Gershuny on ballot again

By Graeme McNaughton/The Oshawa Express

When David Gershuny was first getting into politics, he came to believe that all the major political parties were, in fact, the same.

That’s what led him to join up with a different party: the Marxist-Leninist Party.

“I got involved as a student many years ago, and essentially saw that what are called the major parties, they represent basically the same thing, which is they’re representing a ruling elite. And especially the way that elections are set up, they’re set up so that these elite parties have all the advantages,” Gershuny tells The Oshawa Express. “So I thought that there must be some political force that actually represented people’s desire for progress, for social change and that they could actually participate in deciding what the future would be and not saying, ‘Oh, we’ll hand over our fate to somebody else and hopefully they’ll do something in our favour.’”

Gershuny has dedicated his political ideals to the party, running under the party’s banner in Oshawa since the 2000 federal election.

The Marxist-Leninist Party of Canada was established in 1970, and typically receives a higher number of votes compared to other fringe parties. In the 2011 federal election, the party received 10,160 votes nationwide.

While Gershuny is likely not to become Oshawa’s next MP – in the 2011 election, he received 61 votes – the candidate for Oshawa believes the city would work better operating under Marxist-Leninist ideals.

“Here in Oshawa, we could be making our own cars for ourselves from our own natural resources and our own manpower. The way the situation is today, you have a place like GM that’s been given tens of millions of dollars in subsidies, and they shouldn’t be allowed just to trample over the rights of workers, shutting down plants whenever they like and making workers the cost of production.”