PV staff
Mark Carney’s first budget followed through on promises made in last spring’s Throne Speech: massive cuts to public services and social programs, huge increases to military spending and militarization of the economy, expanded oil and gas exports and the pipelines needed to do it, and a massive shift of wealth from working people to corporate monopolies.
Along the way, Ottawa is expanding mining and export of rare earth elements and other minerals while giving lip service to Indigenous rights under UNDRIP and cutting spending on Indigenous services, abandoning the environment, and cutting corporate taxes to the lowest levels in the OECD. It’s also doubling down on xenophobia by cutting immigration including foreign students and temporary foreign workers, as well as toughening jail sentencing and access to bail.
Instead of creating jobs this budget will destroy vital jobs and services across Canada that working people want and need, starting with 40,000 job cuts in the federal public service and the loss of services in every public sector. Instead of protecting public services, the budget paves the way to even more widespread privatization. While the Liberals say the budget will protect sovereignty, it will build a massive military industrial complex in Canada that is deeply integrated with the US – further weakening Canadian sovereignty and independence, and increasing the growing threat of war.
Carney’s “elbows up” are visible in this budget and in his negotiations with Trump over tariffs and the future of manufacturing in Canada – but they’re not aimed at Trump. They’re aimed at workers and trade unions in Canada, who will pay the price for the prime minister’s determination to renew the disastrous USMCA deal at any cost.
The budget shows that Ottawa has money to spend, and plenty of it – to the tune of $140 billion in new spending. But the government’s priorities are flipped in the wrong direction entirely.
There’s nothing about poverty reduction – even through poverty levels continue to rise and currently 4 million people don’t have enough to live on. There’s nothing about housing – even though the housing crisis continues to deepen and widen, condemning millions of people to either paying all their earnings for shelter or having to live with inadequate shelter. There’s nothing about nationalizing key industries, as a way to protect jobs and services against plant closure or relocation, or about a 32-hour work week to provide jobs and increase leisure time. Nor is there anything about rolling back prices on basic necessities like food, fuel or housing.
What there is, though, is a lot of public money heading to huge corporations to offset their expenses, minimize their risks and pad their bottom lines. Just how much money are we talking? The budget proposes more than $110 billion in “productivity-enhancing investments” over the next five years, enough to reduce corporations’ marginal effective tax rate by more than 2 percent and taking Canada to the lowest rate in the OECD.
There’s also plenty of public funding heading into capital infrastructure rather than operating costs – so, your hospital still won’t have enough nurses to reopen entire wards or ERs that have been closed, but at least there will be a shiny new private clinic next door where you can pay to get healthcare.
This is a budget for bombs and bankers, not working people. The big question is what to do about it. There is a massive basis of unity for building opposition, and that’s what working people need to do now.
We need to build unity around resistance to this budget, right across the country. Every effort to mobilize against it, to make it unimplementable needs to be supported. We need to form local anti-cuts committees that bring working people together in our communities, and then connect to one another through provincial and federal networks. Key to this is the role of local labour councils, who have the connections and the social and economic clout to lead efforts to forge ongoing and escalating action campaigns.
This is no time to sit back and pretend that we can wait until the next election – working people need to take a stand now. The efforts we make today will help build up the basis for a broader people’s coalition that can continue the struggle over the longer term.
Today, we need pull ourselves together around a plan of resistance, which should include calls for:
- Expanded funding for public services and universal social programs – no layoffs and no privatization.
- Expanded services at Canada Post, including door to door delivery throughout the country, postal banking and a monopoly on final mile parcel delivery.
- A 75-percent cut to military spending, with funds re-directed to public services and social programs, with a goal of raising wages, incomes and living standards.
- An independent Canadian foreign policy of peace and disarmament, including withdrawal from NATO and NORAD and cancellation of warships and fighter planes.
- Withdrawal from USMCA now and a multilateral and mutually beneficial trade policy with the world.
- An economic policy that builds Canadian secondary industry and manufacturing, creating good, well-paid and permanent value-added jobs.
- A program to build affordable publicly owned and operated social housing across Canada now, combined with rent rollbacks and controls for all tenants.
- Nationalize the auto and steel industries to build a Canadian car, public transit and transportation, and light industrial vehicles in retooled and new Canadian plants.
- Strong plant closure legislation that requires corporations to demonstrate just cause for layoffs, relocation and closures, at public tribunals with the power to levy fines, jail terms and to nationalize plants.
- Raise EI to 90 percent of previous earnings, for the entire period of unemployment, for all unemployed workers.
- Outlaw Section 107 of the Canada Labour Code and the use of back-to-work legislation by federal and provincial governments against striking workers, while enshrining the right to strike, picket and organize in a Labour Bill of Rights in the constitution.
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