Oppose National Unity, Fight Imperialism!

The following resolution was adopted at the 5 September 2026 Central Committee Meeting of the Trotskyist League in Quebec and Canada. Since then, Carney has been burnishing his reputation as defender of the old liberal world order and anointed leader of the so-called middle powers against Trump’s strong-arm efforts to reverse the decline of American hegemony. From the September investment summit of billionaires to his recent speech to the EU, Carney aims to make the rotting Canadian economy more competitive, reducing but never eliminating integration with the U.S. economy and military. And in dangling massive tax breaks before corporate investors, the ruling class is clear: the working people will bear the cost.

Now the Liberals have put that cost in black and white. Bill C-39, the “Building Canada Strong Act,” enshrines an approval process that will fast-track projects deemed in the “national interest.” This will further trample on the rights of Indigenous peoples through whose lands the projected pipelines, mines and highways will be built, and existing (hardly robust) environmental protections will be ripped up. The law also strengthens the government’s strikebreaking powers under Section 107 of the Labour Code. In an additional move to squeeze out “competitive advantages” for institutional investors through “speed, certainty, and predictability,” the Liberals plan to privatize operations at Canada’s four major airports, which, if not fought, will lead to more job losses and assaults on the unions.

While union leaders rightly decry Bill C-39 as an attack on labour, they promote Carney’s “Davos liberalism” and overall economic plans. However, C-39 is a pillar of the Liberal’s “Build Canada Strong” strategy! The strikebreaking provision is integral to the strategy, not an aberration that if excised would make the whole “national unity” program serve the interests of labour. CLC president Bea Bruske absurdly claims that the right to strike is “in the national interest” and “Canada needs workers with our elbows up, not our hands tied.” But it is the bureaucrats running the unions who are tying the hands of labour. Between 2023 and 2025, the Liberals used Section 107 to break strikes ten times, but these union bureaucrats did nothing to defend the unions against the government’s attacks. This treachery is what paved the way for C-39.

The left urgently needs to take on the job of forming a class-struggle opposition to these people who have betrayed workers time and again. Our resolution aims to advance a program to guide socialists in building a revolutionary trend that breaks with liberalism and is anchored in the labour movement.

Our perspectives in the next period must be grounded in two fundamental realities. First, the surge of national unity in reaction to Trump’s onslaught is poison to workers and the oppressed. It ties them to the interests of the Canadian capitalist exploiters via Carney’s Liberal government. Second, the hammer blows coming down from the U.S. empire as it drives to shore up its global hegemony are only the first stage in an expanding world crisis. This will lead to even deeper attacks everywhere, including in Canada. The anti-Trump unity with the Carney government promoted by union leaders and the NDP will leave workers defenseless in the face of this assault.

The collapse of trade negotiations with the U.S. reinforces this reactionary dynamic. The opposition parties, union bureaucrats, most provincial governments and big-business groups have backed Carney’s stance, with Danielle Smith’s Alberta regime the only outlier. Carney’s rhetoric about standing up to the U.S. is largely performative. His government has already bowed to many of Trump’s demands, notably vastly increased military spending, and the realities of geography, industrial integration and trade patterns give Canada very little room to maneuver. Carney must also reckon with the outrage that would follow an overt major concession to the U.S., for example dismantling agricultural supply management in Quebec or giving a green light to the total destruction of the auto industry.

Opposition to Trump’s blitzkrieg among workers is completely justified. As explained in detail in our international conference document, the U.S. empire is the central force driving the world toward barbarism. But allying with the Canadian capitalists in the name of opposing Trump can only produce disaster. Whatever steps the government takes in the name of shoring up the Canadian economy will be at the expense of workers and the oppressed. Already, Carney has used the surge of patriotism as a cover for big attacks on the unions, immigrants, Indigenous peoples and democratic rights. Public-sector jobs are being axed and social programs gutted. Another round of bailouts for corporations will be accompanied by more attacks. The starting point for defense against this onslaught is for workers to oppose the government and lead struggle against it—the opposite of the perspective pushed by the union leaders. Retaliatory tariffs and similar measures, which will only further fuel the cost-of-living crisis, must also be sharply opposed.

Since World War II, Canada has functioned as a junior imperialist partner to the U.S. This is true militarily (NATO, NORAD) and economically (three quarters of exports go to the U.S.). Major industries like auto are entirely tied to the U.S. market and will collapse if this is cut off. The country simply does not have the clout to act as an autonomous power. Thus, the rulers in Ottawa have bent over again and again to the U.S.’s reactionary course. Carney made this explicit in his speech to the Economic Club of New York last spring, where he pitched a “strong Canada” to “help make America great again.” Despite leverage in a few areas like critical minerals, Canada is qualitatively too weak and too closely tied to the U.S. behemoth to prevail in a trade war. Carney is currently putting up some resistance, and his popularity is enormous right now based on his posture of standing up to Trump on the world stage and defending “all Canadians.” But whatever reality there is to this “resistance” will be paid for by the blood and sweat of the Canadian working class. The question posed is: Will the working class break from the trap of this popular-front national unity and embark on a course of class struggle? Or will its conditions be further degraded as the capitalist rulers escalate their attacks?

Carney is buying time, but he will capitulate more fully to Trump sooner or later. For now, his national unity crusade is a battering ram for the interests of Bay Street, aiming to preserve Canada’s place amid the decaying U.S. empire as much as possible while managing the fissures in society. The only defense against this is anti-imperialist struggle by the workers of Canada and Quebec, independent of the Liberals and other capitalist parties and reaching out to working people in the U.S. and beyond. Clearly, the NDP and the current crop of labour leaders will not lead such a fight. Their utterly bankrupt perspective was summed up in the recent statement by CLC president Bea Bruske backing Carney against Trump, which calls for “governments, workers, unions, businesses and communities” to “stand together” against the U.S.

Looming Economic Crisis

Beyond the immediate trade war stands the state of the U.S. and global economy, which is overdue for a major crisis. Big shocks are coming. Trump is waging war after war, stepping up tariffs and sanctions and escalating the assault on immigrants and other minorities at home. This is all part of U.S. imperialism’s drive to shore up its weakened global supremacy and prepare to confront its main rival, China. But its economic foundations are built on a speculative frenzy. The national debt has surpassed $40 trillion. The AI bubble that has fueled the stock market will eventually pop. When it bursts, this will sweep away mountains of fictitious capital and lay bare the rot at the heart of the U.S. empire. Yet so long as the U.S. remains the overwhelmingly dominant military power and controls the world financial system, it will have enormous advantages in shaping the response to the crisis, enabling it to shift much of the burden onto other countries.

The impact of the coming crisis will be felt worldwide, especially in the Global South. But it will also produce devastating attacks on workers within the U.S. and among its junior imperialist partners. Canada will be hit hard, especially given its weak economic fundamentals. There will be mass layoffs and a deep austerity drive, likely accompanied by significant repression. As the ruling class invests in increased military spending and bailouts of businesses stuck in the trade war, it will seek to cut spending by attacking unions and social services. Yet the health system is already in decay, personal debt is soaring, housing in major cities is unaffordable and Indigenous communities continue to live without basic services including potable water.

There is much talk about the need to re-industrialize Canada in order to develop the economy, rebuild infrastructure and increase living standards. But Canada’s economic deterioration is a problem the ruling class cannot solve. The steady decline in productivity in recent decades is the flip side of the financial parasitism that has increasingly driven the economy. And now fissures threaten to crack open everywhere: energy and natural resources (largely in the West) vs. an industrial sector (largely in Ontario and Quebec); the centrality of primary resources, particularly oil exports; a hollowed-out industrial sector dependent on the U.S.; western alienation, Quebec’s national subordination, the degradation of Indigenous peoples and more. Nor is trade “diversification” or a supposed “alliance of middle powers” a magic pill to cure Canada of its dependence on the U.S. empire. As the crisis of U.S. imperialism deepens, so too will that of its Canadian junior partner.

There has been some resistance to the attacks already waged by federal and provincial governments. This includes strikes, mainly in the public sector, Indigenous actions in B.C. and student anti-austerity protests in Ontario. But these have largely been disparate and isolated. Some sectors of the labour movement, notably CUPW postal workers, have suffered historic defeats. The strike by Air Canada flight attendants last year, which saw the union briefly defy a government back-to-work edict, was the biggest opportunity for a labour victory that could have started to turn the tide. But the CUPE bureaucrats quickly pulled the plug and pushed through a sellout contract.

The working class has not been crushed, but the unions have been severely weakened, and their leaders constrain struggles that do occur. The prevailing sentiment among many workers appears to be to keep their heads down and try to get by, with the unions themselves often seen as useless talk shops that do little beyond collecting dues. This is true as well in Quebec, even though the unions remain stronger than anywhere else in the country. National unity even reaches within the Quebec working class, which is driven by fear to support Carney and to some extent the federalist CAQ, putting pressure on PQ leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon to postpone plans for a sovereignty referendum. What is needed is for the working class to collectively brace for the coming attacks, waging defensive struggles to minimize the damage as much as possible. This can prepare the ground for a counteroffensive when the situation changes. Such a perspective poses directly the need to rebuild the labour movement through struggle against its current leadership.

Bankruptcy of Liberalism

Carney’s replacement of the hated Trudeau in the early days of the second Trump presidency blocked the rise of Poilievre’s Tories in the last election. This situation has not changed, with the Tories languishing in the polls. For the political and business elites, along with the social democrats and union bureaucrats (and even in Quebec), government by the technocratic banker Carney is the current preference for dealing with Trump. But disaffection with the Liberals will grow at some stage. The NDP retains pockets of support provincially, especially in the West, but at the federal level they are discredited and largely irrelevant, with no sign of this changing. Instead, it is right-wing forces whose support is expanding among those workers who are not simply keeping their heads down but seek an alternative to establishment politicians, especially over the entrenched cost-of-living crisis.

Under Carney, Canadian liberalism has undergone a reorientation. Trudeau’s blah-blah about diversity, human rights, Indigenous reconciliation and progressive social values has given way to a language of economic security, nation building, industrial policy and Canadian sovereignty. The pretense of defending minorities and official multiculturalism has not disappeared but is increasingly subordinate. While largely going along with Carney’s economic policies, the NDP and many labour leaders have objected to his shift in rhetoric, seeking to hang on to the disintegrating liberal order. So long as they do this, the populist right will continue to be able to present itself as the only alternative to the status quo.

When the current popular support for anti-Trump national unity collapses, right-wing populists will move to capitalize on this. They already intersect skepticism about the “elbows-up” posture of the Liberal government among layers of the working class, with some wanting to simply make a deal with the U.S. Absent the cohering of a left-wing alternative that thoroughly breaks with liberalism, these forces are positioned to take advantage of the inevitable failure of Carneyism. This underscores the urgency of building a socialist alternative and taking on and defeating the arguments of the right.

Canadian multiculturalism has always been used as a bludgeon against Quebec national liberation. Appeals to national unity rest on the lie that Canada is a voluntary community of equal citizens. In the face of growing economic and geopolitical uncertainty, one of Carney’s aims is to rally the population by obscuring Canada’s character as an oppressor nation. Thus, he followed his Davos speech last January by travelling to the Plains of Abraham, where he praised the British Conquest as a “partnership” and urged “all Canadians” to unite in the face of the coming economic challenges. This was a shot across the bow against the surge in support for Quebec independence among youth and a warning that Ottawa will stop at nothing to thwart Quebec’s national aspirations.

Trump’s threats have now altered the balance in the upcoming Quebec elections. While the PQ still leads the polls by a thin margin, it has already backtracked on holding an early referendum. This also reflects the fact that far from having a strategy to win independence through anti-imperialist struggle, the Quebec bourgeois nationalists put their faith in a peaceful, gradualist deal with the Canadian rulers and the U.S. imperialists (at least once Trump is gone). The Bloc Québécois saluted Carney’s break of trade negotiations with Washington, and for its part the PQ merely offered some criticisms, thereby accommodating reactionary Canadian unity. The only way to stand up to Trump’s bullying and Carney’s threats is to fight for Quebec independence by mobilizing independent struggle of the working class. A crucial part of this struggle is to break workers in English Canada from the trap of national unity and win them to support Quebec’s fight for national freedom. This will not be an easy task given the historic chauvinism of the English Canadian labour movement. However, it is the task of the left to show concretely that workers in Canada have more to lose from upholding Quebec’s national oppression than opposing it. Even a small show of solidarity with Quebec in the current context would go a long way to crack this national unity consensus.

We are also seeing a rise in anti-immigrant activity by far-right forces. So far this is not a mass movement like in Britain and the U.S., in large part due to support for Carney’s national unity crusade and his moves to reverse the high level of immigration under Trudeau, when huge numbers of foreign workers were brought in as a source of cheap labour that also served to mask a steady decline in economic productivity. This shift has been rapid and stark: with the immigration spigot turned off, Canada’s population declined last year for the first time in recorded history. But the sharp decline in living and working conditions ushered in by decades of the liberal status quo is pushing increasing numbers of workers to the right and fueling reaction against non-white minorities, Indigenous peoples and other layers of the oppressed. In fighting for a revolutionary leadership of the labour movement, socialists must be in the vanguard of the fight to defend the oppressed through concretely showing that these divisions actually further depress the condition of the entire working class.

One very visible expression of this rejection of liberalism in a right-wing direction has been in Alberta, where petty-bourgeois forces are playing on economic uncertainty to whip up hostility against immigrants and Indigenous peoples and push a referendum on separating from Canada. Western alienation has long been part of Canada’s political fabric, but the issue has now come to the fore in the context of the U.S. drive to reshape the world and the sharp decline of traditional Canadian liberalism. In complete contrast to Quebec, Alberta is not an oppressed nation; indeed, part of the Alberta separatists’ appeal is to denounce “privileges” given to Quebec by “Laurentian elites.” While both Smith and Poilievre oppose separation, they are using the movement to gain leverage with Ottawa in negotiations over provincial autonomy and regulations constraining the oil and gas industry. Carney has responded with a deal for a new West Coast pipeline, which is sharply opposed by Indigenous groups.

Movements like Alberta separatism are not a challenge to the ruling class but another reactionary expression of the crisis of Canadian federalism, substituting right-wing populism for liberalism. They would heighten attacks on immigrants and Indigenous peoples while doing nothing to advance the material interests of workers in Alberta. Furthermore, an independent Alberta would be little more than an oil vassal of U.S. imperialism. But while it is not in the interests of the working class to support separatism, nor should they back the pro-Canada opposition, which runs the gamut from the NDP and union leadership through the Liberals to the Conservative mainstream. Here again, revolutionaries must draw a class line against both liberalism and the populist right. The left must channel the just resentments of the Alberta working class against liberalism away from the reactionary Alberta independence movement, and towards joint class struggle against both Carney and the oil barons.

Building a Revolutionary Youth Movement

Youth are on the frontlines of the shifts, fissures and social rot in Canadian society. The consequences of the decaying U.S. empire, the deepening crisis of Canadian capitalism and the rise of reaction fall hardest on young people: crushing debt, unaffordable housing, a crumbling education system, grim job prospects, a weakened working class and increased regimentation and repression all make youth more insecure. At the same time, there is significant energy and raw anger among young people. The question is: Where is that energy going to go, who will be able to give it direction and toward what ends? Revolutionaries must be at the forefront of this fight. Neither Carney’s Liberals nor Poilievre’s Tories can offer youth a future, and we must fight to rip the youth away from the reactionary lure of the populist right and the bankrupt anti-Trump national unity of the Liberals and give this anger a fighting, class-struggle direction opposed to the twin dead ends of liberalism and right-wing populism.

The student movement in Ontario is a key battleground for us to advance this goal. Ford’s cuts to OSAP did not originate in the moral failings of this individual but reflect the ruling-class need to close the doors to higher education and turn the screws on young people. This attack sparked a reaction from a large layer of youth in Ontario. The movement’s leadership, however, did everything it could to confine the anger of these youth within the bounds of liberal outrage and the dead-end strategy of petitions, emails to MPPs and parliamentary motions. The stranglehold of the CFS-NDP leadership on the student movement has paralyzed it and assured its impotence by demobilizing the students with their liberal and reformist politics and blocking any real confrontation with Ford. Our student comrades were instrumental in leading a high school walkout during last spring’s protests against Ford’s OSAP cuts. We argued against the strategy of the central protest organizers in the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS), who pushed reliance on the NDP to oppose Ford within the Ontario legislature, thereby demobilizing the struggle.

The task of the socialist left is to break this stranglehold by fighting for a different course, not just in the pages of its newspapers but in the real world. However, the socialist left’s abstract calls for a student strike were not accompanied by a serious struggle to build a pole that would fight for it. This constitutes the socialist left’s chief failure—a continuation of its historic failure in the anti-Ford struggle since his election in 2018. If this cycle is not broken, the protests organized by the anti-Ford popular front will continue to serve as a safety valve for anger without changing anything. It is into this vacuum that Students Against Austerity (SAA) emerged, a small but committed group of Marxist students based primarily in Toronto. As a group, they are defined by a fundamental contradiction: their defining goal is for a student strike—which demands a struggle against the leadership—but their practical method of fighting for it avoids that necessary confrontation, thereby holding back the advancement of this goal. By having our youth comrades join SAA, we can seek to exploit this contradiction to advance the struggle for a revolutionary pole against the CFS-NDP and, more broadly, for a revolutionary youth movement.

A Forward Perspective in a Reactionary Situation

The far left is divided and largely divorced from the working class. As our international conference document powerfully argued, the workers of the world need to unite against the U.S. empire, and the left must take on this world-historic task. This is as true in Canada as elsewhere. The concrete expression of this struggle here passes through an uncompromising battle against the Canadian ruling class, the junior partner of U.S. imperialism which is currently posturing as a defender of “middle-power” sovereignty and even engaging in a tariff conflict with Trump. Against this charade, the left in Canada must channel the legitimate anger at Trump and the U.S. empire into a break with Canadian national unity and towards actual class struggle against the U.S. and Canadian rulers. It is a rigid and sectarian response to interpret this as a capitulation to “Canadian nationalism”. To the contrary, a fight against U.S. imperialism necessarily entails a fight against its Canadian junior partners. But the left will not win workers to this struggle and away from the reactionary nationalism of the ruling class by denying the reality in the name of some principled anti-nationalist “purity”.

Parts of the left are reacting to the NDP leadership’s overt betrayals and witchhunts of left oppositionists (especially over Palestine) by trying to rebuild a more radical social-democratic alternative, such as Capitalism Can’t Be Fixed. Others, notably the Revolutionary Communist Party are recruiting layers of disaffected youth. However, they combine a false picture of a general left-wing surge in society with an abstract program of party-building that is divorced from shaping the actual class struggle and combating the misleaders of the working class. A third trend, such as Alliance Ouvrière (AO) or the Communist Workers Circle (CWC), does seek to intervene in ongoing working-class and other struggles, though also largely refuses to openly oppose the labour and other misleaders. The central task of socialists must be to cohere a revolutionary trend in these left-wing milieus, one that breaks completely with “progressive” liberal politics and seeks to anchor itself in the workers movement. Despite our very modest forces, this is the perspective that must continue to guide our work. Our goal is not the linear recruitment of a few individuals, but a fundamental realignment of the left on clear programmatic grounds, especially against liberalism, on the Quebec national question and over China.

We carried out this perspective in our campaign of critical support to Yves Engler in the NDP leadership race. Our intervention highlighted the key issues where Engler drew a hard line against the capitalist and NDP establishment: opposition to Zionism and NATO. The NDP brass responded to Engler’s campaign by excluding him from the race, then expelling him from the party altogether. We have continued to intervene among forces involved in this campaign who have regrouped into Capitalism Can’t Be Fixed and the Socialist Movement. When the latter proposed standing candidates in the Ontario municipal elections, we argued that this be based on a clear class alternative to the establishment politicians, including Toronto mayor Olivia Chow and the alliance of NDP/Green/Liberal politicians who back her. In particular, we put forward a working-class perspective for fighting the affordability crisis and opposition to police repression of Palestine protesters, which Chow has publicly supported. While the Socialist Movement’s appeal to stand candidates appears to be stillborn, the fighting program we outlined for this campaign provides a solid basis for intervening around the elections.

Our roots and connections in the labour movement are painfully thin, a weakness we seek to overcome. We seek to build oppositional caucuses that can lead struggles, even minimal ones, against the bosses as well as the current union misleaders. The task of the Marxist left is to go to the working class through implantation and intervention, in order to build an organized opposition to the trade-union misleaders. Current conditions for this are difficult given the prevailing apathy, illusions in national unity and moves to the right among different sections of workers. But shying away from this, whether in the name of sectarianism or refusal to confront obstacles, is no alternative. Despite our modest resources, we have sought to put forward this perspective in areas of work that are available to us, both in industry and in or around pro-working-class left currents, such as AO or the CWC. The overarching goal of socialist militants must be to rebuild the union movement from the ground up and forge a new, class-struggle leadership.

United defense of left-wing activists facing repression is also key. In Toronto, for example, more than 100 pro-Palestine militants have been rounded up under the cops’ Project Resolute. Yet when faced with attacks, most left organizations defend themselves alone or at best express symbolic solidarity. Ingrained sectarianism is a huge obstacle to what should be a basic task: united action against state repression. We will continue to campaign for joint action by the socialist left, extended wherever possible into the broader labour movement. Such necessary actions can also provide a forum to debate out perspectives on the road forward. This task will be all the more important when state repression is heightened in the coming period.

As noted at the international conference, the resources and energies of Marxists in the West must be leveraged to build the revolutionary forces of the Global South. We seek to integrate this work among the diasporas in Quebec and Canada, e.g. Chinese, Indian, Haitian, Filipino.

The current crisis of the U.S. empire and the eventual collapse of Carneyism will only deepen the fissures in Canadian society. Empty liberalism or dreams of reformist palliatives can do nothing to defend the interests of workers and the oppressed. We aim to reconstruct the left through a frank exchange of views as well as common action, laying out a revolutionary strategy for the current epoch rooted in the struggles of the working class. There is no other way forward.