Capitalism Can’t Be Fixed (CCBF) calls for immediate escalation of the struggle to Kill Bill C-39. Titled the ‘Building Canada Strong Act’, the legislation brazenly prioritizes the interests of corporate investors, in the process subordinating workers and the environment. The 243-page bill makes sweeping changes to the Canada Labour Code. It undermines the right to strike, and introduces new powers to designate entire “regions of national interest” in order to bypass environmental protection and Indigenous consultation.
Without the right to strike, organized workers swiftly go from collective bargaining to collective begging. Without environmental safeguards, corporations have free reign to plunder the environment.
All workers, Indigenous people, women, youths, seniors, small business folks and many others will suffer greatly from the totality of Mark Carney’s anti-social, ecocidal agenda. His Bill C-39 would magnify the power of the super-rich and their state, at the expense of the vast majority and the planet.
Capitalism Can’t Be Fixed— the socialist movement that in September co-organized over two thousand to confront Carney’s CEO Summit in Toronto— joins with the Canadian Labour Congress and its many affiliates in the current compelling campaign to kill Bill C-39. Our common aim is to safeguard democratic rights, Mother Nature and the capacity of working people to obtain decent wages and conditions.
CCBF views this anti-labour, deregulation law as an integral part of the Liberal federal government’s broader agenda: privatizing and selling off public assets, attracting private investment at any cost, and pouring billions into weapons and war-making. Carney is hoping that the population will fall for his patriot games — the increasingly transparent cover for his insidious gambit.
The fight back is off to a good start. The Canadian Labour Congress hosted a massive telephone conference that attracted thousands on October 13, while the NDP held a zoom conference with some 800 participants. Both engaged in protest rallies at the offices of Liberal MPs across the country. The executive of the Canadian Union of Public Employees, the largest union in Canada with over 600,000 members, voted unanimously to defy any attempt under Bill C-39 to break a CUPE strike. CCBF, on its part, has raised $4000 for the Arctic Crossroads Tour, an Indigenous-led tour educating on the stakes of the North being designated as a “region of national interest” under Bill C-39 and the prospect of further fossil fuel extraction.
But what’s at stake is far too important to pause there. We must match and exceed the cross-country Day of Action Against Wage Controls in October 1976, the largest labour protest in Canadian history. As labour, Indigenous and climate organizations organize to expose and challenge C-39, it will surely be necessary to escalate the current struggle.
Step by step, showing that in unity there is strength, workers and activists should move with growing confidence to defend the right to strike and demand environmental protection by shuttering every work place in order to terminate Bill C-39.
In this way, the raw nerve in every boss, in every capitalist, will be pinched— the nerve that connects their wallet to their brain. The truth is that there is no ‘tomorrow’ without workers’ rights and environmental justice today. The time to fight, and to win, is now!
Reprinted from Capitalism Can’t Be Fixed Site, 2026.