Ottawa's demand that the Brazilian aerospace company Embraer, Bombardier's main competitor, stop selling planes during trade talks--which Ottawa might let drag out for years--is characteristic of the arrogance of the Canadian rulers.

The World Trade Organization's siding with Bombardier against Embraer is no surprise. It gives the lie to the claim by Canadian union officials and radical middle-class organizations that the WTO is "infringing on Canadian sovereignty." The WTO is an instrument of the main imperialist powers, including Canada, both in their conflicts among themselves and in extracting more wealth from the countries they plunder.

The Canada-Brazil dispute is a good illustration of the fact that the source of the problem for working people isn't the WTO--it's the ruling classes whose headquarters are in Ottawa, Washington, and other imperialist capitals. These trade wars are fueled by the relentless drive by the employers to get an edge over their international rivals in the fight for markets and profit margins. These attacks abroad go hand in hand with the bosses' efforts at home to speed up production, lengthen working hours, drive down wages, slash social benefits, and weaken the unions.

Workers and farmers in Canada have no interest in siding with Canadian capitalists against Brazil. Ottawa is the main enemy of working people in Canada, as the 10,000 hospital workers in Alberta can testify to. They just led a successful strike--decreed "illegal"--for better wages and health care for the population as a whole.

The Canadian government has for years been leading a brutal drive to cut social services, aid the bosses' squeeze on workers, and curtail democratic rights. Ottawa enforces the denial of the national rights of the Quebecois and other oppressed nationalities in Canada. It has escalated its attacks on working people coming to Canada from other countries, such as the hundreds of Chinese immigrants jailed the day they set foot in Canada and those who have been deported.

We are told that by supporting Bombardier against Brazil, working people in Canada will save "Canadian" jobs. But we will never be able to organize--let alone win--a fight for jobs by siding with "our" employers--the very source of our exploitation. The attempt to make workers identify themselves as "Canadians" is a trap to pit workers there against working people elsewhere in the world.

The trade union officialdom in Canada has been complicit by its silence in face of Ottawa's trade assault on Brazil. Instead, the labor movement should vigorously oppose Ottawa's trade war, campaign for the cancellation of Brazil's onerous debt to Canadian and other imperialist banks, and join in solidarity with the ongoing struggles of workers and farmers in Brazil.  
 
 
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