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Anne Jamieson

Bowen Island nurse wants more power for the people

The Marxist-Leninist candidate in the West Vancouver Sunshine Coast riding is a fourth generation Bowen Islander who has been with the party since its inception in 1971.

Anne Jamieson, 60, is a nurse with a PhD is sociology and a mother of four.

Her priority is to get more people involved in the political process.

"In the present set-up lobbyists and petitioners can’t really achieve very much… because the power bases are becoming more and more centralized," said Jamieson.

"People are not involved in the political process at all except for an election every four years… we need to go a step further to look at how we can overcome political marginlization.

"It’s a dangerous situation for people not to become involved and concerned about the political process now."

As a health-care worker Jamieson is also passionate about the state of the health-care system.

"One of our party’s platforms is to stop paying for rich social welfare programs, health care needs to be accessible for everyone."

The Marxist-Leninist Party movement enjoys its strongest support in British Columbia because it gained national prominence out of protests that began at the University of British Columbia.

The Communist Party of Canada Marxist-Leninist is registered with Elections Canada by the name "Marxist-Leninist Party of Canada" only to avoid confusion with the Communist Party of Canada.

The party officially takes the stand that Canada’s other Communist Party is "revisionist", in the sense of not being true to Stalinism/Maoism.

The history of the Marxist-Leninist Party is essentially Maoist/Stalinist and was founded by Hardial Bains, an Indian Communist.

Bains was born into a communist family in the Punjab and was member of the youth wing of the Communist Party of India.

He was dismayed by the revisionism of Nikita Khrushchev following the death of Stalin and he broke with the CPI when it supported Khrushchev's criticisms of Stalin.

He came to Canada in the late 1950s to pursue his studies and became a university professor.

In 1961, he founded the Internationalists, an anti-revisionist party that supported Mao’s Chinese Communist Party in the Sino-Soviet split.

This party ultimately became the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist).

The Marxist-Leninist Party in Canada ran 84 candidates in the 2000 federal election and is now being led by Bain’s widow, Sandra L. Smith.



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