New Solidarity July 27, 1984
July 21 (NSIPS)—Canadian co-thinkers of economist Lyndon LaRouche, who recently sought the Democratic Party presidential nomination, are in the process of forming a Canada-wide political party to create in Canada the same kind of mass citizens’-candidate movement which developed in the U.S. in 1983 and 1984 around LaRouche’s candidacy.
According to organizers of the new party, the goal of their candidate-recruitment drive is to sign up 50 candidates in one week’s time, by July 27. As required by Canadian law, these 50 candidates will file as the founding members of “The Party of the Commonwealth of Canada,” which will then be accorded official party status.
The effort spans the country. In recent years, most of the organizing activity of LaRouche co-thinkers has occurred around Montreal, in Quebec, and around the Canadian capital of Ottawa. Now, however, organizing for the new party and the candidates’ movement is equally active on the West Coast, with Vancouver, British Columbia, opening up as a center of organizing activity.
The initiative comes at a time when Canada’s Liberal Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau has finally left politics, after years of undercutting the industrial development not just of Canada, but of the Third World—-to which he was a self-appointed “emissary” with a passion for population reduction. Elections are scheduled to determine the new government, and Commonwealth Party candidates want to ensure that the anti-American, environmentalist Liberal Party goes down to defeat. Canadian collaboration is crucial to the defense of the United States. For example, the “Pine Tree” line and “DEW line” defense systems are shared by Canada and the United States, being the northernmost early-warning system which alerts the entire North American continent to incoming ICBMs and nuclear-bomb-capable bombers.
The two lines are part of NORAD (North American Regional Air Space Defense).
Under Trudeau, however, the elements of the Canadian government he controlled were consistently hostile to the United States, hostile to the American Strategic Defense Initiative, and pro-Soviet in line.
The exit of Trudeau and the emergence of the LaRouche-associated Commonwealth Party opens all that up. The basis of the Commonwealth Party is defense of the Western Alliance and the battle for beam weapons. A strong prodefense grouping inside Canada’s Conservative Party may be prodded into useful action by the emergence of the Commonwealth Party, organizers say.
The formation of “The Party for the Commonwealth of Canada” will be a milestone in Canadian history; for the first time in that history, there will exist in the country an official party based on republican principles. Canada is at present a monarchy whose head of state is Queen Elizabeth II of England. Changes in the Canadian Constitution, guided by Pierre Trudeau in 1981-82, strengthened the hold of the British monarchy over the country’s institutions.
The basis for the Commonwealth Party, on the other hand, is LaRouche’s Draft Constitution for the Commonwealth of Canada, written in 1981 to counter Trudeau’s Constitution and the British royal family’s increasingly direct control over the northern neighbor of the United States.