None of the parties running in the election offers a way forward for workers seeking to fight Trump’s threatened annexation of Canada, oppose rearmament and imperialist war, defend their jobs and living conditions, and reject the drive towards authoritarian forms of rule.
Mark Carney, who has never been elected to public office, is a tried and tested representative of the financial oligarchy.
Canada’s ruling class, furious at the disruption of its eight-decade-long partnership with American imperialism, has responded by promoting vile Canadian nationalism to keep the working class divided and conceal its drive to make workers pay for the capitalist crisis.
The trade war targeting America’s three largest trading partners is part of the Trump administration’s drive to reshore production and secure its dominance over the Americas in preparation for world war against adversaries and nominal allies alike.
That Ford, who has presided over vicious attacks on public services and worker rights, was able to posture as a man of the people leading “Team Canada” against Trump threats was entirely due to the political bankruptcy of the union-sponsored NDP, and the suppression of working-class opposition by the union bureaucracy.
If Ford and the Progressive Conservatives win today’s provincial election, they will intensify healthcare privatization. The transformation of healthcare into a commodity has been facilitated by the unions’ suppression of working class opposition.
Canadian Labour Congress President Bea Bruske and the heads of its major member unions met Sunday with strikebreaker-in-chief Steven MacKinnon, the Labour Minister in Trudeau’s Liberal government, to plot how they can assist Canadian big business in its reactionary tariff war with Washington.
Trump’s “paused” 25 percent tariffs will continue to hang like a sword of Damocles over both Canada and Mexico, as will the threat to the jobs and living standards of workers across North America.
The state-led crackdown on workers’ rights underscores the ruling elite’s embrace of authoritarianism to enforce its class war agenda of austerity and war, and that to defend their jobs, workplace benefits, right to strike and public services, workers in Canada and around the world confront a political struggle over which class controls society’s resources and to what end.
Postal workers must defy this anti-democratic edict, but this requires the mobilization of the broadest sections of the working class—public and private sector alike—across Canada and internationally.
The long-running discussions about the need to eliminate thousands of full-time jobs, end daily delivery, and sell off post offices underscore that striking postal workers are not merely fighting for a new contract. Rather, they are embroiled in a political fight, which if it is to succeed must be based on an explicit rejection of capitalist austerity and the profit “principle.”
Both Liberal Defence Minister Bill Blair and Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre voiced support Monday for an Israeli attack on Iran’s oilfields, with the leader of the official opposition going even further and calling for the targeting of Tehran’s nuclear program.
Canada has been swept by a wave of militant worker struggles and mass anti-Gaza genocide protests, but in the absence of the working class mounting an independent political challenge to the Trudeau government, the field has been left open for the Conservatives and other reactionary forces to exploit mounting social anger.
The main argument raised against the Canadian government revealing the names of the mass murderers it allowed into the country following World War II is that it would harm the imperialist powers’ war on Russia. There could hardly be a more damning admission as to the character of the regime backed by Washington and Ottawa in Kiev.
Just hours after Canadian National and Canadian Pacific-Kansas City imposed a lockout, Liberal Labour Minister Steven MacKinnon used the quasi-dictatorial powers invested in him to outlaw all worker job action and empower an arbitrator to dictate their contracts.
The urgent task is to fight to politically mobilize the working class as an independent force against the drive of the rail barons, backed by Biden and Trudeau, to impose slave-like conditions on the railways, to secure the imperialist powers’ home front in a rapidly developing world war.
This amounts to a government-sanctioned dictatorship of the rail bosses, who will get everything they want from the CIRB. It is in keeping with the systematic suppression of workers’ struggles over recent years by the Canadian capitalist state.
The overwhelming support among rail workers for a struggle to put an end to dangerous working conditions must be organized into a political fight against the rail barons, who are backed to the hilt by corporate Canada and the pro-war, pro-austerity Trudeau Liberal government.
As part of its fight to mobilize postal workers independently of the union bureaucracy, the World Socialist Web Site has sharply criticized “militant” CUPW bureaucrats who have postured as defenders of workers’ interests. A key experience in this regard was the presidency of Mike Palecek.
Using a court injunction and police violence, authorities in Ontario and Quebec succeeded in shutting down the student encampments at University of Toronto and McGill University, without any of their demands being met.
