Niles Niemuth is managing editor of the WSWS and a member of the National Committee of the Socialist Equality Party in the United States. He was the Socialist Equality Party candidate for vice president in the 2016 US Presidential elections, and SEP candidate in the 2018 Michigan general elections.
The monopoly over letter mail forms the core of the Crown corporation’s operations. Its erosion or elimination in the name of “liberalizing” trade barriers and protecting corporate Canada’s profits during the trade war would mean the destruction of thousands of jobs and the end of Canada Post as it currently operates.
To counter the company-government-union gang-up against them, Canada Post workers must take the struggle into their own hands and prepare an industrial and political counteroffensive against government-strikebreaking and for secure jobs for all.
Desperate to placate Trump and uphold the Canada-US military-security partnership, Ottawa has pointedly failed to criticize Trump for his proposal to seize Gaza and and ethnically cleanse the Palestinian population.
Postal workers should have no illusions that the commission headed by seasoned federal arbitrator William Kaplan will produce anything but a blueprint for the evisceration of their jobs and working conditions.
Having obtained a government strike ban, Canada Post now has the audacity to insist that the union should not even have the right to legally challenge it.
Even as contract talks resume and an Industrial Inquiry Commission is scheduled for its first hearings on the future of Canada Post on January 27 and 28, plans are well underway to gut jobs, degrade working conditions and transform the country’s postal service into a skeleton operation in the name of returning to profitability.
The extent of the devastation—much of which has yet to be accounted for—is yet another criminal indictment of the capitalist ruling elite, which is fueling climate change and doing nothing to combat its ever greater impact on the world’s population in the name of profits, leaving poor and rich alike to deal with the consequences.
In the nearly two-hour-long interview, the far-right populist Poilievre promised that should his Conservatives come to power as expected in the next election, they would slash taxes and regulations, expand funding for the military, and carry out “the biggest crackdown on crime in Canadian history.”
“I feel that we are giving up our power and momentum by following this order. I do want to find other ways of defying and sticking it to the one percent, where it actually hurts them and not the Canadian public,” one Ontario postal worker told the WSWS.
MacKinnon’s move is an attack not just on postal workers, but the entire working class. It marks the third time since August that the Liberal government, without even referring to a parliamentary vote, has arbitrarily robbed workers of their supposedly constitutionally protected right to strike.
The Trudeau government has used the CIRB and a cooked-up “reinterpretation” of Section 107 of the Labour Code to break a series of strikes, and now threatens to use them against the 55,000 striking Canada Post workers.
The Teamster bureaucrats assurances of support for the striking Canada Post workers have proven to be worthless. Meanwhile, CUPW maintains a complicit silence, making no appeal to rank-and-file Purolator workers.
Workers across the country from St. John’s, Newfoundland, to Vancouver, British Columbia, took enthusiastically to picket lines outside their depots and workplaces, seeking to beat back demands for major concessions by the federally controlled Crown corporation.
The employers on both coasts have crippled Canada’s largest port operations with the aim of compelling the Trudeau Liberal government to intervene to enforce pro-company contracts through binding arbitration or other anti-democratic means.
After a year of negotiations and more than one hundred bargaining sessions between CUPW and management, Canada Post workers are not any clearer as to if or when the union will authorize job action.
Workers voted by over 95 percent to strike, making clear their determination to fight back after years of concessions and to resist the Crown corporation's plans to use AI and other new technologies to increase worker-exploitation.
The two demonstrators are facing charges of “disguise with intent,” making them liable to 10-year prison terms, for wearing medical masks which protect from COVID-19 and other diseases during a March 7 protest.
The coordinated crackdown on Samidoun by the Biden and Trudeau administations is a component part of their effort to suppress opposition to the Gaza genocide and the wave of pro-Palestinian protests which has continued for more than a year.
The strike would have pitted the low-paid workers against the provincial New Democratic Party (NDP) government, which in spite of pledges to improve the health care system is enforcing strict budgetary and wage restraint.
Denouncing Iran as a “terrorist regime,” Trudeau told reporters, “Obviously, Israel has the right to defend itself against these attacks.”
