The fact that the NDP requires police thugs to silence peaceful protesters at its events exposes its fundamental hostility to the working class it claims to represent.
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 the opposition parties have been unable to differentiate themselves from Doug Ford, the province’s hard-right, Trump wannabee Tory premier, it is because the union-sponsored NDP, the Liberals and Greens stand for the same thing—upholding the interests of Canadian capital.
Underscoring the accelerating march to the right of Canada’s union bureaucracies, Unifor Local 1285—the bargaining agent for some 8,000 auto assembly, auto parts, food processing and other workers in Brampton, Ontario—has endorsed Ford and his Conservatives.
Ontario Progressive Conservative Premier Ford’s snap decision to order the immediate and permanent closure of the Ontario Science Centre, located in a working class Toronto neighbourhood, has provoked widespread popular opposition.
The Liberal debacle in the June 24 Toronto-St. Paul’s by-election confirmed what polls have been indicating for well over a year: support for the Trudeau-led minority Liberal government has hemorrhaged.
Under conditions in which major struggles by workers increasingly take the form of a rebellion against the union apparatus, which works tirelessly to suppress the class struggle, defenders of the union bureaucracy invariably come forward to insist that this time, everything will be different.
Teaching assistants, graduate assistants, researchers and contract faculty are set to walk off the job Monday at Toronto’s York University. They are demanding wage increases to keep pace with inflation and make up for years of concessions, and job security to put an end to precarious employment.
The following statement was issued by a participant in the November 2022 “illegal” strike of Ontario education support-staff workers and is a leader of the Ontario Education Workers Rank-and-File Committee.
Walton has been rewarded with her new six-figure position in the union bureaucracy after proving her anti-worker bonafides by selling out a strike by 55,000 education workers and scuttling a general strike movement which threatened to bring down the hated Ford government.
Anger at the union’s abandonment of the workers’ demands for wage increases that keep pace with inflation, job protection measures, and the right to work remotely is so strong among rank-and-file workers that a major PSAC component union has felt compelled to issue a call for a “No” vote.
PSAC has abandoned workers’ demands, agreed to real wage cuts and is trumpeting as victories side-deals on remote work and job security that mean workers will remain subject to the tyranny of “managerial rights.”
Rather than alerting federal government workers and the working class more broadly to the government’s strikebreaking plans, the PSAC bureaucrats have fallen silent.
Regardless of any tactical differences over the use of the “notwithstanding clause,” all sections of the Canadian ruling class—Quebec sovereignists as well as federalists—defend this provision as they increasingly resort to authoritarian methods to suppress growing working class resistance.
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.
“Enough is enough” is a fraud that aims to ensnare workers in a toothless protest campaign confined to Ontario’s provincial borders, and led by the very same unions that are propping up the Trudeau Liberal government at the federal level as it spends billions on war and takes the axe to public spending.
For decades, the purported “progressive” alliance between the union bureaucrats, social democrats and Liberals has served as a key mechanism for suppressing working class opposition to austerity, imperialist war, and attacks on wages and conditions.
The additional funds will be used to hire more police so the City can respond with brutal repression to the signs of mounting social breakdown, including unprecedented levels of homelessness, and growing working class opposition.
The president of the faculty union has opposed appealing to other workers, including teaching assistants, not to cross the strikers’ picket lines, declaring “We are not hooligans.”
Singh neglected to mention a “trifle”—His NDP, with the full-throated backing of the trade unions, has been propping up the minority Liberal government for years and since March 2022 has been in a formal governmental alliance with them.
