If the polls are to be believed, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservatives have lost ground since the start of the long campaign and are headed for defeat. If these trends continue, Canadian workers might get a respite from a neoliberal offensive that has been unrelenting and far-reaching. And if Harper loses, there would be a potential opening to begin to undo the dramatic right-wing shift that so many on the Left and center of Canadian politics predicted would never happen here.

For the Left specifically, Harper’s defeat or weakening would present opportunities to organize collective resistance in and around the labor movement and to raise and deepen demands for renewed social programs, minimum-wage increases, infrastructure, and new challenges to the current social and economic regime.

But a number of obstacles will remain: the inability and unwillingness of the electoral opposition — both the social-democratic New Democratic Party (NDP) and the centrist Liberal Party — to present real alternatives; the relative weakness (and lack of radicalism) of labor and other working-class-based social movements; the embedded strength of neoliberalism’s material and ideological gains; and the lack of any organized, class-based, socialist political movement or party with any resonance.