months since Beaudet’s memo, his organization Alternatives has worked to promote solidarity with the Ukraine resistance while opposing Russian aggression and NATO expansion. It has also joined the international campaign for the release of Boris Kagarlitsky and other Russian antiwar prisoners. Its approach contrasts with that of the pacifist organization Échec à la guerre, which claims to oppose all imperialisms – especially U.S. “military domination” -- but has not rallied to defend Ukraine.

In what follows, I will outline and critically comment on some of the other responses to the war by the Canadian and Quebec left.

The parliamentary Left

When it comes to membership in NATO and its alliance with U.S. imperialism -- the bedrock of Canada’s foreign policy -- the labour-based New Democratic Party tends to march in lockstep with whatever government holds office in Ottawa. The Ukraine war is no exception. While supporting provision of weapons needed by Ukraine – as it should – the NDP has also agreed with moves to reinforce Canada’s military spending and NATO involvement as well as sanctions designed to harm the economic needs of the Russian people.

In a statement issued on the one-year anniversary of the full-scale Russian invasion, the NDP reaffirmed its support of “the Ukrainians who are defending their country and … those who have been forced to flee.” But it called for strengthening the sanctions regime, and failed to raise the need to cancel Ukraine’s public debt as it seeks to rebuild.

The other party of Canada’s parliamentary Left, the pro-Quebec sovereignty party Québec solidaire, defends Ukraine of course. However, it has limited its support to a motion in Quebec’s National Assembly, on the eve of Russia’s aggression,[1] and a resolution adopted by its National Council on May 28, 2022. The resolution condemned Russia, reaffirmed Ukraine’s right to self-determination while calling for an immediate ceasefire and negotiations to end the aggression, and urged rapid reception of Ukrainian refugees.

The QS council resolution emphasized that “this conflict must not be used as a justification to allow the exploitation of Quebec’s oil and gas resources, or to increase exports of fossil fuels from Canada on the pretext of replacing Russian oil and gas.”

Finally, it called on its members, and citizens, to “support peace demonstrations opposing the invasion of Ukraine by the Russian army….”

However, QS has not itself initiated any such demonstrations although its program[2] declares that the party “will participate in building international mobilizations against military interventions (of imperialist powers) aimed at ensuring control over peoples and their wealth and attacking their sovereignty.” The party also calls for Canada’s immediate withdrawal from NATO and NORAD.[3]

Extraparliamentary Left

Québec solidaire identifies itself as “a party of the streets as well as the ballot-boxes,” and it is the extraparliamentary wing of the party that has taken the lead in defense of Ukraine. The popular website Presse-toi à gauche (PTàG) includes among its editors and writers the most prominent left-wing activists within QS. Since the war began each weekly edition has included a selection of articles on the war, the vast majority sympathetic to Ukraine.

Another left website based in Quebec, Pivot, has likewise supported Ukraine, although not as diligently as PTàG. In April it published a powerful rejoinder to a few accounts in mainstream media and left-leaning publications in Quebec that attributed the war to provocation of Russia by NATO and/or Ukraine.

In the rest of Canada, unfortunately, the major left publications and organizations have tended to ignore the Ukraine resistance or dismiss it as a “proxy” for what they portray as a NATO war against Russia.[4] People’s Voice, the Communist party monthly newspaper, not surprisingly supports Russia. “NATO, the US, EU and Canada have left Russia with few options,” said the CP in a statement issued in October 2022 that echoed some of the Kremlin’s narratives.

A prolific blogger on the war is Yves Engler, who has a well-earned reputation as the most prominent critic of Canadian foreign policy from an anti-imperialist standpoint. The author of many books and articles, Engler is associated with the Canadian Foreign Policy Institute, an NGO that sponsors online seminars and petitions critical of Canadian corporate and government intervention abroad. Engler and the CFPI have campaigned against the provision of Canadian arms to Ukraine, and joined the international chorus advocating a “negotiated peace” in Ukraine that is not predicated on Russian withdrawal.[5]

Engler’s articles have been republished by some on-line “progressive” websites such as rabble.ca, which otherwise have little to say about the war.

A widely-read online website The Maple publishes well-researched critiques of Canadian foreign policy but has said little about the Russian war on Ukraine. Its managing editor Alex Cosh published an article in another left publication Briarpatch that repeated much of the Kremlin narrative justifying its aggression.[6] However, The Maple also organized an on-line debate between Ukrainian socialist Taras Bilous and Quebec blogger Dimitri Lascaris on the issue “Should Leftists Support Sending Weapons to Ukraine?”[7] Lascaris, who once ran for leader of the Canadian Green party, is notorious for his support of Russia as a force for peace. A readers’ poll conducted by The Maple following the debate found a substantial majority supporting Bilous in his defense of the Ukraine resistance.

A rare debate on the war: Canadian Dimension

Canadian Dimension, a Winnipeg-based monthly magazine (founded in 1963, on-line only since 2019), is undoubtedly the most prominent publication on the English-Canadian left. Its extensive coverage of the war[8] has been slanted heavily against Ukraine’s resistance, some of it authored by writers like Yves Engler and Dimitri Lascaris, as well as U.S. sources like CodePink. However, CD also published five articles this year by Russian antiwar critic Boris Kagarlitsky, and recently published a strong editorial statement protesting Kagarlitsky’s arrest and urging its readers to support the international solidarity campaign for his release.

When Canadian Dimension introduced an article by Kagarlitsky with the headline “Clear-eyed veteran Russian leftist dissident offers a courageous and politically indispensable take on the Russia-Ukraine war,” Toronto socialist Sam Gindin and Montreal-based professor David Mandel wrote an angry “reply to Kagarlitsky” deriding his analysis as “shallow” and “simple-minded.” Their article was largely a defense of Putin based on a selective discourse analysis purporting to show that “there is no hint here, or indeed anywhere in Putin’s speeches or writing, of a denial of the right of the Ukrainian state or people to exist” – deliberately overlooking the ample well-documented evidence to the contrary.[9] As for Gindin and Mandel, they argued that Ukraine could not possibly strive for sovereignty given its reliance on US support. It was just a “proxy” for US imperialism in its attempt to weaken Russia.

In a subsequent article, Mandel repeated many of the now-familiar (and false) Kremlin talking points in its narrative of defensive war. Canadian Dimension has now published a devastating rebuttal, refuting many of Mandel’s “myths” one by one.

The Gindin-Mandel piece was a clear illustration of how viewing the war as a defensive reaction by Russia to U.S. aggression tends to translate into support of Russia and justification of its action. Both authors had been developing this position on an internal discussion list of the Toronto-based Socialist Project over the past 18 months. In Gindin’s case, it seemed to reflect the disorienting impact of the war’s outbreak on a thesis he had long defended with the late Leo Panitch, articulated at length in their magnum opus The Making of Global Capitalism.[10] As I have summarized it:

“The book’s central thesis is that the United States has dominated the planet since World War II, integrating other powers (and countries) by way of subordination to its ‘informal empire.’ This portrayal is distinguished from the conditions of inter-imperialist rivalry that Lenin had characterized as a central element of prewar capitalism…. This new world superpower has integrated ‘all the other major capitalist powers into an effective system of coordination under its aegis’.”[11]

Clearly, this portrayal of a harmonized (if competitive) global capitalism was a long shot from the brutal imperial savagery of capitalist Russia’s violation of Ukrainian sovereignty. Gindin seems unable to explain this contradiction, and has fallen back on a more classic, but still unipolar, image of a U.S. empire determined to discipline, even militarily defeat a recalcitrant subaltern in its global order.

(If, as some argue, the war is fundamentally an inter-imperialist conflict, revolutionary socialists would support neither side, although they might still defend Ukraine state sovereignty.)

Gindin is by far the pre-eminent member of Socialist Project’s steering committee. Following his lead, the SP has refrained from campaigning in defense of the Ukrainian resistance. Instead, the few articles on the war published in its on-line Bullet have promoted pacifist themes and opposition to providing Ukraine with defensive weapons. The Bullet has also published two articles by David Mandel that attempt to “explain” and excuse the Russian invasion. Both articles proclaim that Ukrainian resistance is futile and should immediately cease.

It should also be noted that Socialist Project, unlike many groups and individuals representing a diversity of political perspectives, has not even endorsed the international campaign of protest against the arrest of Boris Kagarlitsky.[12]

Ex-Trotskyists rejecting Ukraine solidarity

Among the other political casualties of the war are some of the small groups with roots in various wings of the international Trotskyist movement. The Toronto-based International Socialists published a statement on February 24, 2022 denouncing “Russian expansionism” and calling for Russian withdrawal from Ukraine… and Canadian withdrawal from Eastern Europe, referring to its role in NATO “training fascists within the Ukrainian military.” Ukraine, it said, “is once again paying the price as a state stuck in between two major imperialist rivals,” Russia and NATO. The IS newspaper Socialist Worker has published several articles along the same lines since the invasion, all of them produced by their co-thinkers in Britain.

Spring, the on-line publication of a group that broke with the IS a few years ago, has reposted many articles on the war by Yves Engler, and two or three of its own. David Bush denounces the Russian aggression but insists “the main enemy is at home.” This means opposing “troop deployments and arms shipments” to Ukraine. James Clark, once a leader in the Canadian movement against U.S. aggression in the Middle East and Afghanistan, wrote a four-part series of articles on the antiwar movement of ten years ago, but made no attempt to link its lessons to the war on Ukraine.

Fightback (in Quebec, La Riposte, a recognized collective within Québec solidaire) is the Canadian member of the British-based International Marxist Tendency. At the outset of the war, its publications featured a lengthy statement by the IMT dismissing the Ukrainian resistance:

“All the talk of Ukrainian sovereignty is contradicted by the fact that the country has been under growing domination from the US since the victory of the 2014 Euromaidan movement. All the key levers of economic and political power are in the hands of a corrupt oligarchy and its government, which, in turn, is the puppet of US imperialism and a pawn in its hands…. In fact, the current war is to a large extent a US-Russia conflict, being played out in the territory of Ukraine.”

Subsequent articles on the war have replicated this approach.

Finally, it is worth noting the fate of a tiny current that originated in some 2004 expulsions from the U.S. Socialist Workers Party because they had questioned the SWP’s support of the Pentagon overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. John Riddell and Roger Annis, joined by Ian Angus, founded an on-line journal Socialist Voice and invited some other Marxists (including myself) to participate in its production. An on-line archive of the issues and pamphlets published before its demise in 2011 may be accessed here.

As it explains, Socialist Voice ceased publication because its key editors had become heavily committed to other enterprises. John Riddell had resumed publication of his massive volumes on the proceedings of the Communist International in Lenin’s day.[13] Ian Angus was publishing his website Climate & Capitalism and writing books on Ecosocialism.

As for Roger Annis, he travelled to Ukraine with two other Canadians – Radhika Desai and Alan Freeman – in 2014, at the invitation of Boris Kagarlitsky, and emerged as a supporter of Russia’s annexation of Crimea and intervention in Eastern Ukraine. He has since transformed his blog A Socialist in Canada into a shameless propaganda mouthpiece for Putin’s regime and its aggression, occupation and annexations in Ukraine. Independently of Annis, Desai and Freeman (he is a former Trotskyist, in Britain) have created their own website and authored a Manifesto that praises today’s China as “the indispensable nation in humankind’s struggle for socialism, offering aid and inspiration as a worthy example of a country pursuing socialism in accordance with its national conditions.” Among the initial signatories of the Manifesto is John Riddell.

The group praises China – and Russia – as paragons of “multipolarity,” the alternative they promote to U.S. unipolar hegemony. What this means for Ukraine is described by Radhika Desai in her recent book: “[T]his war takes the form of a US-led NATO war against Russia over Ukraine. In this war, Ukraine is the terrain, and a pawn—one that can be and is being sacrificed with the apparent cooperation of its West-oriented leadership.”

Conclusion

As in other countries, Canadian left responses to Russia’s war have tended to divide along two conflicting fault lines. Crudely put, there are those who see the war as a Russian imperialist assault on Ukraine and seek to mobilize solidarity with Ukraine’s popular resistance, including its right to acquire the weapons it needs for its defense. In contrast, there are those who reduce the war to a conflict between NATO and Russia, the Ukrainians being simply pawns of the Pentagon and its European allies. The first group call for immediate Russian withdrawal from Ukraine as the only path to a peaceful solution. The second claim that Russia has some legitimate interest in occupying all or part of Ukraine, and invent narratives to justify its aggression and deny Ukraine’s right of national self-determination. These differences cannot be reconciled. It is a fundamental rift.

Thanks to Art Young for his assistance in reviewing a draft of this article. – RF

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[1] “L’Assemblée nationale adopte une motion unanime de soutien à l’Ukraine,” February 23, 2022. https://www.lapresse.ca/actualites/politique/2022-02-23/l-assemblee-nationale-adopte-une-motion-unanime-de-soutien-a-l-ukraine.php.

[2] Programme de Québec solidaire. See, in particular, para. 9.2.1.

[3] North American Air Defense Agreement (NORAD).

[4] For a critical analysis of this convoluted reasoning, see “The war in Ukraine: four reductions we must avoid.”

[5] A typical article: “Cutting through Canada’s war propaganda.”

[6] See also “Yes, The Ukraine War Could Have Been Prevented,” by Alex Cosh, arguing that the war is a “NATO proxy war.”

[7] “Should Leftists Support Sending Weapons to Ukraine?”

[8] See the section “Crisis in Ukraine” on the CD website.

[9] See, for example, Putin’s speech on February 23, 2023 justifying his decision to invade Ukraine.

[10] The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire (Verso, 2013).

[11] Richard Fidler, “Remembering Leo Panitch.” See the text following the subhead “Global capitalism.”

[12] As one of the very few SP members on its discussion list to dispute Gindin and Mandel, I was barred by the steering committee from posting any comment on “the Ukraine-Russia war” (sic) for two months earlier this year.

[13] Pathfinder Press and Haymarket.

Amid crisis, Putin’s Russia cracks down on anti-war dissent

By Federico Fuentes

August 7, 2023

Asked about the arrest of renowned socialist intellectual Boris Kagarlitsky, Russian president Vladimir Putin said on July 29: “It's the year 2023, and Russia is engaged in an armed conflict with a neighbour. And I think that there should be a certain attitude towards people who harm us inside the country.”

The “harm” Kagarlitsky is alleged to have caused relates to an October 8, 2022 Telegram post in which he analysed the military implications of an attack that had occurred just days before on the Crimea bridge. For this, he has been held in custody since July 25 and faces up to 7 years’ jail if found guilty of “justifying terrorism”.

“We must keep in mind”, Putin added, “that in order for us to achieve success, including in a conflict zone, everyone needs to follow certain rules.”

His comment led some to ironise on Russian anti-war Telegram channels that Kagarlitsky should have launched an armed mutiny instead of simply voicing his anti-war opinions — a reference to the contrasting treatment dealt to Yevgeny Prigozhin, whom Putin accused of “treason” after Prigozhin led his Wagner mercenary troops in a coup attempt in late June, only to then let him walk free.

While Prigozhin’s coup attempt failed, it exposed Putin's weaknesses and triggered a crisis on the domestic front. Meanwhile, in Ukraine, Russian military leaders and pro-war bloggers are warning of flagging morale and heavy losses, as Ukrainian forces pursue their latest counteroffensive.

Crackdown

In weeks following the mutiny, the Kremlin has responded by purging high-profile military leaders, jailing pro-war critic and far-right extremist Igor Girkin, and sentencing opposition leader Alexy Navalny to an extra 19 years in prison.

The domestic crisis also explains the jailing of perhaps the most high-profile — and one of the last remaining — public left-wing voices opposing the war inside Russia.

But Kagarlitsky’s arrest is just the latest in an ongoing and escalating war against domestic dissent.

Since the start of June, several prominent left politicians and activists have been labelled “foreign agents”, a designation that imposes severe restrictions on personal and professional activities and which many view as the last step before arrest. These include Moscow City Duma deputies Yevgeny Stupin and Mikhail Timonov, municipal deputy Vitaly Bovar and democratic socialist Mikhail Lobanov, who was also fired from his university post.

That same month, anti-war activist Ivan Kudryashov was sentenced to six years’ jail. Arrested for a street art piece with the words “Fuck the War” last September, Federal Security Service (FSB) officers tortured Kudryashov until he “confessed” to preparing an arson attack on a military enlistment office.

Putin’s repression has not been limited to Russia’s borders: Left Bloc activist Lev Skoryakin and Left Resistance activist Alena Krylova, were detained in Kyrgyzstan in June and are set to be deported back to Russia at Moscow’s request, a fate already sealed for anarchist anti-war activist Alexey Rozhkov.

In total, some 21,000 individuals in Russia have faced reprisals for opposing the war, including  more than 2000 who have been jailed in a country where it is illegal to publicly criticise the self-dubbed “special military operation”, according to Amnesty International.

Given the circumstances, the Russian Socialists Against War coalition issued a statement on July 29 declaring: “The campaign in defence of Kagarlitsky is not just a matter for his relatives and colleagues or human rights activists. Opposition to each new attack is an important political action that reduces the likelihood of new repressions.

“In this case, such action could unite not only leftists, but also representatives of other segments of the Russian anti-war movement, and many thousands of people around the world who have heard Kagarlitsky's name, read his books and articles, and argued with him.”

Controversy

A broad international solidarity movement calling for Kagarlitsky’s release, along with all other political prisoners has emerged, involving individuals and organisations with often differing views over Russia’s war on Ukraine.

Among those to declare their support are British politicians Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, Swiss parliamentarian Stefania Prezioso, European deputy Miguel Urbán Crespo, Brazilian federal MPs Fernanda Melchionna and Sâmia Bomfim, Puerto Rican senator Rafael Bernabe, Pussy Riot member Nadya Tolokonnikova and academics such as Slavoj Žižek, Enzo Traverso, Alina Bárbara López Hernández, Étienne Balibar, Simon Pirani and many more.

Yet Kagarlitsky’s case has caused controversy among certain sections of the left, due to various positions he has held towards Russia’s military interventions in Ukraine.

Back in 2014, Kagarlitsky supported Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its military support for pro-Russian separatist movements in Donbas, which he viewed as progressive and “anti-imperialist”.

Ukrainian socialist Andriy Movchan notes this position led Kagarlitsky to become “a frequent guest on state television”, with “his new milieu” coming to be “dominated by people associated with Russia’s so-called ‘patriotic left’, which often involved conservative and imperialist positions.”

In contrast, in 2022, Kagarlitsky opposed Russia’s full-scale invasion.

The day of the invasion, Kagarlitsky helped convene the Anti-War Round Table of the Left Forces, which unequivocally condemned Putin’s “aggression against our brothers and sisters of the Ukrainian people” and urged Russian citizens “to lead an anti-war agitation with your neighbours, relatives, colleagues and other citizens of Russia”.

Outlining his position in an interview with theAnalysis.news — one he has repeated throughout the war — Kagarlitsky said: “In 2014, I was critical of the Ukrainian policy of military intervention in Donbas … This time, it’s the other way around … this time it is Putin and his entourage who started the war and are responsible. In some way or another, they have to be punished.”

Movchan writes that as a result of this shift, “Kagarlitsky’s Rabkor YouTube channel and website has published anti-war content from Marxist positions” since the invasion started and “other anti-war leftists and even liberals began to appear on Kagarlitsky’s live streams — people who were on the opposite side of the argument from him eight years ago.”

Because of this, some who have, to more or a lesser extent, taken Russia’s side in the war — and enthusiastically championed Kagarlitsky in 2014 — have remained silent on his arrest. On the flipside, some Ukraine supporters have argued Kagarlitsky is not worthy of solidarity or that his case is simply a “distraction”.

In light of this controversy, the editorial collective of Russian left anti-war site, Posle, declared: “[Kagarlitsky’s] numerous books and public speeches had a great influence on several generations of the Russian left, and that is why his responsibility for certain assessments remained exceptionally high.

“In 2014, Kagarlitsky actively supported the annexation of Crimea and the creation of the so-called ‘People's Republics’ in eastern Ukraine. This support, unfortunately, played a role in disorienting part of the Russian left.

“These, like many other moments in Kagarlitsky's activities, are completely unacceptable for the members of the Posle team. Our fundamental differences have not gone away, we will certainly discuss them with Boris — but only after his release.”

Anti-war movement needed

For Posle, “the arrest of Kagarlitsky is part of a new large-scale repressive campaign by the authorities aimed at completely clearing the political space of any critics of the war … it has become clear that repression is reaching a new level and the number of activists in the immediate risk zone has increased significantly".

Given this, they argue for an international campaign in support of Kagarlitsky and all political prisoners.

Noting he was detained for his anti-war convictions, Andriy Movchan writes that “for this reason alone, [Kagarlitsky] deserves international solidarity”.

But he adds a further important argument: “Without an anti-war movement inside Russia itself, it will be very difficult, perhaps impossible, to end the war in Ukraine.

“Russian society is far from ideal, of course, but only from this imperfect society, with its imperfect people with their imperfect biographies, can an anti-war and anti-government movement emerge.

“Anyone who delays this movement is doing harm. For the last 18 months, Kagarlitsky brought it closer.”

[Visit links.org.au to view a collection of petitions and statements in support of Kagarlitsky.]

Thanks to Green Left Weekly, where this article was first published. – Richard Fidler

See also

Solidarity needed for Russian anti-war socialist Boris Kagarlitsky

Socialist Alliance: Free Russian anti-war socialist Boris Kagalitsky!

Resisting Russia’s war in Ukraine: Left voices speak out

How Ontario tenants fought for legal security of tenure, and won

By Richard Fidler

Nothing illustrates the post-pandemic austerity more clearly than the sharp inflation in housing costs as reflected in the escalating rates of mortgage interest[1] and residential rents.

Most immediate are the rent increases. Average rents across Canada have risen by 20 percent since the onset of the pandemic, and by even more in major cities.[2]

Not surprisingly, Ricardo Tranjan’s book on what he terms “The Tenant Class,” published in May, has attracted wide interest and sympathy from housing activists and advocates.[3] A senior researcher at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, Tranjan takes aim at the conventional approach, which treats the “housing crisis” as a temporary problem requiring a technical solution: build more housing to bring supply into balance with demand and thereby limit prices through competition. Critics on the left, he notes, emphasize the need to remove housing as much as possible from market forces through promoting and building social and community housing, regulating the remaining market provision, and organizing tenants to ensure quality and access.

How can this be done? Tranjan sees tenants as the vehicle for change. His concern is with agency, and tenants alone in his view have the interest and capacity to force the debate onto the political agenda. And he describes some major tenant struggles in Canada. “Organizers may find these stories helpful,” he says, “when calling other tenants to join the historical struggle against the landlord class, which includes many inspiring victories.” The stories he cites include a struggle by 19^th century settlers in Prince Edward Island against absentee British landlords for the right to buy their land as freehold tenure; Nova Scotia struggles for social housing construction; Montréal battles for tenants control of social housing; and struggles in Vancouver for the right to collective bargaining by tenants.

A separate chapter on tenant organizing today features rent strikes and political action initiatives in Toronto, Montréal and Vancouver as well as community organizing aimed at strengthening tenant input in battles for adequate housing.

Important omission

It is a useful, if rather disparate, inventory. But I – as a tenant activist in the late 1960s – was surprised to find only a fleeting (and inaccurate) mention of the major struggle in which we won legal security of tenure in Ontario. Here is what Tranjan says, in toto:

“Ontario had revised its residential tenancy act in 1968, drawing on a law reform commission that reviewed the matter in detail. In particular, the Ontario commission argued that tenants should have the right to collective bargaining as the asymmetric power relations between tenants and landlords would prevent fair outcomes in grievance cases and other negotiations….” (page 79)

In fact, until 1970 Ontario had no legislation specifically addressed to residential tenancies; these were subsumed under a general Landlord and Tenant Act that covered all tenancies, commercial and residential, the latter being based on feudal estates law that failed to address residential tenants’ needs for protection against exorbitant rent increases and restrictions against children, or for the right to individual and collective negotiation and adjudication of evictions and other conflicts with landlords. Tenant agitation in the 1960s prompted a law reform study, published in December 1968, that urged adoption of special legislation governing residential tenancies. Among its recommendations, it called for abolition of security deposits and distraint; an end to arbitrary or unreasonable refusal by landlords to allow tenants to assign, sublet or quit their leaseholds; imposing a legal duty of landlords to deliver and maintain premises in a good state of repair and fit for habitation; giving tenants a statutory right to apply to a court for enforcement of the landlord’s repair obligations, etc.

The Law Reform Commission report urged municipalities to establish Tenant Advisory Bureaus for provision of information, conciliation and rent review, using rent review officers to obtain “fair and just settlements of disputes concerning the payment or increasing of rent… and of disputes over evictions” – and, if this proved insufficient, “the introduction of a more stringent and compulsory system” of rent control. Although the report mentioned the issue of collective bargaining rights for tenants, it did not recommend that this be provided in law.

Ontario Tenants’ Association formed

While the Commission’s report, which was based on extensive consultation and hearings, was being publicly debated, a call for formation of an Ontario-wide tenants’ association was issued by the Association for Tenants’ Action in Kingston. ATAK had recently elected a member, Joan Kuyek, to Kingston’s City Council. I was among the delegates who met in response to the call in Kingston June 28-29, 1969 to found the Ontario Tenants’ Association. We represented tenants’ associations in Toronto, Kingston, Ottawa, Brampton, Hamilton and Peterborough.

We heard stirring presentations by tenant activists – including Frances Goldin from the Metropolitan Council on Housing in New York City, who pointed out that Canadians were paying a far higher percentage of rent to income than their neighbors in the United States, while possessing a much smaller stock of housing. Included in her advice to the new OTA: “Use demonstrations to break through the morass of the bureaucratic mind.”

The conference adopted some preliminary objectives, which were followed by a more complete definition of policy at the OTA’s October 1969 convention. They are worth quoting:

1. Membership in the Association shall be restricted to tenants and tenants’ associations.

2. The OTA will work for legal recognition of collective bargaining for tenants.

3. The OTA shall remain independent of any political party.

4. One immediate goal of the Association shall be to achieve the reform of the Landlord and Tenant Act, and to support the recommendations of the Law Reform Commission as a first step.

5. The OTA will work for tenant control of the management of the buildings in which they live.

6. The OTA will work towards the creation of a new Rent Regulation Act….”

The OTA’s detailed suggestions for the proposed Act emphasized that “The tenant is to have security of tenure, with eviction only for illegal non-payment of rent, undue damage, or criminal activities. Eviction is to be only by court order….” And they were preceded by the statement that “Rent regulation is a temporary solution to a long-standing problem that can only really be solved by more public and co-operative housing.”

OTA Chair Joan Kuyek and Alderman John Sewell at panel on Tenant Control, Toronto.

On October 8, 1969, about 500 OTA members and supporters demonstrated at the Ontario legislature in Queen’s Park, Toronto, to protest the provincial government’s failure to enact tenant protection legislation. According to the news release I issued on behalf of the OTA,

“Their demands were moderate, but the tenants were angry. At Queen’s Park they heard speeches by NDP deputy leader Jim Renwick and Liberal opposition leader Robert Nixon. But they booed lustily when Trade and Development Minister Stanley Randall, representing the cabinet [of Tory Premier John Robarts], took the microphone. Randall was constantly heckled as he plowed through a 15-minute prepared speech that made no attempt to meet the tenants’ demands.”

At a conference on the following day, close to 100 delegates met to debate and adopt the OTA’s principles and policies. Again, some excerpts are worth quoting. We began with the Statement of Principles:

“Two classes of people are interested in housing - those who live in it, and those who live off it. The latter comprise developers, real estate speculators, lending institutions, landlords’ lobbies, and the governments which are all too ready to heed their wishes. It is these institutions which are responsible for the housing crisis, and they alone who benefit from it.

“The Ontario Tenants Association seeks to represent a growing part of the first group — that is, those who rent the homes they occupy. OTA bases all its policies and actions upon the following premises, that:

1. Everyone has a right to a decent home at a price that he or she can afford.

2. It is the responsibility of governments to ensure that this housing is provided.

3. Because tenants, through their rent, pay for the financing, operations and maintenance of their homes, they should be entitled to bargain collectively over the terms of their rents and over the quantity and quality of services provided.”

In addition to detailed proposals for enactment of a new rent regulation act, we adopted resolutions on public housing that reflected input from affiliated Ontario Housing Corporation (OHC) tenant associations.[4] One called on the Ontario government to “increase the public stock of housing so that the average rent of all housing not exceed 20% of a household’s net income.” Another demanded that OHC “establish the principle of tenants’ control of the management of their buildings” and that public housing tenants be guaranteed access to the OHC’s files on them with the right to challenge misinformation before “a Review Board comprised equally of civil servants and tenants.”

Still another resolution addressed the need for collective bargaining rights:

“BE IT RESOLVED that the principles of collective bargaining be established by law as a method of resolving disputes between landlords and tenants, and that the Provincial Government be asked to introduce legislation to compel landlords by law to recognize any association, organization or union that represents 50% or more of the tenants in the leased premises under dispute, as the sole spokesman and bargaining agent for all the tenants in the leased premises under dispute.”

“And further, that the parties be compelled by law to bargain in good faith,

“And further, if the tenants choose to enhance their bargaining position by withholding rent, they, like unions, shall not individually or collectively be subject to the law of conspiracy.”

Law reform

Throughout 1969, tenants’ associations throughout southern and eastern Ontario organized and joined with the OTA in marching and lobbying for these objectives. And in December 1969 the Ontario government finally tabled its Bill 234 adding a Part IV to the Landlord and Tenant Act to govern residential tenancies. At the legislative committee hearing on the Bill, we were unsuccessful in winning agreement on our major criticisms as outlined in a five-page brief submitted by OTA chair Joan Kuyek along with representatives of the Metro Toronto Tenants Association. Nevertheless, as the OTA Newsletter reported, “the Bill does represent a recognition of the rights of Ontario tenants and it does take a step toward granting us some measure of security of tenure.”

The Newsletter outlined the major changes in the Act:

1. The right of distress has been abolished. Landlords can no longer seize tenants’ property to cover arrears in rent….

2. Security deposits have been abolished on all leases signed or renewed after January 1 [1970]. On leases signed before that date, you will get six percent interest on the deposit [an amendment to the Bill obtained by the OTA]….

3. Tenants cannot be evicted for exercising their human rights, legal rights, or reporting their landlord violations under any government statutes.

4. For the first time, landlords are put on the same footing as any other business by requiring that they live up to their side of the bargain before they can legally demand rent.”…

5. The landlord’s right of entry is severely limited…

Most importantly, procedures for termination of tenancies were “spelled out in detail, in sections 97-108. They are long, so you should look at the Act for answers to specific questions.”

In the Summer 1970 issue of the OTA Newsletter (now a print tabloid, myself listed as editor), we pointed to major defects still in the revised Act. Singled out was the failure to address “the critical problem of rent increases.” Only two cities (Burlington and Windsor) had set up Leasehold Advisory Bureaus, an option under the Act. Furthermore, there were still no guarantees that a lease, once expired, could be renewed.

In the following years, these and some other problems were addressed in law and regulations. In 1975 the Act was amended to convert leases into indeterminate contracts; a landlord now needed a court order to evict a tenant. Also in 1975, residential premises rent review was established in Ontario, and rent controls were tightened under successive Liberal and NDP governments in the 1980s and 1990s.

Most reforms governing landlord and tenant duties established in Part IV of the Landlord and Tenant Act remain in force in today’s legislation. When I worked at Toronto’s Parkdale Community Legal Services in the early 1980s as a student lawyer representing tenants, I was often reminded of how critically important these reforms were to enforcing the rights and interests of low-income tenants.

Since then, however, there have been major setbacks.

Governments throttle key reforms

In 1997, the Conservative government of Mike Harris enacted a new Tenant Protection Act (TPA) which removed the dispute resolution process under the previous law, including evictions and rent increases, from the Ontario court system and assigned jurisdiction to a newly created quasi-judicial body, the Ontario Rental Housing Tribunal, staffed by politically appointed adjudicators. The TPA also eliminated rent control on vacant units between tenants, increasing the financial incentive for landlords to evict tenants through what is known as vacancy decontrol. Among the results is a massive increase in “no fault” eviction cases, such as evictions for extensive renovations, a frequent pretext claimed by landlords.

Later Liberal governments retained vacancy decontrol while replacing the TPA by separate laws governing residential tenancies and rent review.

The Landlord and Tenant Board (LTB), the body responsible for adjudicating landlord and tenant disputes under the new Residential Tenancies Act, is now overwhelmed by the volume of eviction cases landlords file against tenants. In 2021-2022, 88% of all applications received by the LTB were filed by landlords against tenants.[5]

Although in 2017 rent control was expanded to all units, including those built after 1991 (previously exempt), one of the first acts of the newly-elected Conservative government of Doug Ford was to exempt all rental units created or occupied after November 15, 2018 from rent control. Rent increases on existing tenancies are limited by decree: 2.5% annually at present. But landlords may apply to the Board for “above guideline increases,” as many do.

A provisional conclusion 

These retreats from the reforms initiated in 1969-70 underscore the fragility of any progressive reforms – especially those restraining private property rights – achieved under capitalist governments. Nevertheless, the reforms themselves, as outlined here, were major gains for the working class in Ontario.

The Ontario Tenants Association played an important role in publicizing tenant interests and actions and in providing political leadership to the movement for reform.

Tenant struggles, a constant reality under market-based housing conditions, need to find ways to go beyond the inevitable defensive struggles against the power and privileges of individual corporate and financial landlords – important as these are – and to seek political solutions at the level of government housing policy and programs.

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[1] “Mortgage borrowers to see payments increase by 20-40% at renewal: Bank of Canada,” Canadian Mortgage Trends, May 19, 2023.

[2] Rentals.ca May 2023 Rent Report.

[3] Loretta Fisher, “The housing market and tenant organizing,” Spring Maganzine, May 12, 2023. Sahar Raza, “This is a class struggle, not housing crisis – and it’s time to pick a side,” CCPA Monitor, May-June 2023.

[4] The OHC, now the Housing Services Corporation, is the province’s public social-housing corporation for moderate and low-income households.

[5] “A More ‘Efficient’ Landlord And Tenant Board Will Mainly Hurt Renters,” The Maple, May 15, 2023.

Origins of the Ukrainian Crisis (Part I)

In a major article published in Critique in 2015 Marko Bojcun analyzed the origins of the crisis that erupted in Ukraine in 2013-2014, and which has shaped that country’s political, economic and social situation since then. The essay is republished in his book Towards a Political Economy of Ukraine: Selected Essays 1990-2015. This article by a leading Ukrainian Marxist historian addresses many of the issues that are currently being debated in the international Left in relation to the current war unleashed on Ukraine by Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Published here in two parts because of its length. [R.F.]

Origins of the Ukrainian Crisis

This article explores the origins of the Ukrainian crisis in several historical developments that came together in 2014. The first devel­opment, and the condition necessary for activating all the others, is the situation that has unfolded inside Ukraine itself since 1991 with the establishment of a new nation state simultaneously with the re­turn of capitalism. The second is the isolation of Ukraine from the regional economic and security blocs of the Euro-Atlantic core states to the west and of Russia to the east. The third is the revival of Russian imperialism, and the fourth is the ensuing rivalry be­tween Russian and European imperialisms to incorporate Ukraine, into their respective transnational strategies. The fifth development is the overarching confrontation between a declining American power and a reviving Russian power in Europe. Russia is observed as the proactive power that militarised and internationalised the Ukrainian crisis in 2014 by seizing Crimea and arming the sepa­ratist insurgency in the east. It brought the question of European security to the centre ground, making a confrontation inevitable be­tween Russia and the USA. However, it also has the potential to open up cracks in the Euro-Atlantic core between the USA on the one hand and the most powerful European states on the other.

My findings are at odds with the claim made by academic and political figures right across the political spectrum in the West that the USA bears primary responsibility for the Ukrainian crisis by having encroached too far into Russia’s traditional sphere of influence.[1] Rather, I see the US-Russia rivalry as only one contrib­uting factor. The Euro-Atlantic core states had the initiative after the collapse of the Soviet bloc. They integrated Central European and Baltic littoral states into the EU and NATO on their own terms from the end of the Cold War right up to the international financial crisis and the Russo-Georgian war in 2008. Thereafter, however, the Russian state retook the initiative in Eastern Europe and the Cau­casus, the eastward drive of NATO and the EU stalled, and the role of the USA in the region’s affairs became increasingly a reactive one. This was the broader context of the Ukrainian crisis, which matured and then erupted in the period from 2008 to 2014.

The fragility of the Ukrainian state

The Maidan[2] arose in 2013, as it did in 2004, because the new Ukrainian ruling class failed to share state power democratically or to invest in the development of its own society. Lacking democratic legitimacy or an adequate social consensus made the state weak and less capable of dealing with the challenges and opportunities it faced from neighbouring powers.

This past quarter-century we have seen the simultaneous con­struction of a new nation state and its still incomplete transition to a capitalist economy. State building and the privatisation of the na­tionalised assets have been not only simultaneous, but also symbi­otic processes. The state was built as the instrument for the whole­sale transfer of these assets into the hands of a very narrow class that we call the oligarchs. This social class then turned the state to enabling new rounds of wealth accumulation from the living labour deployed in the growing private sector.

The old Stalinist bureaucracy was not driven out of the col­lapsing nationalised economy. Rather, it made its own way to the individual and corporate ownership of the economy’s commanding heights. So too did it ensure its own resurrection in the political sphere where it became the absolutely dominant subject of the multi-party system.

The state rested on a fragile social consensus of a population holding onto an ever-fading promise that prosperity would come from leaving the Soviet Union and joining the West. The Ukrainian masses rose up in frustration and anger over this broken promise in 1994, 2001 and 2004, but their increasingly massive protests failed each time to fundamentally change things. On the contrary,[3] the Ukrainian people are as poor today as they were in the last year of the USSR, and they are riven by far more inequalities than they were then. Their influence over public policy and public institu­tions remains weak, even if they have managed repeatedly to re­cover their basic rights to free expression, assembly and self-organisation.

Thus the present crisis is in the first instance attributable to the failure of a newly independent state to meet the mass expectations on which it was founded in 1991. The Maidan in the winter of 2013-­2014 was the latest revolt against this manifest failure, a mass move­ment that briefly undermined the new ruling class, drove its most powerful faction out of the country, but ultimately failed to dis­lodge it from the political and economic institutions. However, the Maidan was sufficiently threatening to compel the Russian state — gendarme of the transnational ruling class in its region — to intervene and seize Crimea, to arm a revanchist insurgency in the Donbas, and so to prevent the revolutionary process from spreading into the east and south.

The international isolation of the Ukrainian state

The second historical development that contributed to the outbreak of the current crisis was the failure of the Ukrainian state — for rea­sons not entirely of its own making — to integrate successfully into either the Euro-Atlantic alliance or the Russia-led alliance. Its re­sulting isolation from the integration projects on either side made Ukraine particularly vulnerable to shifts in the relations between the big powers in the region.

After succeeding Leonid Kravchuk as president in 1994, Leo­nid Kuchma pursued a strategy to build a national ruling class that could hold its own place in the international political economy. His strategy required keeping Western and Russian capital out of the first big privatisations of nationalised property, accumulating wealth at home and upgrading technologically so as to prepare the country for membership in the EU and its single market. Kuchma’s strategy failed because the state leadership could not compel its own capitalists to keep their wealth in the country to upgrade and diversify the domestic economy. Rather, Ukraine became a low wage, energy and materials intensive exporter of primary goods and semi-finished products in agriculture, energy, chemicals and minerals, the profits from which the oligarchs sent abroad.[4] The mounting social inequalities in the midst of a rapid rate of economic recovery on the back of an export boom and an increasingly repres­sive regime were the triggers for the 2004 Orange Revolution.

From Kuchma’s second term in office and Putin’s first in Rus­sia, Russian capitalists succeeded in placing substantial invest­ments in the Ukrainian economy. Kuchma’s successor in 2004, Viktor Yushchenko, tried to offset the Russian advance by inviting in European investment capital. By 2008 the Ukrainian economy was well penetrated by both Western and Russian investors, nei­ther of whom contributed much to diversifying or upgrading it. Ra­ther, each side was trying to incorporate Ukraine’s natural re­sources, cheap labour and markets onto a low technological echelon of its own regional chains of production and consumption.

Yet the 2008 financial crisis prevented either side from making a bid for a dominant position. The Ukrainian oligarchs still held onto their hope of remaining an independent capitalist class in the global political economy. They resisted incorporation into the suc­cession of Russia-led integration projects: the Commonwealth of In­dependent States and the Customs Union. The European Union, on the other hand, did not want them in as members, and it made that abundantly clear in 2005-2007 by rejecting the requests for a mem­bership path from Yushchenko, the most pro-Western of all Ukraine’s leaders. Moreover, the EU’s biggest states — Germany, France and Italy — remained steadfastly opposed to offering Ukraine membership in NATO.

So Ukraine ended up in the grey zone between US-led Europe and Russia, and the likely recipient of friction between them that grew as Russia revived and US influence in Europe waned.

The revival of Russian imperialism

The third historical development contributing to the current crisis has been the revival of Russian imperialist ambitions. Throughout the 1990s the Western powers set the agenda, incorporating Central European and Baltic states into the EU and NATO, and all the time holding Russia, Ukraine and Belarus at arm’s length outside their integration project.

From around 2000 Putin began to restore Russia’s position as a power in Eurasia. He focussed first on rebuilding Russia’s eco­nomic ties in the ex-Soviet space by reclaiming state control over Russian energy and mineral resources and promoting several na­tional corporate champions in these sectors. Later, the restored eco­nomic links with Russia’s near abroad would lay a path to securing transnational competitive status for Russia’s biggest energy and mineral producers.[5]

In terms of strategy, although not of scale, the Russian model of imperialism is similar to that of the USA in the twentieth century: the provision of military security to countries in exchange for their alignment with Russian foreign policy, and their access to Russian markets in exchange for the removal of barriers against Russian capital penetrating their national economies. It is different from the USA experience insofar as Russian expansion has relied on its competitive advantages in global markets of fuel, energy and mineral resources whereas American capitalism expanded globally with a far more diversified production base and with already saturated domestic demand.

The Russian economy is weakly driven by domestic demand, and it does not satisfy it. It is not diversified nor is its bourgeoisie willing to invest significantly in its diversification. Property owner­ship in Russia is too insecure, access to domestic resources and markets is in the gift of state authorities, and better security and invest­ment opportunities exist for Russian capital investment abroad. Therefore, while the Russian national economy is not diversified, Russian capital has become diversified both sectorally and geographically along transnational chains of production, trade and in­vestment.

A Deutsche Bank report in 2008 concluded that Russia had become by 2006 the largest outward investor of its capital of all the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China). Russian overseas direct investment (ODI) was double that of its nearest rivals India and China at $160 bn, up from $20 bn in 2000. Russia was already the second largest source of ODI in emerging markets after Hong Kong. Russian private capital was invested first in the near abroad and then expanded outwards, seeking new markets, financing and new technologies principally in the fields of fuel, energy and met­als.

A survey of 25 top Russian firms shows they sent 52 percent of the ODI into Western Europe, followed by 22 percent to the near-abroad countries and 11 percent to Eastern Europe. Several Russian companies made new large purchases abroad in 2008: Evraz in Can­ada, the USA and Ukraine, Severstal in the USA, Lukoil in Italy and Gazprom in Belarus. The biggest transnational corporations of Rus­sian origin at the time also included Sistema, Sovkomflot, Norilsk Nickel and Basic Element. By 2010 ODI by Russian firms exceeded $200 bn, and was going mainly to the CIS and EU countries.[6]

For the past 15 years Russia has targeted Ukraine for reabsorption into its traditional sphere of influence. There was an ongoing desire to preserve joint production in engineering, defence, aero­space and other high-technology sectors that survived the Soviet break-up. However, Russian capitalism was looking to new hori­zons as well, and Ukraine lay along its principal path of expansion into Central and Western Europe. It holds the downstream transit facilities and processing industries that Russian energy, minerals and chemical producers need. Russian producers made their first such cross-border acquisitions in 2000.[7] However, the gas and oil transit pipelines through Ukraine that link Russian suppliers to Eu­ropean consumers, the most valuable transit facility of them all, have remained steadfastly in state hands.

The Yanukovych presidency

The period of Viktor Yanukovych’s presidency saw further popular alienation from the political order, the economy falter under the blows of the 2008 financial crisis, and the state face a zero-sum choice of accepting either Russia’s or the West’s terms of integration into their respective regional integration projects. The mixture of these three factors finally exploded in Kyiv in the winter of 2013-2014.

Yanukovych narrowly defeated Yulia Tymoshenko for the presidency in 2009 on a platform of political stability and the resto­ration of economic ties with Russia.[8] His predecessor Yushchenko had fallen out bitterly with Tymoshenko as Prime Minister over policy towards Russia. Tymoshenko took the full force of the 2008 financial crisis. She negotiated for emergency funding with the IMF in 2009. Ukraine-Russia relations were dominated by disputes about the cost of Russian gas and its transit to Europe. The state corporation Naftogaz Ukrainy became more and more indebted to Gazprom, and the Russian government used the debt to pressure Ukraine on a variety of issues.

Yushchenko had tried to balance growing Russian economic penetration by opening up the country to Western investment. That influx ended spectacularly with the financial meltdown in 2008 that battered people’s livelihoods and convinced enough voters, even in the nationalist west of the country, to give Yanukovych a chance to turn things around. The arrival of Armani-dressed oligarchs in li­mos with tinted windows and bodyguards inside to Yanukovych’s inauguration in Kyiv in January 2010 gave everyone a taste of things to come.

Yanukovych perfected the scheme of taking bribes from all of the businesses his ministries permitted to trade. These appropriations made him a tycoon in his own right (he was nominally repre­sented in the private sector by his son Andrii). Yanukovych created his inner circle, called the “Family”, from the seven most powerful capitalists. He restored Dmytro Firtash, the gas trader, to financial health by giving him 12 billion cubic metres of Russian gas in set­tlement of a dispute that Firtash’s firm Rosukrenergo had had with Naftogaz Ukrainy during Yushchenko and Tymoshenko’s terms, when they tried to close him down. Rosukrenergo once again be­came the intermediary between Gazprom and Naftogaz Ukrainy in a scheme that allowed Russian and Ukrainian presidents and oli­garchs to milk the interstate gas transit. Gazprom opened an $11 bn credit line for Firtash, which he used to build a monopoly stake in fertiliser processing in Ukraine, a port facility, a bank and the na­tional television channel Inter.[9]

Renat Akhmetov, the country’s richest man, was also blessed when Yanukovych granted his firm DTEK a monopoly on electric­ity exports. Yanukovych ordered the state energy regulator to in­crease the tariffs local and regional authorities paid for DTEK’s elec­tricity from coal-burning stations, to levels comparable to those paid to state-operated nuclear power stations. Both Akhmetov and Firtash won tenders to privatise regional electricity distributors. Both placed their representatives into the state energy regulating commission to ensure that they continued to get high returns for their gas and electricity.[10]

In November 2012 President Yanukovych signed a Double Tax Treaty with the government of Cyprus to replace the Soviet-era treaty. Thus he preserved the channel used by the biggest corpora­tions to expatriate their profits, either permanently or to recycle them back to Ukraine as foreign investments and loans that were subject to much lower levels of capital gains tax. Flight of capital to tax havens was taking place through various other channels used by Ukrainian and foreign firms alike. They consistently deprived the state budget of between $10 bn and $20 bn every year.[11]

As soon as he took office Yanukovych moved to strengthen presidential authority over the legislature, judiciary, the public procurator and the Kyiv city government. He appointed his own Cabinet of Ministers under Mykola Azarov, denying the legislature its constitutional prerogative. The rules were changed to make it easier for the Party of Regions to build voting majorities in the Verkhovna Rada. And in August 2012 the law by which the Rada was elected entirely on the basis of proportional representation of parties was replaced. Now half the seats would be chosen on the basis of proportional representation of those parties that gained more than 5 percent of all votes, and the other half by single man­date constituency elections. The new law gave the President’s Party of Regions a way to finance its own candidates disguised as inde­pendents to run in the single-mandate constituencies. It also pro­vided the means to subvert the democratic oversight of local elec­toral committees and to deliver fraudulent vote counts to the Cen­tral Election Commission.

The October 2012 elections to Verkhovna Rada were the dirti­est in the history of independent Ukraine. They provided Yanukovych with a majority of deputies in the Rada, elected by propor­tional representation from the list of the Party of Regions and as nominally independent candidates standing in single-member constituencies.[12]

In addition to settling scores with potent rivals, the imprison­ment of Yulia Tymoshenko and Yurii Lutsenko (former Minister of Interior) and their barring from public office for seven years served to intimidate the entire parliamentary and extra-parliamentary op­position. State security organs went after opposition candidates, in­dependent analysts, university rectors and investigative journalists. A determined attempt was made -- in the end unsuccessful -- to muzzle the media by making slander of public officials a criminal offence. This broader offensive had the hallmarks of the drive to “sovereign democracy” made by Putin years before in neighbour­ing Russia.

The economy

Economic growth in the period 2000-2008 was driven by the influx of foreign direct investment into domestic retail markets and the commodities that dominated Ukraine’s exports: raw and semi-pro­cessed minerals, chemicals and food products. When their hugely inflated prices finally collapsed in 2008, GDP dropped more than 15 percent in the following year, the second deepest fall in Eastern Europe after Latvia. The private sector was left holding debts equivalent in value to a year’s GDP.[13] Commodity prices recovered at the end of 2009, but in the longer term international demand did not. Ukraine’s recorded annual GDP grew again, in 2011 by just over 5 percent, but then fell back and registered no growth at all in 2012 and 2013. In 2014 it began to contract as a result of the Russian seizure of Crimea and the war in the east of the country.

Trade

Ukraine’s foreign trade was characterised by the following pat­terns:

• Trade with the EU single market and with Russia each ac­counted for one quarter of the value of its foreign trade.
• Ukraine incurred annual trade deficits in its trade with Rus­sia as a result of its reliance on Russia’s and Turkmenistan’s oil and gas (transited through Russia).
• Ukraine incurred annual trade deficits with the EU as a re­sult of the disparity between the capital content of goods it imported from the EU (machinery, consumer durables) and those it exported to the EU (primary and semi-processed goods).
• Ukraine covered its trade deficits with Russia and the EU by generating surpluses from trade with the East Asian, Middle Eastern and African countries.

External trade remained in balance or went into surplus as long as demand for the country’s principal exports remained strong -- that is, between 2000 and 2008. There-after, the trade deficit grew year on year, reaching $15 bn in 2012.[14]

In 2013 Russia began a trade war with Ukraine in response to the first easing of trade barriers between the EU and Ukraine ahead of the anticipated free trade area agreement between them. Russia claimed that EU exporters would use Ukraine to dump their prod­ucts into the Russian market. It banned imports of Ukrainian dairy products, fruit, vegetables, meat, sunflower oil and alcohol.

Investment

Annual foreign direct investment leapt forward after the Orange revolution from $1.7 bn in 2004 to a peak of $9.2 bn in 2007. Ukraine was second only to China in these years in terms of per capita in­vestment flowing into the country. For the first time much of this inflow came through the banking system, with many foreign banks setting up Ukrainian subsidiaries to provide both corporate lending and retail services. Most foreign direct investment went into export credits for agricultural and mining concerns, consumer lending, real estate and the domestic trade in imported luxury goods.[15]

The proportion of foreign capital held in Ukraine’s banks grew from 13 percent to over 50 percent between 2004 and 2008. Between them the banks of six EU member states held 30 percent of the bank­ing capital. Financial institutions based in Russia held another 10 percent. The European share was held overwhelmingly by large commercial banks, headed up by Raiffeisen of Austria, Unicredit and Intesa San Paolo of Italy, and BNP Paribas of France. The Rus­sian share was distinguished by the predominance of state banks among their holders — VTB, Vneshekonombank, Sberbank, BM Bank and Prominvestbank, and by four other banks tied to the Kremlin.[16]

The international financial crisis in 2008 forced the rival cen­tres of foreign capital to alter their positions in the Ukrainian mar­ket. Facing serious problems at home, the banks that had bought up the domestic networks of several Ukrainian banks were forced to sell. Ukrainian oligarchs, who had sold their banks at lucrative mul­tiples of their book value, now bought them back at a good dis­count. Russian banks, on the other hand, were better protected from the financial crisis by ample credit from their own government’s sovereign funds, so they strengthened their position in the Ukrain­ian banking system. On balance, however, the biggest initial win­ners were the Ukrainian private banks, which increased their share of assets in the banking system from 40 to 51 percent between 2008 and 2012. The Ukrainian state banks Oshchadbank and Ukrexsimbank also increased their share from 11 to 15 percent over the same period.[17]

The overall share of banking capital owned by foreigners fell to 34 percent in 2014. The share of Russian capital rose to 12 percent, making it the largest bloc from any one country and double that of its closest rival, Cyprus, at 6 percent. Not to be over-looked is the fact that a considerable share of Cyprus-exported capital came orig­inally from Russia. After 15 years of cross-border investment, Rus­sian capital was deeply penetrated not only into Ukraine’s banking services, but critically also in the processing and manufacturing sec­tors: petrochemicals, agrochemicals, food production, paper, con­struction materials, steel, non-ferrous metals, machinery and weap­ons manufacturing. It also had developed strong positions in mass media, telecommunications, insurance, business information and information technology.[18]

Debt

Ukraine’s state debt (including state guaranteed debt of the private sector) grew only marginally between 2000 and 2007 to $18 bn, or 12 percent of its GDP. Thereafter it grew rapidly, peaking at $73 bn in 2013. The country’s gross external debt, which included that of the private sector, was double that amount at $142.5 bn, equivalent to 78.3 percent of GDP in 2013.[19]

Tymoshenko’s government negotiated a loan of $16.4 bn from the IMF, $10.6 bn of which were released by September 2009. Yanukovych’s government led by Prime Minister Mykola Azarov that succeeded Tymoshenko’s in 2010 was responsible for adding an­other $40 bn to the state debt over four years, including: $20 bn in treasury bills and Eurobonds; $6.85 bn in IMF Special Drawing Rights in August 2010 and April 2013; $6.6 bn borrowed from the Chinese government in 2012; and $3 bn of the $15 bn originally of­fered by the Russian government in November 2013 to help per­suade Yanukovych not to sign the Association and Free Trade Area Agreements with the EU. The Ukrainian government was addition­ally in arrears to Gazprom for several billions dollars’ worth of gas.[20]

Debt repayment became an increasingly heavy burden on the state budget, at the end of 2014 accounting for 40 percent of total expenditures.[21] For both the West and Russia Ukraine’s indebted­ness provided a handy lever to influence its government. The IMF was the arbiter of its creditworthiness and gatekeeper to interna­tional capital markets. It tried to impose its conditions on the gov­ernment to decrease state ownership of public utilities, and to with­draw subsidies on the cost of supplying them to households, com­munal services and businesses.

The Russian government used Ukraine’s indebtedness and its dependence on Russian export markets to leverage the Kharkiv Ac­cords in April 2010. The Accords extended the lease of Sevastopol and other Crimean ports to the Russian Navy until 2042 in ex­change for cheaper gas. In June of that year the Verkhovna Rada excluded the goal of NATO membership from the country’s na­tional security strategy, thus restoring its non-aligned status. Yanukovych also agreed to start talks with Russia about merging the state utility Naftogaz Ukrainy with Gazprom and deepening co-op­eration between the countries’ defence, aerospace and aeronautical industries.

Labour migration

The movement of labour also reveals the pattern of Ukraine’s incor­poration into the international political economy. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukraine has exported its labour in two direc­tions: workers living in the east of the country have gone largely into Russia, while those in the centre and west have gone into the EU countries. They number in the millions, and their outmigration has had a profound, if contradictory impact on the Ukrainian econ­omy. It has lost skilled and well-educated people to countries where they are now employed as cheap, illegal or legally precarious labour. Communities depopulated by the outmigration have seen their social and family structures severely degraded. Migrant work­ers have been sending remittances from their earnings home that are estimated to exceed the combined foreign direct investment coming into Ukraine.[22] Without their remittances, the condition of the working class would be considerably worse than it is today. The overall impact of labour outmigration, however, has been negative as far as the reproductive capacity of Ukrainian society is con­cerned.

The zero-sum choice

Labour migration, trade, the repatriation of profits from foreign di­rect investment, debt repayments and capital flight are all tributar­ies for the extraction of wealth from the Ukrainian economy. The European Union and the Eurasian Economic Union are both re­gional integration projects designed to comprehensively regulate and channel such tributaries into their respective metropolitan cores. In 2013 the Ukrainian state found itself forced to choose be­tween the EU on the one hand and Customs Union on the other. The Customs Union, formed in 2010 and made up of Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan, was the precursor to the Eurasian Economic Union. The latter was launched in January 2015, together with Ar­menia as its fourth member. This was a zero-sum choice because there was no way for Ukraine to belong to both regional integration projects. The fact that its economy was closely tied to both the Rus­sian and EU markets, asymmetrically but nevertheless in equally strong measure—through debt to the West, energy supplies from the East, and trade with both — was simply ignored by Russian and EU leaders.

The European Union and Ukraine had a Partnership and Co­operation Agreement since 1994. They had been negotiating since 2007 an Association Agreement and a common deep free-trade area based on the laws, state competition policy and production stand­ards that are already enforced within the EU single market. These requirements, which the Verkhovna Rada was urgently adopting throughout 2013, would add considerable costs to the state and pri­vate sector in order to make Ukrainian goods acceptable in the EU market. Except for a transition period when EU food products and Ukrainian automobiles were protected from competition, the aboli­tion of almost all tariff and non-tariff barriers to trade would in the long run expose several Ukrainian industries to sustained and ru­inous competition from the EU side.[23]

Moreover, the EU’s offer was “integration without the institu­tions”: Ukraine was not offered membership in the EU nor even the prospect of membership, so it would remain excluded from the de­cision-making process that shapes the EU single market in which its own businesses and workers were going to compete. It was not an attractive proposition.

The Customs Union and its successor Eurasian Economic Un­ion offered Ukraine something different. This integration project was far less developed than the European Union’s. Russia ac­counted for 90 percent of the combined GDP of the Customs Un­ion’s members, which meant that Russia would dominate the Un­ion whatever its formal governing structure. The Russian establish­ment saw in this project one of the important means to reclaim great power status. The news agency Sputnik hailed the launch of the Eur­asian Economic Union in January 2015 as “the birth of a new giant”. Putin called it “a powerful supranational association capable of be­coming one of the poles in the modern world and serving as an efficient bridge between Europe and the dynamic Asia-Pacific region”.[24]

Yet such a bridge was hardly possible to build without Ukraine. Russian diplomacy focussed on this challenge, trying to coax it into the Union by promising generous energy subsidies if it joined and trade sanctions if it did not. Yet even under Yanukovych and in the worsened economic situation, the government continued to resist. There was a fundamental lack of trust between Kyiv and Moscow, at the heart of which was the refusal of the Russian state to acknowledge Ukraine’s independence.

This refusal is rooted in a long history of Russian imperial domination of Ukraine. It is justified ideologically by the claim that the Ukrainian nation does not exist, that its people are simply the little brothers (nialorosy) of the Russian nation. After gaining inde­pendence in 1991 Ukrainian leaders regularly faced jibes from their Russian counterparts about when they would finally come to their senses and stop playing their game of nation building. Putin ex­pressed perfectly the paradox that Ukrainian statehood poses to Russia’s leaders when he told George W. Bush in April 2008 at the NATO summit in Bucharest that Ukraine really was not a state, but if it tried to join NATO it would cease to exist as a state. It was also at this meeting that “Putin threatened to encourage the secession of the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea and eastern Ukraine”.[25] It was therefore hardly surprising Kyiv baulked at pooling its sovereignty with Russia’s in the Customs Union or the Eurasian Economic Un­ion.

Despite the Kharkiv Accords lowering the price for Russian gas by $100 per thousand cubic metres, Ukraine continued to pay more than Germany and Italy, which are considerably further from Russian gas fields than Ukraine. Neighbouring Belarus enjoyed a lower price, but only after its president Alexander Lukashenko sold the country’s gas transit pipelines to Gazprom. The Ukrainians were not ready to do that; instead, they began to diversify their sources of supply, reducing imports from Russia from 57 mcm in 2007 to 33 mcm in 2012 and 26 mcm in 2013.[26]

The Ukrainian government’s inability to service its foreign debt brought matters to a head at the beginning of winter in 2013. Putin and Yanukovych held talks in Moscow on 22 November 2013 after which Yanukovych announced he would not sign the Associ­ation Agreement and the linked European Free Trade Agreement at the upcoming Summit of the EU Eastern Partnership in Vilnius. When the news reached Kyiv, several hundred people gathered on the Maidan to protest and demand Yanukovych sign the agree­ments.

In Vilnius on 29 November he said at his press conference: “We have big difficulties with Moscow. I have been alone for three and a half years in very unequal conditions with Russia”.[27] He pro­posed as a way out of the situation that Moscow be involved in three-way negotiations with the EU and Ukraine. However, EU officials rejected his proposal.

Addressing the Eastern Partnership’s plenary session Yanukovych insisted he was not rejecting the Agreements, but wanted further negotiations in order “to minimise the negative conse­quences of the initial period that will be felt by the most vulnerable groups of Ukrainians”:

“Unfortunately Ukraine has been left facing serious financial and economic problems recently ... [we need] macro-financial as­sistance ... the restoration of co-operation with the IMF and WB … a revision of trade restrictions on individual items ... participation of the EU and international financial institutions in the modernisa­tion of the Ukrainian gas transit system ... as the key element ... to ensuring Ukraine’s energy independence ... the elimination of contradictions and the settlement of problems in trade and economic co-operation with Russia and other members of the Customs Union related to the establishment of the free trade area between Ukraine and the EU”.[28]

Yanukovych was being pressed to choose between Russia and the West, but he wanted co-operation with both sides to deal with the country’s mounting problems.

[Continued in Part II, https://lifeonleft.blogspot.com/2023/04/origins-of-ukrainian-crisis-part-ii.html]

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[1] They have included John Mearsheimer, “Why the Ukraine Crisis is the West’s Fault”, Foreign Affairs, September-October 2014; Stephen Cohen, “Why is Washington Risking War with Russia”, The Nation, 18-25 August 2014; Jeremy Corbyn, British Labour Party MP, “NATO Belligerence Endangers Us All”, Morning Star, 17 April 2014; Marine le Pen, leader of France’s National Front, “France’s le Pen in Moscow blames EU for new ‘Cold War’”, Reuters, 12 April 2014.

[2] Maidan Nezalezhnosti, Independence Square in central Kyiv, lent its name to the mass revolts in 2004 and 2014 against corruption, social injustice and oligarchic rule.

[3] In 1994 the threat of a general strike forced the Verkhovna Rada and President Leonid Kravchuk to finally call the first democratic elections to both institutions in the independent state. In 2001 the encampment on Independence Square - Maidan - in Kyiv that called itself “Ukraine without Kuchma” demanded the second president’s resignation before being violently suppressed. The 2004 Orange Revolution overturned the falsified presidential election and brought Viktor Yushchenko to the presidency.

[4] The government retained state ownership of land, the arms, aeronautical and aerospace industries, communications and energy transportation pipelines.

[5] Putin’s strategy also required subordinating the oligarchs politically, destroying the insurgent Chechen state at the cost of tens of thousands of lives, substantially recentralising the loose federal system he inherited from Boris Yeltsin, and undertaking neoliberal reforms of the welfare system.

[6] Alexey V. Kuznetsov, “Industrial and Geographical Diversification of Russian Foreign Direct Investments” (April 5,2010). Electronic Publications of Pan-European Institute; https://ssrn.com/abstract=2338170. Accessed 1 October 2015.

[7] Marko Bojcun, “Trade, investment and debt: Ukraine’s integration into world markets” in Neil Robinson, ed, Reforging the Weakest Link: Global Political Economy and Post-Soviet Change in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 46-60.

[8] Marko Bojcun, “The International Economic Crisis and the 2010 Presidential Elections in Ukraine”, Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics, 27:3-4 (September-December 2011), 496-519.

[9] “Otochennia Patina dopomohla Firtashu zarobyty rrtiliardy doliariv”; http://tsn.ua/politika/kogo-zdav-na-sudi-firtash-odkrovennya-yaki-mozhat-vildika ti-politichn1y-zem1etrus-v-ukrayini-425106.html. Accessed 1 August 2015.

[10] Yatsenruk prosyt´ kredytoriv dopomohty Ukraini; http://www.epravda.com.ua/news/2015/05/15/542594/ Accessed 5 May 2015.

[11] T.A. Tyshchuk arid 0.V.Ivanov, “Shliakhy protydii pryldiovanomu vidplyvu kapitalu z Ukrainy” National Institute of Strategic Studies, 2012; http://old2.niss.gov.ua/content/articles/fi1es/Kapital_Tuschuk-72ec2.pdf. Accessed 1 December 2012.

[12] Serhii Rakhmanin, “Use vzhe vkradeno do nas”. Zerkalo tyzhnia, 237,19 October 2012.

[13] “Ukraine - the spectre of default”, Economist Intelligence Unit.- Business Eastern Europe, 23 February 2009.

[14] Bohdan Danylyshyn, “Porady novomu uriadu”; http://www.epravda.com.ua/columns/2012/12/ 6/349303/. Accessed 6 December 2012.

[15] Bojcun, “The International Economic Crisis”.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Tyzlzden´,18 February 2013.

[18] Kuznetsov, “Industrial and geographical diversification”.

[19] Oleksandr Kravchuk, “Istoriia Forrnuvannia Borhovoi Zalezhrtosti Ukrainy”; http://commons.com.ua/formuvannya-zalezhnosti/. Accessed 2 May 2015.

[20] “Ukrains’ka vlada ne hotova zarady kredytu ity na reformy”; http://dtua/ ECONOMICS/ ukrayinska-vlada-ne-go tova-zaradi-kreditu-mvf-yti-na-reformi.html. (accessed 13 February 2013); “The hidden debts of Russia and Ukraine”; http://www.businessinsider.com/ the-hidden-debts-of-russia-and-ukraine-2014-3. Accessed 4 March 2014. @Rosiia ne dopomahatyme Ukraini”; http://www. pravda.com.ua/news/20 14/01/29/7011938/. Accessed 1 February 2014. Financial Times, 23 September 2013, 26 November 2013, 28 November 2013, 18 March 2015, 8 April 2015.

[21] David Marples, “Poroshenko’s choices”; https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/poroshenkos-choices/. Accessed 11 November 2014.

[22] World Bank, Migration and Remittances Fact Book 2011.

[23] “Five facts you need to know about the Ukraine-EU trade deal”; http://rtcom/business/168856-ukraine-europe-trade/; Accessed 27 lime 2014.

[24] Nadezhda Arbatova, “Three Faces of Russia’s Neo-Eurasianism”; https://www.iiss.org/publications/ survival/ 2019/survival-global-politics-and-strategy-december-2019january-2020/616-02-arbat0va. Accessed January 2 2020.

[25] “Putin hints at splitting up Ukraine”; http://www.themoscowtimes.cont/ne ws/article/putin-hints-at-splitting-up-ukraine/361701.html. Accessed 5 March 2015. See also Putin’s address to the Russian Federal Assembly on 4 December 2014 when he justified the seizure of Crimea on the grounds that “Crimea, the ancient Korsun or Chersonesus, and Sevastopol have invaluable sacral importance for Russia, like the Temple Mount in Jerusalem for the followers of Islam and Judaism” http:/ /en.kremlin.ru/ events/president/news/47173.

[26] Arkady Moshes, “Will Ukraine Join (and Save) the Eurasian Customs Union?”; http://www.ponarseurasia.org/memo/will-ukraineloin-and-save-eurasian-customs-union. Accessed 20 June 2013.

[27] The Guardian, 29 November 2013.

[28] Kyiv Post, 29 November 2013.