MONTREAL — “When the April 28 federal election was called in March by Mark Carney, who became Canada’s new Liberal prime minister when Justin Trudeau resigned, two counterposed roads faced the unions,” Philippe Tessier, the Communist League candidate for Parliament in the Montreal electoral district of Bourassa, told the Militant the day after the election.
Tessier works as a freight train conductor for Canadian National Railway and is a member of the Teamsters union. His running mate was Katy LeRougetel, a union industrial bakery worker and CL candidate in the Montreal electoral district of Dorval-Lachine-LaSalle.
“One was to refuse to support any of the capitalist parties and their anti-U.S. ‘Team Canada’ and ‘Canada First’ campaigns and to fight to defend the right to strike and for permanent residence for all immigrants, key to unite working people against the bosses and their governments.
“But many union officials took the opposite course, the dead-end road of supporting Carney and the Liberals, lining the major unions up with the same ruling-class forces that have been leading the attacks on political freedoms and the right to strike in a national unity campaign pitting Canadian against American workers,” Tessier said.
A majority of Canada’s capitalist rulers backed Carney, the former head of the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England. They took advantage of the Donald Trump administration-initiated tariff battles to frame the stakes in the election as whether Carney or Pierre Poilievre, the Conservative Party leader, would best be able to “defend the existence of Canada and its sovereignty.”
“Congratulations to Prime Minister Mark Carney on last night’s election victory,” said Bea Bruske, president of the Canadian Labour Congress. “Canada’s unions, representing over 3 million workers, stand ready to work with this government to deliver real progress.”
Other major unions issued similar pledges of support.
“But workers have no common class interests with the bosses, their parties and their government. Last summer I was part of the strike by thousands of freight rail workers across Canada demanding safe working conditions,” said Tessier. “Port and postal workers waged strikes for similar reasons last fall. Each time the Liberal government in Ottawa used anti-labor legislation to make these strikes illegal and forced compulsory arbitration on 70,000 workers.
“Acting on behalf of the ruling rich, the newly elected Liberal government will continue the anti-union drive of the previous administration,” he said. “It will attack the right to free expression, assembly and to strike, tools we need to organize to defend our unions and class interests.”
Three days after the election, Tessier and LeRougetel joined hundreds of unionists for an International Workers Day rally in Montreal. LeRougetel met museum worker and CSD union member Guillaume Picard there.
“There wasn’t really a satisfying alternative in the elections. Defending the economy and defending workers are two totally different things,” he said. “We’re in negotiations for a new union contract, and management refused our wage demands because of Trump’s tariffs. But we’re planning more actions to back up our demands.”
“That’s a good example for all unions,” said LeRougetel. “Workers need to fight for what we need against the bosses and their government.”
Class break needed
These questions and more were discussed at a Communist League campaign rally hosted by the Militant Labor Forum April 26.
LeRougetel pointed to the Communist League’s campaign leaflet, which said: “The fight for workers power is key for humanity to move forward.”
“The only force that can stop imperialism’s march toward fascism and a nuclear third world war is the working class,” LeRougetel said. “The Communist League campaigns 365 days a year to build the kind of party that can help lead millions of working people to take power out of the hands of the warmongers and join the international fight for socialism.”
“Our campaign begins with the world,” Tessier added, “and the need to break from the bosses’ parties.” He described how he began his campaign by taking part in the February Havana International Book Fair in Cuba and then brought solidarity to the largely Haitian Sugarcane Workers Union at their conference in the Dominican Republic.
Campaign supporters marched with striking education workers in Alberta and with the 8,000 child care workers who protested at the National Assembly in Quebec City April 3 for higher pay and better conditions. They rallied in defense of the Ukrainian people’s fight for sovereignty and joined actions in defense of Israel as a refuge against Jew-hatred and pogroms.
“The two great socialist revolutions of the 20th century — the October 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia led by Vladimir Lenin and the 1959 Cuban Revolution led by Fidel Castro — that led millions to uproot capitalism and take political power into their own hands,” Tessier said, “prove that the fight for workers power is not only necessary, but possible.”