Truth breached by professional leftists to defend status quo
Caption: Desmond Cole and Martin Lukacs in conversation during an episode of The Breach’s ‘The Breach Show’.
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Written by: Yves Engler
The Breach has defamed my campaign’s fundraising success. But its finances are far more noteworthy and its willingness to punch down stems from a self-proclaimed “left’ and its political economy that is hostile to anti-imperialism.
On a The Breach Show podcast a week ago Martin Lukacs and Desmond Cole spent 10 minutes maliciously lying about my campaign’s finances (completely ignoring the comprehensive platform drafted by 45 activists and researchers). Amidst his smears Lukacs claimed, “those donations happened in an unregulated way”, “they were accepting donations through e-transfer—in other words, in a way that contravened the rules” and “there’s no way for Elections Canada to adjudicate the legality of those donations… Unless Elections Canada is overseeing those donations, you can’t know for sure.”
But the campaign is in regular contact with Elections Canada around compliance and has collected and recorded all required information for contributions in accordance with their rules. Elections Canada rules do not ban e-transfers. What matters is gathering and retaining the legally required donor information and respecting contribution limits, which is what we have done.
In a sign of how he was just making stuff up on the fly, Lukacs claimed, “He got a two-month head start on raising money.” But my campaign only began fundraising on September 4, six weeks before Lukacs spewed his ‘punch left’ invective.
In subsequent communications Lukacs and Cole have doubled down on their lies and thus far refuse to correct obvious errors. Even the National Post coverage of the NDP brass’ attack against me was more honest. That paper reported, “Matthew McKenna, a spokesperson for Elections Canada, said that it wasn’t against the law for Engler to raise funds in advance of his candidacy being approved by the NDP. ‘There’s nothing in the Canada Elections Act that prevents any individual from raising money for any reason,’ said McKenna.”
Lukacs is a top ‘advisor’ to Avi Lewis, a competitor for the NDP leadership. He’s made it clear for ten years that he wants to be part of a Lewis-led NDP. (Maybe the single biggest argument against backing Lewis’ leadership bid is that he’s been preparing it for at least a decade. Generally, leftists should tread carefully with someone so focused on personal power.)
In a unique twist, my insurgent left campaign’s fundraising success has been used against it by the NDP brass and its sycophants. It was my campaign that repeatedly trumpeted our fundraising success. The idea was to break through the perception that these ideas were marginal and demonstrate the capacity to pay the $100,000 entrance fee as part of an effort to make it more difficult for the party to vet us out.
Unhappy with our success and strategy to delay vetting, the NDP threatened us privately and then went public to the National Post and Toronto Star two weeks ago. Echoing officialdom’s complaints, a slew of ‘leftist’ voices then expressed outrage over my failure to submit to the undemocratic vetting process and suggested the campaign was engaged in financial improprieties.
This line of attack follows their smears about antisemitism, denying the Rwandan genocide and “Red Brown” politics. According to this narrative, I’m an untrustworthy, malicious, loony. (Despite the onslaught of criticism about my campaign’s purported financial irregularities, only one of 500+ individuals who donated asked for their money back. And after we explained the situation the individual, who gave $50, retracted their request.)
While the Breach besmirches our impressive grassroots fundraising, it has some financial questions to answer itself. In the past two years The Breach has received over $60,000 from the government and has benefited from hundreds of thousands of dollars in subsidy from the student-funded Concordia University Television.
More fundamentally, focusing on our fundraising has the political economy of this campaign flipped upside down. The two individuals engaged in the smear previously worked as Guardian and Toronto Star columnists with the benefits that sometimes flow from such media standing, including in one case receiving $16,000 to give four talks. Besmirching the fundraising success of an anti-imperialist campaign is galling since it’s self-evident that challenging Canadian foreign policy is not where money is on the left.
In my 2018 Left, Right: Marching to the Beat of Imperial Canada I note how “peace and international solidarity groups have but a fraction of the resources available to organized labour” or NGOs, the NDP and left think tanks. “The cost of a single Unifor National Representative probably exceeds the Canadian Peace Alliance, Canadian Peace Congress and Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade’s combined annual budgets! (Unifor has over 100 national representatives and hundreds of other staff.) At its height after the 2003 invasion of Iraq the Canadian Peace Alliance had the funds to hire one employee on a meagre salary.”
Except for a burst of resources for Palestine activism recently, the political economy of the left is deeply hostile to internationalism or anti-imperialism. That is part of the backstory to the disproportionate, sometimes unhinged, attacks some self-declared socialists have lobbed against my anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist campaign. Deeply attuned to what’s politically acceptable, the professional left (union bureaucrats, academics, conference circuit speakers, NGOs, NDP staffers, etc.) are unhappy I don’t always conform to the parameters of ‘politically correct’ left thought (however so much they may advance justice). Echoing the establishment, NDP brass and overtly partisan voices, many in this professional socialist left have lodged various criticism while all but ignoring my campaign’s socialist platform.
They aren’t reacting for no reason. The scope of support for my campaign suggests there’s appetite for a bold anti-imperialist left. Some self-described ‘leftists’ find that troubling.
Yves Engler is the author of 13 books. His latest book, available now, is "Canada's Long Fight Against Democracy”.
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