by Hassan Reyes – Published for BasicsNews.ca & America Latina (a Spanish / English Toronto-based Latin American Monthly Newspaper)

Barely one week into the new session of the re-arranged Canadian Parliament, and already expectations among many people that the NDP would constitute a truly progressive opposition to the Harper Government are waning.  Except for the lone Green Party representative in Parliament, Elizabeth May, all Members of Parliament voted to extend Canada’s ‘mission’ in Libya for three months.  The Canadian Government has already acknowledged spending over $26 million so far in the bombing campaign.

Of course, the pretext to this military adventure was the protection of Libyan people from the image of an iron-fisted, homicidal, madman in Col. Muammar Gaddafi.  In February, reports came in about besieged towns and carpet-bombing of villages by Libyan forces determined to quell a spontaneous uprising.  Even as now the mainstream media has had to acknowledge the unsubstantiated nature of these reports and the clear hand of US and British sponsorship of former Gaddafi loyalists (such as former Senior Army Commander Khalifa Haftar who lived in the US State of Virginia for the last 20 years and has now been smuggled into Libya to lead the ‘independent’ resistance), Canada’s new opposition once again reaffirmed their support for Canadian involvement in the NATO-led bombing campaign had killed hundreds of civilians according to TELESUR and other news services. The Canadian government has also gone as far as to recognized the Libyan ‘rebels’ as the ‘official representatives’ of the Libyan people, while maintaining their refusal to recognize the elected representatives of the Palestinians, for example.

Does this signal a shift in the NDP’s policy?  The New Democratic Party – as a party with ties to Canadian labour unions and even some anti-war organizations – has garnered a reputation as the ‘de-facto’ party of all peace-lovers, promoting diplomacy and opposing war.  While the former may be true, the later is not necessarily the case.  Aside from the first Gulf War, since the 1990’s the NDP has supported almost every opportunity for Canadian military intervention including the 1993 intervention in Somalia, the 1999 NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslavia, the ongoing NATO occupation of Afghanistan, the 2004 mission to ‘stabilize’ Haiti and of course, the current bombing of Libya. In all of these cases, the NDP and their members of Parliament have invoked the idea that Canada and its allies have a ‘duty to protect’, often referencing the horrific slaughter of hundreds of thousands in Rwanda in the aftermath of an orchaestrated assassination of that country’s President Habyarimana in 1994.  While the Rwandan situation is a much longer, more complex issue than what this article will allow for, it is distasteful and audacious to exploit the images and memories of this tragedy to justify what is everyday more obviously a civil war where one side is being organized, supplied and supported by the United States, Canada and numerous other European governments.

Far from being a shift from the NDP’s policies or roots, the NDP’s support for Canada’s adventure in Libya is a continuity of its imperialist outlook veiled in univeralist, liberal rhetoric.  The NDP’s election platform committed to spend $21 billion on the military, the same amount presented in the Conservative’s 2010 budget, along with an additional $2.6 billion on two Navy ships like the ones ‘enforcing the no-fly’ zone in Libya.  Their foreign policy is likely to increasingly mirror the Liberal’s and Conservatives as they strive to attain ‘credibility’ and ‘respectability’ within the overwhelmingly Conservative-aligned media.  Those disappointed by this vote and concerned about the NDP’s trajectory would be well served to address their amnesia by looking at the NDP’s history as well as that of almost every social democratic party in the ‘First’ World.