PV Labour Bureau
The 2026 Canadian Labour Congress Convention is meeting against a difficult backdrop, as the federal government launches the deepest austerity drive since at least the 1990s.
In his determination to implement his $150 billion war budget, Prime Minister Mark Carney is slashing public sector jobs and wages, disembowelling urgently needed programs like the $10-a-day childcare plan, and ramping up the privatization of vital public services and institutions like Medicare, airports and the postal service.
Under cover of “patriotism” he’s shifting billions of dollars in public money from working people to huge corporate monopolies through military contracts, P3 infrastructure programs, and fast-tracked mining and fossil fuel projects that pave over Indigenous sovereignty, labour rights and environmental security while shoveling profits into corporate coffers.
In the process, he’s making life more difficult for working people in Canada, he’s widening inequality, and he’s assisting in the escalating US-led arms race and drive to war.
But at the same time, the CLC Convention meets as working people across Canada – and around the world – are standing up and resisting.
Unions, Indigenous people and environmentalists all moved quickly into action to oppose Ottawa’s Bill C-5, the One Canadian Economy Act which, in combination with similar provincial legislation, is designed to accelerate major infrastructure projects and reduce interprovincial trade regulations. That opposition has continued even after the legislation passed, with resistance being organized to each project that tramples on people’s rights, in the unceasing drive for corporate profit.
Public sector workers are on the move in fighting cutbacks and demanding adequate funding for programs and the workers needed to provide them. From CUPW’s ongoing resistance to attacks on the postal service, to BCGEU’s eight-week strike at the end of 2025 to push back the BC NDP’s austerity plans, to the Alberta Teachers’ Association’s first province-wide teachers’ strike and the largest walkout in provincial history, there is a clear mood among public sector workers for building a coordinated and militant fightback.
The same is true in the private sector. Thousands of flight attendants at Air Canada inspired and received solidarity from working people across the country when they took strike action against unpaid work, even compelling CUPE’s national leadership to defy the government’s back-to-work order. Steelworkers at Rio Tinto in Quebec stood up to the transnational’s demands for concessions and held their picket line even as the employer trucked in illegal scabs. UFCW members are delivering massive strike votes as they fight for higher wages at profiteering grocery corporations across Canada.
Labour struggles also extend beyond contract fights. From Israel’s genocide in Palestine, to the illegal US military strike against Venezuela and kidnapping of its president, to the US-Israel war against Iran and Lebanon, thousands of working people have mobilized against militarism and war, and for a foreign policy based on peace, disarmament and international cooperation.
In response to the humanitarian crisis in Cuba – caused by Washington’s escalation of its six-decade blockade of the island – people have worked tirelessly to protest the US siege and fill tanker after tanker of material aid. CLC affiliates have contributed tens of thousands of dollars to these efforts, led by the Canadian Network on Cuba. This is working-class international solidarity in action.
These examples are a sampling of many others that show the broad basis for a massive, labour-led fight against austerity and militarism, against corporate profiteering – a fight for peace, jobs and wages, public services and programs, equality and labour rights, justice for Indigenous peoples and environmental security.
But for this movement to be built – for the awesome power of the working class to be mobilized – the CLC has to move into united action. The Convention has a key role in making this happen, and here are four key questions that delegates should consider:
Labour’s independent political action. The CLC needs to develop and assert its own independent political program, based on the needs and experience of the entire working class, through which it can unite and mobilize working people across the country in an escalating fightback.
The labour movement has the policies – now it needs an action plan to build the mass fight against privatization and in defense of adequately funded and expanded Medicare, postal and other public services; for full employment and good wages; for a public housing program; for expanded EI that covers all unemployed workers at 90 percent of previous earnings for the duration of unemployment.
History shows that backroom lobbying and outsourcing political work and responsibilities to the NDP and, increasingly, the Liberal Party are failed strategies. Labour has the power of the entire working class – it needs to mobilize it independently!
Unity in action. The Canadian Labour Congress is the largest labour central in Canada, but it isn’t the only game in town. In 2023 and 2024, the Common Front in Quebec brought together over 500,000 workers from six different unions, none of whom were organizationally united in the same labour central. Yet they came together in struggle, and because of that, they made gains.
The CLC itself reached beyond its own affiliates in 1976, when it worked with Quebec unions like the CSN to organize a one-day general strike in which over one million workers downed their tools to fight the government’s wage control legislation. The Convention needs to get the Congress back to that way of organizing, through unity in action.
But at a time when unity in action is urgently needed, the house of labour is divided. And it doesn’t just involve unions in Quebec – for too long, Unifor has been outside the CLC. For the largest private sector union in the country, one with deep roots in key industries, to be dislocated from the rest of the labour movement is unacceptable.
This kind of labour disunity only benefits the bosses and their representatives in government – it must be fixed!
Labour democracy and grassroots engagement. Delegates are coming to this Convention looking for the leadership’s plan for the fightback ahead, and will want to discuss and debate it. But over recent years, labour conventions have become carefully managed events that minimize debate and sideline grassroots engagement. Resolutions are grouped and combined into composites that reduce sharp actions to a commitment to lobby, informing and petition governments. Delegates cannot run or move motions from the floor. This means that delegates who are opposed to business unionism are rarely heard from on the Convention floor, even though they often represent the views of the majority of workers.
Furthermore, this Convention will again have to deal with proposed amendments to the CLC Constitution which will further limit democracy in the Congress. Big unions have tried to implement these changes in the past, and in those cases Convention delegates organized to block them – successfully, hence their return. Constitutional amendments that implement a “double majority” decision-making process give full power to the leadership of the largest affiliates, sidelining smaller unions and the membership of the labour movement as a whole, not to mention the Convention itself.
At this moment of intensifying labour struggle, we need full democratic engagement of all union members and accountable leadership. Constitutional amendments that limit labour democracy are driven by right-wing union leaders who favour a powerful and detached CLC leadership that can disregard Convention action plans, without being held accountable – they are another gift to the bosses, and they must be quashed.
Real international solidarity. While many workers and some unions moved into action over the past few years to oppose Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the US attack on Venezuela, the war against Iran and Lebanon, and the intensifying blockade of Cuba, the Congress itself and many affiliates have been quiet. Beyond single press releases, usually repeating timid statements from the International Trade Union Confederation, the CLC has not taken the lead in mobilizing real international solidarity.
In the immediate, this weak response has meant less pressure on the Canadian government to break from Washington’s aggressive foreign policy and stand for human rights, peace and sovereignty. But beyond that, it also gives Ottawa more freedom to implement anti-worker and anti-democratic political and economic policies here in Canada – we know fully well that foreign and domestic politics are intimately linked, and that the same forces which oppress people abroad are also exploiting people here.
This Convention needs to push the CLC to take a leading stand on Canada-wide and global issues that affect workers. This means pressing for Ottawa to reject the USMCA and other corporate trade deals, and pursue multilateral and mutually beneficial trade with the world. It means opposing Carney’s military economy and calling for Canada’s withdrawal from NATO and other military alliances. And it means supporting the Cuban people and the Cuban labour movement (CTC, Workers’ Central Union of Cuba) against Washington’s criminal blockade, and calling on Canada to send oil to Cuba now.
As working people in Canada enter another year of escalating struggles, they will be eager to see how the CLC will weigh in. Will it promote a strong and independent set of demands, and lead escalating fightback campaigns based on class struggle?
Or will it buckle to the pressure of right-wing social democracy, telling workers that the best they can do is to uncritically support an NDP which, even under new leadership, is no substitute for labour’s independent political and economic might?
Clearly, a stronger left is needed within the CLC, to press the need for action and to hold the leadership accountable. This is developing, and this Convention is a key moment to move that process forward and build a more united, militant fightback.
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