MONTREAL — “At the very moment [Canada] needs stable and credible leadership” — as a trade conflict with Washington is imminent — “it is instead wracked by the prolonged death throes of a minority government,” complained the editors of the Globe and Mail. On Jan. 6 Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced he planned to resign, that he was suspending Parliament, and opening up the race for the Liberal Party leadership to replace him.
These events are provoking a serious crisis for Canada’s capitalist rulers and generating a discussion among working people about how to best defend our own class interests.
Saying that the terms of trade between Washington and Canada, and with Mexico, unfairly harm U.S. producers, President Donald Trump has threatened to impose a 25% tariff on all imports from the two countries. Ottawa has said it will respond in kind. Almost 80% of Canadian exports — $548 billion Canadian dollars ($384 billion) in products — went to the U.S. in 2023. Which leader can most effectively defend the Canadian rulers’ interests in the pending trade conflict is the central issue in the coming federal parliamentary elections.
Support for the Trudeau government has been in free fall for some time, reflecting the anger among working people with Ottawa’s inability to offer any protection from the deepening capitalist crisis. Workers face rising prices, stagnating wages, high unemployment, unaffordable housing and the growing threat of new wars. Trudeau’s woke policies, such as a carbon tax on gasoline and home heating fuel, and his government’s meritocratic disdain for working people, are also provoking its plummeting support.
Over the past year hundreds of thousands of workers have waged union battles for wages that keep up with rising prices, and working conditions that are safe with schedules that allow time for family life, union activity and recreation. Since August the Trudeau government has backed the bosses’ offensive by imposing back-to-work orders on close to 70,000 striking rail, port and postal workers.
Rulers in Ottawa have also launched a major attack on the rights of immigrant workers, which has led to the deportation of thousands. Their goal is to deepen divisions in the working class.
Some working people are looking to Pierre Poilievre, leader of the Conservative Party, for some relief. He has been campaigning to win working-class and union support as a “lesser evil” to the Liberals and is far ahead in the polls. Both parties are organized to defend the wealth and power of the ruling rich.
Unions must take independent road
Instead of mobilizing the unions to break with the bosses’ parties and organize a party of labor, the Canadian Labour Congress is organizing conferences across the country centered on defeating the Conservatives. The intended effect is to back the Liberals, possibly in a coalition with the New Democratic Party. In Quebec many of the top union officials support the Bloc Quebecois, a pro-Quebec-sovereignty capitalist party.
As part of this dead-end, class-collaborationist strategy, unions like the United Steelworkers and Unifor are joining together with bosses and capitalist politicians in the newly formed Canada-U.S. Trade Council. Their goal is to build support for Ottawa in the trade war with the U.S.
On Jan. 17 Trudeau convened the first meeting of the Council of Canada-US Relations, a new body uniting unions with bosses and the government. Trudeau said, “You are all patriots. You believe in fighting for Canada.”
Communist League alternative
“But Canada is a class-divided society,” Philippe Tessier, one of two Communist League candidates for Parliament from Montreal, told the Militant Jan. 16. Tessier is a rail worker and Teamsters union member,
“Instead of mobilizing the unions to defend our right to strike and to fight for better wages and working conditions, union officials have joined ‘Team Canada,’ set up by the country’s ruling billionaire families to defend their industries and profit system.
“There is no way forward for working people if we back the class that exploits our labor and is attacking our rights in its trade and military conflicts against their capitalist competitors.”
Katy LeRougetel, the CL’s other candidate, pointed out, “Trade wars lead to shooting wars. That’s what happened before the first and second imperialist world wars in which tens of millions of workers died. These conflicts turn working people in one country against those in another.” LeRougetel is a member of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union.
“Proposals that the unions should be fighting to defend ‘Canadian’ jobs here at the expense of workers in the U.S. is a deadly trap,” she said. “They are not our enemy but our most important and potentially powerful ally. In both countries, workers need to fight for jobs for all and for permanent resident status for all immigrants.
“Hotel workers in Las Vegas in the U.S. are on strike and need solidarity, just like the 600 locked out at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel here. I encourage everyone to join them on their picket line.
“The labor movement needs its own independent working-class foreign policy that defends working people around the world.”
“Out of these struggles working people can break from supporting one or other of the capitalist parties as a ‘lesser evil,’ and forge a party of our own, a party of labor based on the unions,” Tessier said, “to organize working people in their millions to wrest power away from the capitalist rulers, end capitalist exploitation, halt imperialism’s march toward fascism and World War III and join the fight to build a socialist world.”