This controversy has graphically demonstrated how Québec Solidaire provides “left” cover for the turn of the entire Quebec political establishment—and particularly the governing CAQ and pro-independence Parti Québécois—towards the national chauvinism of the far right.
Coming more than 18 months after the previous contract expired, the ratification vote was more a vote of non-confidence in the FIQ leadership than a show of support for the concessions-laden contract.
In an act of craven submission to Quebec’s right-wing CAQ government, the province’s principal nurses’ union, FIQ, has submitted a contract proposal for rank-and-file ratification that flagrantly violates all the “red lines” stipulated by its members.
Nurses and public sector workers can make no gains based on a strategy of pressuring the unions and the government. They must turn to the rest of the working class and mobilize its immense power in a counter-offensive against the entire austerity program of the ruling class.
Far from being a democratic exercise, the union-organized general assemblies were designed to exclude, divide, demobilize and demoralize the rank and file.
We need to form rank-and-file committees in every workplace to unite public sector employees and mobilize all workers, in the province and across North America, in a political struggle to defend jobs, wages and working conditions for all.
The leaders of the Common Front are doing everything they can to manipulate the contract ratification process and demobilize workers, including keeping most details of the agreements secrets and dragging out voting till mid-February.
If rank-and-file workers do not organize to defeat this betrayal, public sector workers will suffer a further deterioration in their wages and working conditions, and the right-wing populist Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) government will accelerate its privatization plans.
Even as workers press for a broadening of the struggle, the unions are conspiring with the government to reach sellout agreements and scuttle the strike movement.
To prevail against the big business CAQ government, workers must wrest control of their struggle from the pro-capitalist union apparatuses and transform it into a unified political offensive of the entire working class against the Quebec and Canadian ruling elite’s agenda of austerity and war.
With the explosion of workers’ struggles on an international scale, conditions are even more favorable for the development of a mass movement against austerity and war. But as in 2015, the unions are determined to prevent a working-class challenge to the capitalist elite’s class-war agenda and to isolate Quebec public sector workers from their class brothers and sisters in the rest of Canada.
Supported by the trade unions and the pseudo-left Québec Solidaire, the CAQ’s Bill 19 is a legal fig leaf for the growing exploitation of children by capitalist businesses, reviving one of the most retrograde elements of the Victorian era.
In violation of international law, all migrants seeking refuge in Canada who enter “irregularly,” whether via land or waterway, will now be handed over to American ICE agents.
With less than three weeks to go before the contracts of Quebec’s 600,000 public sector employees expire, the hard-right CAQ government is making increasingly belligerent threats.
The CAQ government is proposing wage “increases” totalling 9 percent spread over five years, although prices rose 6.8 percent last year and continue to rise at an annual rate of close to 6 percent in 2023.
Although Quebec’s nurses have been complaining bitterly about forced overtime and inhumane working conditions for years, the province's premier tried to present the dispute as an isolated problem.
Quebec's hard-right CAQ government is determined to impoverish public sector employees, cut social spending and privatize public services.
The pandemic has revealed more than ever that workers, wherever they live in Canada , confront the same essential political issues and must wage a common struggle to eliminate the virus from our schools.
The fundamental issues raised ten years ago have an even more urgent character today: the need for students to turn to the working class, the only social force capable of providing a progressive solution to the systemic global capitalist crisis; and the need to resolve the crisis of revolutionary leadership within the working class.
Canada’s epidemiological curve shows a direct correlation—throughout the now two-and-a-half year long pandemic—between the reopening of schools and mass COVID-19 infection.
