By Dave McKee
It’s a dangerous moment for working people in Canada. The right wing in this country – including Conservative and Liberal politicians at the federal and provincial level; their wealthy supporters including monopoly corporations; security forces including police, military and intelligence; and far-right parties and movements including the truck convoys and fundamentalist religious organizations – has waged a very successful campaign to shift political discourse and government policy to the right.
Concretely, this has meant increased and more aggressive racism and xenophobia – scapegoating immigrants for social and economic ills, combined with more frequent and louder calls for mass deportations, and sweeping and restrictive changes to immigration policies. It has meant continued attacks on Indigenous land and defenders, including through outright armed invasion of Indigenous territory. It has meant rollbacks to women’s and gender equality – a continuing and, in some areas, widening pay gap; reduced access to abortion, combined with increased organizing among anti-choice groups; increasing intimate partner violence, which governments refuse to recognize as an epidemic; widespread and increasingly violent hate against 2SLGBTIQ+ and especially trans people.
It has also meant sustained and deepening attacks on working people and labour rights – increasing government use of back-to-work legislation and other legislative means to violate workers’ right to strike and picket, in an effort to deliver a “tamed” labour force to profiteering corporations; use of monetary policies like high interest rates to drive workers’ real wages down and transfer billions into corporate coffers; laws and directives which force wage and benefit freezes on broader public sector workers; privatization and cuts in public services, resulting in fewer and poorer jobs and reduced services unless people are able to pay out of pocket.
And all the time, military spending balloons – estimated to more than double to $80 billion by 2032 – which increases the threat of war while removing huge amounts of public money from socially useful needs like childcare, pharmacare, job creation, green transition and a livable universal public pension.
These shifts are reflective of a global capitalist system that is in deepening crisis, as competition soars and rates of profit decline, as imperialist centres maneuver to preserve their spheres of influence against old and new challengers, and as monopoly capital looks increasingly toward reaction and even fascism to suppress working people and save itself.
During the three-month prorogation of Parliament following Justin Trudeau’s resignation announcement, the right wing – particularly Poilievre and his corporate backers – will pull out all the stops to manipulate public opinion in its favour. While we may hear Conservatives (and conservative Liberals) slam Donald Trump’s proposal for Canada to become the 51st state, we will also hear them sing the praises of yet closer economic, political and military integration, and of the need to find congruence (to the lowest level) between the two countries’ labour and environmental laws.
But prorogation also provides working people, and specifically the labour movement with an opportunity. It offers a nearly three-month window in which to build resistance to the rightward shift in politics and block the right-wing surge. With no party in Parliament presenting an alternative to capitalist policies of austerity, privatization, militarism and war, the task falls to working people.
Rather than confronting the drive to the right with yet another version of Trudeau’s populist gimmickry, or with the NDP’s naïve notion of “capitalism with a human face,” we need to build a mass movement advancing a progressive political program. In particular, we need the labour movement – the Canadian Labour Congress, its provincial federations and affiliated unions, together with unions outside the CLC and the labour centrals in Quebec – to pull together a coalition of democratic forces that can press hard for a political agenda that clearly puts people’s need ahead of corporate profiteering. In the process, such a coalition could set the tone for the next federal election – which we all know is coming very soon – and mobilize millions of working people into the political struggle.
We need a sustained Canada-wide mass campaign to press for:
- government action to reduce prices on necessities like food, housing and fuel, and to increase incomes for working people including unemployed workers and retirees
- a full employment economic policy to provide good, stable and well-paying jobs for the two million people currently out of work and the millions more whose full-time jobs are diminishing and being replaced by part-time employment
- real action on the housing crisis, complete with rent rollbacks, rent control, a tenants’ bill of rights, and a massive construction campaign to build millions of badly needed units of truly affordable publicly owned and publicly provided housing
- strong and expanding social programs like health, education, childcare, and climate and environmental clean-up and protection.
- an end to the government’s plans, supported by all parties in Parliament, to jack military spending by more than 100 percent to $80 billion in less than a decade, and in the process drain the public coffers of any capacity to protect and expand social programs and infrastructure
In the wake of Donald Trump’s election and Justin Trudeau’s resignation, Poilievre and his right-wing base are gunning for power and will take every opportunity to force an election. The NDP is complicit in this, having focused all of its efforts on defeating the Liberals even if it means a Conservative majority. A mass coalition of labour and popular forces can change this – by advancing a truly progressive alternative, blocking the drive to the right, and changing the balance of forces in Parliament.
But we have to make the choice to do it.
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