Editor’s Note: Foster, in reviewing Tim Buck’s book, takes note of the long history of US aggression against Canada. Trump’s recent remarks about making Canada a US state reflect US ruling class attitudes that are not new.
William Z. Foster on “Canada’s Fight for Freedom“ Political Affairs, March 1960
A Review of Tim Buck’s Our Fight for Canada: Selected Writings (1923-1959). (Progress Books, Toronto 1959. 407 pp.)
Tim Buck’s latest book, Our Fight for Canada, a selection of his writings over some 36 years, with an introduction by Leslie Morris, is a splendid piece of work. The Communists in our country, as well as in Canada, would do well to read and study this book. Tim Buck, the tested head of the Communist Party of Canada, is well known throughout the Communist world for his many sterling qualities. He is a staunch fighter, an excellent Marxist-Leninist theoretician, and generally a splendid Party leader and mass worker. our joist and mass. This book exhibits his many good points.
The book is a survey of the Canadian Party’s organizational and theoretical history, giving the general highlights of both; at the same time it contains numerous excellent resumes of the major campaigns of the Party over the years. It is a fine blending of the theory of the Party and its application of this theory among the masses, Tim Buck writes very well, and his descriptions of the many struggles that the Canadian working class and the Party have engaged in are models of good agitational material, as well as fine examples of-Marxist-Leninist analysis. The book is packed with many valu-able lessons and should be in every American Communist’s library. ….
The Canadian working class, like that of the United States, is heavily foreign-born, or of immediate immigrant parentage. Its component nationalities are essentially the same m number ours, except that there is a larger per centage of representation in it from the English, Irish, and Scottish, due to Canada’s long period as a colony of Great Britain. People of French descent are also a large factor in Canada. This is the source of most of its 42% Catholic minority. Canada is in fact today a bi-national state, which presents the Communist Party with one of its most complex problems—to help the oppressed French minority protect itself from the oppressive Anglo-Saxon domination. There are also fewer Negroes in Canada than in the United States. In the vast, thinly settled north, the Indians remain a very important factor.Canada, nearly 18million inhabitants, is growing very rapidly. Covering more than 3,845,000 square miles, Canada is larger territorially than the United States (not counting Alaska and Hawaii). …
Throughout its history, Canada has led a bitter struggle for national existence against the attempts of the United States to absorb it. Since the Communist Party was organized, this fight for nationhood has permeated all its activities.
Ever since the US was formed it has engaged in a program of rapid expansion. It seized (sometimes by forceful purchase) the whole Midwest from France; the Floridas, Mississippi and Alabama from Spain; the entire southwest from Mexico; big slabs of Oregon and Washington from England; Alaska from Russia, etc. Half a continent was thus added to the original 13 states, and the basis laid for the great United States empire.
The United States expansionists did not overlook Canada. During the Revolutionary War, with very considerable support inside that country, they tried to take over Canada proper, but were militarily defeated by the Canadians and the British. In the War of 1812, they also set as their major objective Canada, but again they were frustrated on the field of battle. After the [US] Civil War they plotted to seize Canada, but they could not make it. From that time on they have undertaken to strengthen their economic and political influence in Canada generally by grabbing industries , the land, the banks etc. Even today there is a vigorous minority that is looking for every means possible to grab Canada. For about a century, until recently, Great Britain seriously resisted American attempts to seize Canada, but British influence was overwhelmed. The Communist Party [of Canada] has been amongst the most intelligent and militant in this fight for Canadian nationhood, and realizing that the nation must be led by labor….
–The full text of William Z. Foster’s review is at marxists.org
