Vote Communist!

By Karen Kawawada
Kitchener-Waterloo Record
October 1, 2008

The Soviet Union is ancient history. China manufactures dolls, bras and toasters for sale in the West. North Korea teeters on the edge of starvation.

What's a Communist to do?

Take inspiration from elsewhere, raise money through bake sales, push for revolutionary change through the ballot box, and run yet again for office, despite acknowledging you're unlikely to win.

Miguel Figueroa, leader of the Communist Party of Canada, visited the The Record yesterday for a candid interview in an area where the 500-some-member national party has a disproportionate number of its 24 candidates running.

Ramon Portillo is running in Kitchener-Waterloo, Martin Suter is running in Kitchener Centre and Drew Garvie is running in Guelph.

But it was only Figueroa who came for the interview, shaking hands and speaking in a low-key, friendly manner more reminiscent of a neighbourhood barber than a would-be Dear Leader or Comandante.

Figueroa, 56, the son of a Peruvian aeronautical engineer and a stay-at-home mother from New Brunswick, has been party leader since 1992. Last election, he got 176 votes in his Toronto riding.

It can be frustrating, he said. But he doesn't let himself get too discouraged.

"Some say Communists are eternal optimists," he said, admitting there's something to that. "I don't know if we'll achieve socialism in my lifetime . . . (but) we're quite convinced that ultimately . . . people will come to the conclusion that yes, we can organize ourselves without the guidance of the capitalist class."

The Communist Party has been around in Canada since 1921. A couple of Communist MPs were elected in the 1940s, and some also gained seats at the provincial and municipal levels.

Though there is a separate Marxist-Leninist Party of Canada, Figueroa's party is also Marxist-Leninist. So when the Soviet Union collapsed, it was "pretty bleak," he admitted.

But in recent years, things have turned around, Figueroa said. Left-wing parties have been elected in Venezuela, Bolivia and parts of India and have gained ground in other countries, including Greece and Portugal.

"I think what's changed is an understanding that there's no universal model for socialism and the people in every country have to find their own way and develop their own system based on their own national conditions," Figueroa said.

The communism Figueroa envisions doesn't include guerrilla warfare, a bloody coup or identical wages for all.

It does include some measures other parties have advocated, such as universal affordable child care, pulling out of Afghanistan, getting rid of for-profit medical clinics, investing in renewable energy and changing the first-past-the-post electoral system.

The party also has more unusual platform planks, such as nationalizing oil and gas, a $15 minimum wage and 32-hour work week with no loss in pay, halving the military budget, eliminating transit fares and tuition fees, requiring two years' notice for layoffs, and getting out of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

The current economic crisis is "a stinging indictment of . . . worshipping at the altar of the so-called free market," Figueroa said. "We don't have a free market. We have a corporate monopoly-dominated market."

Figueroa said he understands why some feel a vote for his party would be wasted under the first-past-the-post system. But it wouldn't be, he said.

"Sooner or later it's going to be necessary for working people in this country to build up an electoral constituency on the left, on the real left."