A Statement by Bayan-Canada National Organizing Committee*
Whether on Sunday, July 27 or the Monday after, whether in Canada's west coast gateway, Vancouver, to its capital, Ottawa, and Canada's financial heartland, Toronto, in between; Bayan-Canada organizations from the west to the province of Quebec, will be holding various events from a People's Festival, a People's Worship, and a picket in front of the Philippine Embassy to celebrate the Filipino people's movement as it struggles for a better future for the Filipino people and international solidarity, and to unmask the glittering falsehoods that will be peddled on July 28 in the Philippine Congress.
As you know, that very day the bogus President of the Republic of the Philippines, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, will be delivering her fantastical state of the nation address. She will stand there before a body that is overwhelmingly made up of ill-gotten millionaires to weave a mendacious tale of advancement for the Filipino people. Ever mindful of the largess out of Macapagal Arroyo's schemes to cling to the throne, the Philippine Congress will sycophantically grunt at this fool's gold as their minds wander off to thoughts of another year's worth of pork barrel.
As the great anti-imperialist author Mark Twain once made popular, there are "lies, damned lies, and statistics." No doubt Arroyo will dip frequently into her grab bag of numerical sorcery to chant her incantation that her so-called Medium Term Philippine Development Plan of 2004-2010 is actually working. This kind of plan, premised as it is on the old wives' tale that subjecting a maldeveloped country's proto-industries to the brutal competition of a world market dominated at all levels by imperial powers develops that country, has been cliché in the Philippines now for a century. Only a psychotic can believe that doing the same thing again will somehow get different results.
To disabuse us of this notion that any development is actually happening in the Philippines, we need only recall that the National Statistics Office of the Philippine government can actually claim with a straight face that April 2008 unemployment in the Philippines is only 8%. Just to compare, Canada's unemployment rate is said to be only 6.2% by Statistics Canada. In other words, we are supposed to believe that a country in deep, deep, deep, deep, deep depression and backward maldevelopment has barely worse unemployment than one of the richest countries in the world possibly in the throes of a mild economic contraction?
This staggers the mind and no Filipino, except in the worst bad faith, will believe it. To be fair, perhaps the numbers were conjured by leaving out the fact that last year 1,070,192 Filipinos were deployed abroad as overseas workers, not to mention those that actually emigrated, or did not return after doing some tourism, etc.
The Filipino people know the palpable truth through the ache of their growling stomachs, and the silent emptiness of another loved one in strange foreign lands just so the family might survive another day that the country's situation is again worsening as it did the year before, and the year before that, and so on. The most accurate way to picture the direction of the Philippine economy is going down stairs. On those rare best of years, when everything goes right, it either does not get worse or it gets just a little worse. This is one of those years in which not only are the Filipino people hit with weekly oil price increases of P1.50, rice prices have already soared by 1/3 and corn prices by 1/5 even as daily minimum wages hover between P345 or P382, or between $8.00 and $9.00 Canadian per day.
As we vow to redouble our efforts to arouse, organize and mobilize the Filipino people in Canada to struggle for a brighter future for the Filipino people overall, and to defend our rights and improve our welfare in Canada; we also call on our Canadian friends to redouble their efforts to arouse, organize and mobilize the Canadian people to pry away the blood-soaked talons of its imperialist state from its loving embrace with the Philippine fascist state.
*Bayan-Canada organizing committees exist in Vancouver, Winnipeg, Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal.
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