Workers of the World, Unite
                         Cast off Your Chains, and Check Out the
Radical Party of Canada
Unofficial Party Programme Website


sponsored by the Canadian Federation of Labour (CFL)

"Let’s Party and Get Radical, Baby!"    

   

Hidden History of the RPC

15-Point Programme for a Revolutionary Transition

Praise & Endorsements

Official Statement of the Canadian Football League (CFL) on labour

Official Statement of the Canadian Federation of Labour (CFL) on football

Links

Feedback

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Hidden History of the RPC

The Origins of the Radical Party

he roots of the Radical Party of Canada are shrouded in mystery. While the public appearance of the party is a fairly recent event, prompted by the threat of globalization and American football, growing evidence points to a long hidden history of planning and conspiracy involving many prominent figures in Canadian society over the past hundred years. For a long time, apocryphal stories have circulated concerning the strategic roles played by pre-party Radical Caucus members in the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike, the Antigonish Movement of the twenties, the 1970-71 NDP Waffle rebellion, the sabotage of the 1987 Meech Lake accord, and the 1962 Fog Bowl Grey Cup game. As RPC mascot Bucky Beaver said recently, "We didn’t just pop out of nowhere—we’re firmly rooted in Canadian radical culture."

         The final decision to launch the Party is reported to have been reached at a clandestine meeting three or four years ago involving about a score of people including feminist NDPer Rosemary Brown, CAW strategist Sam Gindin, Council of Canadians activist Maude Barlow, football star Lui Passaglia, ecofeminist Tzeporah Berman, Trotskyist-turned-dietitian Wayne Roberts, folksinger Garnet Rogers, native leader Ovid Mercredi, and Halifax Buddhist teacher and card shark Rinpoche Karma Bologna. Our sources indicate that the late Emery Barnes, a BC Lions player-turned-NDP-politician was a central organizer of the meeting, and a key figure in the underground planning committee over the previous two decades.
        The meeting apparently took place in a tent on the grounds of the Winnipeg folk festival. Details are sketchy, but the assemblage obviously concluded that the appropriate time had finally arrived for the formal launch of the Party. Participants said that the spectre of globalization was raised repeatedly, and some mystical significance seems to have been attributed to the fact that both the Canadian Federation of Labour (CFL) and the Canadian Football League (CFL) had almost simultaneously concluded that radical action was now necessary for their own survival. The labour federation had been recently transformed by a rank-and-file rebellion from a building trades front for big American internationals into a vanguard of Canadian nationalism; and the football league had just beaten back a CIA-sponsored attempt to turn the league into a version of American football based in southern cities like Shrieveport and Birmingham.

         A provisional programme committee was appointed, after the meeting came to virtually unanimous agreement concerning programme principles. These principles included opposition to globalization and corporate rule; decentralized political decision-making; the elimination of poverty and social inequity; ecosystem-based economics; a party-hardy spiritual sensibility; and support for Canadian football. Witnesses said the founding meeting came to an emotional close with Garnet Rogers and singer Faith Nolan leading the assembly in a funky hip-hop version of The Mary Ellen Carter written by Rogers’ brother Stan.

         Since its founding, the party has been expanding its operations, with a particular focus on developing a "radically Canadian" movement against the MAI, the WTO and the NFL. In the last year, it has come to international prominence with its rousing tailgate parties at the WTO meetings in Seattle and the World Bank meetings in Washington. The RPC’s principled party-hardy strategy is widely considered the leading threat to labour discipline in western capitalism.

** Note: Subject to change without notice. This programme has been developed with the extensive consultation of eminent Canadian scholars, activists, proletarians and football fans. Although it is the culmination of years of primary research, mathematical modeling, comprehensive focus groups, surveys, networking, negotiation and stochastic synthesis, the essential goal has always been to tap the depth of human potential. That is, the RPC programme approximates the sound of one hand clapping*.
        We sincerely hope that this programme will not only stimulate progressive social, political, ecological and economic initiatives, but serve as the basis for the next Steven Seagal socially-conscious action movie.
        The programme is open to continual review--you know, the whole Maoist criticism/self-criticism thing. So comments and suggestions are welcome.

* the approximate noise level at a Toronto Argonauts football game

Celebrity Endorsements

In the interest of stimulating discussion (as well as awe), we will cite frank reactions by distinguished celebrities, past and present, from Canada and around the world. (We did not make them up!)

John Clarke: "In no other party do we find such militant defense of the homeless and Canadian football."

Pierre Berton: "Next to our railroads and SCTV, Canadian football is the heart of the Canadian experience. The RPC has taken a courageous stand in its defense."

Jane Jacobs: "When it comes to promoting human scale and community concerns, these RPC folks make me sound like Al Leach!"

Doug Mackenzie: "Hey, don’t listen to all those hosers tryin to be Party-poopers. This is way better than those stupid conventions where everybody wears goofy hats. And I think they’re givin’ free beer if you vote for em, eh?"

Hardial Bains: "The glorious and resolute battle of the RPC against the Hitlerite running dogs of US imperialism and their cowardly Canadian lackey puppets is an inspiration to heroic struggling peoples around the world."

Don Cherry: "These guys know how to dish it out in the corners. Listen kids, keep your heads up, and don’t pay any attention to these crybaby liberals trying to reform a corrupt bureaucratic system."

Pin Ball Clemons: "The RPC scores with me. It lights up politics with its funloving programme of gentle humanitarian service."

Crackers, the Corporate Crime-Fighting Chicken: "I, and progressive mascots around the world, pledge eternal solidarity for Bucky, the RPC’s revolutionary beaver, and his admirable campaign to stamp out corrupt and exploitative corporate rule, in Canada and everywhere there are freedom-loving people and animals."

Conrad Black: "Hmm, by comparison with this party, maybe Communism wasn’t such a bad thing."

Peter Gzowski: "mmm, aah, oh yeah?"

Milton Friedman: "I now see there is a democratic alternative to capitalism!"

Tony Robbins: "After only one reading of the Party programme, I’m back washing my dishes in the bathtub!"

Judy Rebick: "This is the kind of grassroots democracy that will never get on the CBC. "

Jeannie Bekkers: "This season’s RPC programme really brings fun, femininity and romance back into political fashion."

David Suzuki: "We have perhaps only a decade to implement this admirable programme, to avoid the catastrophic collapse of vital ecosystem processes and the football franchises dependent upon them."

Karl Marx: "This programme represents the grandest historical synthesis of both my own dialectical work and that of my nephews Groucho and Harpo."

Danny Barrett: "The RPC must be considered the Roughriders of the Canadian spirit!"

Charlie Farqhuarson:  "It's rite timely here in Ontario--what wit yer Common Stench Resolution, dumpin T.O.'s garbage into the hole landscape, imposing yer municipal a-manglemation, pushing yer geneticly commodified foods, and this danged piratization of public surfaces. This revosolution thing could work if folks just sees the means of prediction."

John Polanyi: "So far as I know, this is the only party programme based on rigourous scientific investigation. The RPC has my full support."

Prime Minister Jean Chretien: "We don't really have much use for all these concerns about justice, community and sustainability, but we fully support the RPC bakers' use of the highest quality natural ingredients."


V.I. Lenin: "Despite some fairly flagrant violations of Democratic Centralism, we have to consider the RPC the vanguard of the proletariat in Canada."

Leo Panitch: "Finally, the new Workers Party I’ve been calling for."

Farley Mowat: "The Beaver in the RPC logo says it all for me. If you’re going to cry Wolf, go all the way. Compromise in defense of Mother Earth is no excuse. With the RPC in power, we can extend the vote to our animal friends."

Ed Grimley: "I’ve never been so excited with a party in my whole life, I must say. It’s so decent of them to ask me to join. On the other hand, being repressed by racist white male police violence would drive me mental. But then again, maybe we can get the police to join us and be good public servants. That would certainly be decent of them, I must say."

Constable Benton Fraser: "A very decent programme, I must say. You have my personal commitment to make sure all counter-revolutionary surveillance of radicals by the RCMP and CSIS ends immediately."

The Dali Lama: "The Basic Goodness of the RPC’s compassionate programme goes beyond the distracting attachments of everyday life and superficial desire. Especially enlightening is its stance on the decriminalization of marijuana."

Barry Switzer: "We did it, baby! We did it! We did it!"

(More or less) Official Statement of the Canadian Football League (CFL) on labour:

"The vicarious experience of competition and community offered by Canadian football is essential to the revolutionary consciousness of oppressed and exploited workers. No form of hokum pro ’rassling offers the quality of male bonding essential to seizing the means of production. For this reason, we realize that the struggle against US imperialist football and for workers control of the means of production is one and the same. Besides, giving workers the right to create money for themselves not only means growing collective bargaining power, but increased season ticket sales. With this in mind, we support fully the efforts of the Wobblies to organize our employees and turn our franchises into worker co-ops."

Official Statement of the Canadian Federation of Labour (CFL) on football:

"Here in the proletarian vanguard, we clearly understand that the defense of our more humane Canadian identity from the aggressive and alienated individualism of American commercial culture is closely connected to the vitality of our health care system, the CBC, and Canadian football. Almost as insidious as the WTO’s efforts to impose new rules for corporate investment are parallel rules reducing the football field and adding a down. The Canadian Federation of Labour urges class-conscious workers to defend Canadian autonomy on all levels!"