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 Posted: Sat Jul 21, 2007 7:13 am
As we all know, France and Canada are Socialist countries, leading them to have free health care, better labor conditions, ect.
Your thoughts?
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Posted: Sun Jan 27, 2008 10:05 pm
I wouldn't necessarily say we (Canada) are a socialist country... Our social services are tragically underfunded and there are a lack of hospital beds. While working, I sometimes found unions to be overprotective of their workers to the point where they were a hindered productivity. (I'm 16 so maybe the unions are more protective of "minors")
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Posted: Tue Apr 15, 2008 9:22 am
being a canadian marxist and member of the internation marxist tendency I can tell you that canada is certainly not a socialist country, niether is france. Canada is a fairly large imperialist power. The country is still run by the bourgeoisie and the working class suffers with job loss and underpayment. In canada over the last 3 or so years we have lost about 300,000 manufacturing jobs and the gap between rich and poor is ever increasing.
The working class in canada has not taken any revolutionary process in gaining power in favour of the workers. Canada is simply capitalism with social benefits. Even in france where they have much better social care and a more revolutionary work force, it is still every bit a capitalist nation as canada.
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Posted: Mon Aug 25, 2008 6:54 pm
Typical American propaganda would have one believe that Canada, France, nationalized healthcare and government regulation are all socialist. This could not be further from the truth. Canada is a heavily capitalist-oriented market economy with more social services and a few nationalized services ("Crown Corporations") such as CBS, healthcare services and their national auto insurance firm. Aside from that, Canada is far less "socialist" than most of the West European social democracies. In Canada, the state does not own or control the means of production, nor does it direct the economy according to public/national interest ... it merely regulates private companies and provides tax-funded welfare and social services to those who don't perform well in the market or were born into poor living conditions.
France, however, is quite different. Before the 1990s, France had a national planning ministry that practiced dirigisme - the policy of having the government direct the market economy using incentive-based methods such as taxes, subsidies and through public ownership. France also maintained an extensive welfare state with national healthcare services. A majority of French strategic industries were partly or wholly nationalized, such as Airbus. Though in recent years, as with most countries throughout the world, they have enacted neoliberal reforms such as privatization, de-regulation and de-emphasizing the state's role in the economy. The government still retains partial ownership of major French corporations though, but this is through owning a small percentage of stock in a publicly-listed corporation, so it is quite capitalistic nonetheless. France was, however, never socialist in the Marxist sense in that the working class, or the "proletariat" did not manage their enterprises in a democratic, cooperative fashion.
At the most, I'd consider France to be a mixed "social market" economy, or a social democracy.
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