I first met André Frappier in the late 1970s, when we were members of the Revolutionary Workers League, a pan-Canadian Marxist cadre organization. When the league decided to hoist its banner in the 1980 federal election campaign, André was chosen as our candidate in a downtown Montréal riding. For André, this was by no means the end of his political activism, quite the contrary, as this recent interview by Pierre Beaudet shows.

50 years ago this month, the federal government, invoking the War Measures Act, occupied Québec with 12,000 troops, arrested almost 500 citizens without a warrant, and carried out 36,000 police searches of homes, organizations and publications. That year marked a turning point in the federalist response to Québec’s “Quiet Revolution” and the rapidly growing popular mobilization in favour of making Québec an independent state.

The NDP is fighting for its life in Quebec, where the Bloc Québécois, supported by the right-wing government of François Legault, threatens many if not all of the party’s current 14 seats which were already reduced from the high watermark of 59 federal seats that the NDP won in the province in 2011.

Also, we need to center the working class in a just transition: Decommodify survival by guaranteeing living wages, healthcare, childcare, housing, food, water, energy, public transit etc. Demilitarize, decolonize and strive for a future of international solidarity and cooperation. Ultimately, we need a different kind of government with the political will to lead, coordinate and consolidate the transition.

Québec solidaire will make climate change the party’s main political campaign issue in the coming year, both in and outside the National Assembly. The campaign will build on the major proposals in the QS economic transition plan featured in the recent Quebec general election. Among younger voters it was the party’s emphasis on climate crisis and its support for universal free tuition that proved most attractive.

The Maduro government is by no means exempt from responsibility for these deteriorating conditions. It has displayed a remarkable ineptness in its failure to overcome the economic crisis by tackling its underlying causes, notwithstanding some innovative maneuvering that has, for now, staved off the offensive by its right-wing political opponents and their foreign supporters.

The debate on these options in the party in recent months has revealed a deep and wholly understandable reluctance of QS members to any association with the PQ which, they say, would tend to mask Québec solidaire’s identity as a progressive alternative to the neoliberal parties, including the PQ, and undermine the QS attempt to build alliances between the party and “some social and political movements that share the same inclusive vision.”

Quebec’s broad party of the left, Québec solidaire (QS), will open a four-day congress on May 19 in Montréal. The delegates face a challenging agenda. It includes the final stage of adoption of the party’s detailed program, a process begun eight years ago; discussion of possible alliances with other parties and some social movements including a proposed fusion with another pro-independence party, Option nationale; and renewal of the party’s top leadership.

Will the Leap Manifesto suffer a similar fate in the NDP? That’s an open question at this point. All signs point, however, to deepening climate crisis and increasing consciousness among broad layers of the population of the need for radical anti-capitalist solutions. Ecosocialists have every interest in investigating and where possible pursuing this development in the months to come.

In the context of a concerted movement to rid the country of the Tory government, the FPTP system put enormous pressure on anti-Tory voters to “vote strategically,” i.e. for any other party that had the best chance of defeating the government. The Liberals won that wager.