By Stéphane Doucet
The Canadian Labour Congress newsletter arrived in my inbox on May Day – International Workers’ Day. Imagine my surprise when I read its boldly stated first move against the new Liberal government: “Here’s our plan: We’re building a powerful open letter to Prime Minister Carney!”
An international banker heading the Liberal government, and the leadership of Canada’s house of labour is writing an open letter … and bragging about it? Where’s the sense of urgency? Where’s the organization? What’s the plan?
The “Workers Together” platform that the CLC put together for the election sank like a rock, just like the NDP that it was trying to buoy. Unions like the Steelworkers and CUPE who campaigned hard for the NDP have to face up to the fact that they weren’t convincing most of their members.
We do have to come to terms with some hard truths about the state of the labour movement in Canada. The leadership’s lack of desire to fight is staring us in the face – instead, we are knee-deep in class collaborationist lobbying muck. While there are certainly exceptions, this dispiriting CLC email is just a symptom of a lack of combativeness and dynamism, which flows directly from the lack of ideological preparedness for the fight ahead that plagues the movement today.
That said, the signs of the desire to fight are quite apparent. The Liberals had to use section 107 of the Labour Code four times to squash several different massive work stoppages across the country. Strikes and lockouts are lasting longer, and data on the number of days lost to work stoppages back this up.
What the movement needs is leadership that is willing to channel that anger, that fighting spirit, into real campaigns that deliver for workers, not dampen it through online open-letter-writing campaigns and not much else.
The years ahead look awfully grim. It seems clear that Carney’s mandate will be to lower social spending on public services, increase funding to the private sector, increase military spending dramatically, and more of the like. We are not going to be receiving any gifts from this government. There is a clear shift to the right in Parliament, which means lean years ahead for working people, especially if the union movement doesn’t start organizing its fightback immediately.
Within the labour movement, there will be pressure to react with more of the same: more petitions, more lobbying, more small-scale top-heavy media-oriented actions that don’t bring in the base or reach out to the broader public, more attempts at collaborating with bosses and government to try and lobby a better deal.
This is not a strategy to win. These strategies have been tried in more favourable circumstances of higher spending and tighter labour markets, and they have delivered next to nothing. Worse, they have left working people with little to build on – demobilized bases put the labour movement at a disadvantage from the beginning.
Labour needs to assert itself with the broadest possible base of support, starting inside workplaces and reaching out to other sections of the working class with a real alternative program and a fighting plan to achieve it. Left-wing union members need to take up the fight and force the issue to get us out of this situation – no one else can. Leading these struggles will be instructive and build bases of support for the left, which can reach out and win over the centre of the labour movement.
This is the path to resistance to Carney’s Liberals, not letter-writing. Let’s get to work.
[Photo: Bea Bruske on X]
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