Build Canada’s economic sovereignty through public ownership of auto and steel, rebuilding manufacturing, and mass construction of housing and public infrastructure
In the face of the mandatory review of the Canada-US-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA/USMCA) approaches, working people across Canada are looking at a stark choice. The Carney government, after a hypocritical “elbows up” campaign and a grandstanding Davos speech about middle-power resistance, has now travelled to New York to declare that a “Canada Strong” will help “Make America Great Again.”
This, alongside Carney’s recent calling the US’s illegal war on Iran “worth it” and his deafening silence on the Washington’s strangulation of Cuba, demonstrates the Carney government’s repeated attempts at capitulation to the Trump administration.
Canada and Mexico have formally requested a 16-year extension of USMCA. That would mean another 16 years of deepened dependency on US monopoly diktat. The Trump administration has refused to commit, demanding sweeping concessions that would gut Canadian sovereignty even further.
The US wants to eliminate supply management and destroy the livelihoods of Canadian farmers. It wants to eliminate cultural protections, including for French language content, and remove the insufficient taxes and regulations faced by US tech monopolies. It wants to scrap procurement policies that create decent local jobs and force Canada to accelerate the privatization of public healthcare, opening the door to massive US medical services and health insurance monopolies. It seeks to eliminate jobs in forestry. And it demands Canada remain in lockstep with Washington as it escalates its economic war on China, with the real potential of dragging Canada into a hot war.
But this push for extension is not simply the result of US pressure. Canadian monopoly capital is equally eager to strike a deal. Mark Carney’s recent business trip to New York was the logical expression of the interests of Canada’s ruling class. Canadian and US corporate monopolies share a common agenda: driving down wages, gutting environmental regulations, eroding democratic oversight and maximizing profit at any cost. For Canada’s billionaires and their transnational partners, access to the US market is well worth sacrificing public healthcare and workers’ livelihoods and even Canadian independence.
Alongside these corporate trade negotiations, the Carney government is quietly waging a parallel attack on workers’ rights at home. Through a rushed, invitation-only consultation process that flew under the public radar, Ottawa is reviewing the entire Canada Labour Code with an eye to sweeping changes that unions warn amount to a fundamental assault on the right to strike. The Carney government’s agenda is to weaken collective bargaining, curb strike action, and “Americanize” Canada’s labour laws to benefit large corporations and the super-rich, all while claiming to stand up for Canadian workers against Trump.
Meanwhile, US tariffs are already causing mass devastation. The 25-percent tariff on vehicles assembled in Canada has led to an estimated loss of 6,500 direct autoworker jobs including 3,000 jobs at Stellantis. GM shut down its CAMI assembly plant in Ingersoll, laying off 1,144 employees. Another 700 jobs were eliminated by GM in Oshawa, not including the loss of supplier jobs. At Algoma Steel, 1,000 workers lost their jobs despite $500 million in joint federal-provincial loans. The layoffs have already started, and many more are coming.
Over the past quarter-century, the working class has been forced to finance the corporate monopolies that then cut jobs and outsource production. In the auto sector this can be tallied as high as $79 billion in corporate welfare. Of that sum, $57 billion was locked into tax incentives and production subsidies for the EV sector stretching through 2033, while an additional $22 billion has been funneled into emergency bailouts, including nearly $14 billion shoveled to the Detroit Three during the 2008 financial meltdown.
These are public funds that could have built a stable, publicly owned and democratically controlled auto industry with well-paying union jobs. Instead, we are left with closed plants and mass layoffs.
The Carney government’s strategy is a doubling down on the failed policies that got us here. Pinning hopes on the USMCA review is a recipe for more disaster. This deal, like NAFTA before it, was never about fair trade; it is a corporate constitution designed to empower monopolies, pit workers against each other across borders, and systematically dismantle Canadian sovereignty and independence. With the current US government, this process accelerates dramatically. Deeper integration means increased attacks on democratic rights and complicity in escalating acts of aggression and wars around the world.
USMCA has already proven to be bad for workers. When USMCA was signed in 2018, official unemployment stood at 6 percent. After a brief pandemic-era dip to 4.8 percent in July 2022, unemployment has since climbed past its pre-USMCA level, hitting 7 percent in November 2024. Meanwhile, the employment rate fell from 62.5 percent in 2018 to under 61 percent by late 2023, a drop equivalent to roughly 380,000 additional workers without jobs.
If USMCA were truly designed to “stabilize and expand the economy and jobs,” as its proponents claim, we would expect the opposite: more jobs, not fewer. Instead, even before Trump’s tariffs, the data shows a deal that has delivered for corporations while leaving workers behind.
Instead of choosing between reactionary tariffs and massive job losses on the one hand, and submission to continental corporate free trade and massive job losses on the other, we must fight for Canadian sovereignty, for peace, and for an economy that puts steel and auto under public ownership and democratic control and rebuilds manufacturing, creating tens of thousands of well-paid and permanent value-added jobs in the process.
We need multilateral and mutually beneficial trade. For the Communist Party, genuine “mutually beneficial trade” means trade that serves working people, not corporate panels sitting in judgment over government policy. It must be based on full employment, environmental security, respect for Indigenous rights, and democratic national planning – with corporations barred from dictating the terms.
Fortunately, we have seen impressive and powerful fights against corporate free trade before. In the late 1980s, a broad people’s movement – uniting labour, farmers, women’s groups, environmentalists, churches, cultural workers and Indigenous peoples – rose up to fight Mulroney’s original Free Trade Agreement and NAFTA. We lost that battle, but their fight showed the potential for a united fightback against the corporate agenda.
Today, faced with a new generation of attacks under USMCA, we must rebuild that movement, not to salvage a bad deal but to reject it entirely and build a truly independent Canada based on public ownership, workers’ rights and genuine sovereignty.
The Communist Party of Canada demands:
Nationalization of the auto and steel industries. Public ownership means elected governments, not a private board of directors in another country, control the profits and direct the industry to meet the needs of working people across Canada.
Build a Canadian car and expand mass transit. A publicly owned auto sector should produce an affordable electric Canadian passenger vehicle and rapidly expand manufacturing capacity for municipal and inter-urban public transit, as well as light industrial vehicles.
Enact plant closure legislation with teeth. Immediately pass legislation requiring corporations to justify any closure or mass layoff before a public tribunal with the power to prohibit closures and impose severe penalties.
Expand Employment Insurance now. Raise EI benefits to 90 percent of previous earnings for the full duration of unemployment, and cover all the unemployed, to protect all workers from the growing capitalist economic crisis.
Withdraw from USMCA. End the “free trade” deals that sacrifice jobs and sovereignty. Pursue multilateral, mutually beneficial trade with the world. Reject Carney’s war economy that fuels US and NATO wars and adopt an independent foreign policy of peace and disarmament, redirecting the billions wasted on militarization to social needs such as health, housing and education.
People across Canada have poured billions of public funds into these industries over decades. We ought to own them by now, and socialize their profits, not just their losses. No more bailouts and free trade. We need mutually beneficial multilateral trade with the world, and public ownership of key economic sectors to strengthen sovereignty and create jobs.
Central Executive Committee, Communist Party of Canada
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