The Red Review | Issue #16 (January 2025)
No to Legislative Strikebreaking! Victory to Postal Workers!
by Kiri Vadivelu
Free collective bargaining, including the right to strike, is being reduced to a farce by the Liberal minority federal government. Postal workers are the latest victims of this abrogation of labour liberties, with no hint of defiance suggested by the Canadian Labour Congress and its major affiliates. On the heels of Ottawa’s gross interference with job actions by dockworkers and railroad employees during the summer, this comes as a hard blow. It demands a powerful collective response, including a general strike. The CLC should convene an emergency conference now to adopt and implement an immediate plan of action to defend posties and workers’ rights.
On December 13, Justin Trudeau’s Minister of Labour, Steven MacKinnon, directed the Canadian Industrial Relations Board (CIRB) to determine whether Canada Post and the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) can quickly negotiate a settlement under obscure Section 107 of the Canada Labour Code. Three days later, the CIRB ordered an end to the strike, sending the dispute between the parties to an inquiry set to report in May 2025.
John Horgan, Social Democrat, Former BC Premier, Dead at 65
by Gary Porter
John Horgan died November 12, 2024 of cancer at the relatively young age of 65. Horgan was a dedicated, lifelong public servant, a former Premier of British Columbia. He was devoted, as are all social democrats, firstly to the defense of private ownership of the means of production for the profit of the wealthy few, and secondarily to the pursuit of minor reforms to ease the suffering of workers and their families.
As Premier of British Columbia, Horgan led the province through the COVID-19 pandemic, advocated for economic growth at any cost to the environment to “create jobs” in British Columbia and beyond. He spoke publicly of reconciliation with Indigenous peoples, while forcing them, with heavily armed and thuggish RCMP, to allow construction of the Coastal Gaslink fracked-gas pipeline through their unceded land and under the lakes, rivers and streams from which their drinking water comes. He and his competent Minister of Health, Adrian Dix, navigated the province through a number of extreme weather events, including floods and wildfires.
From Kanehsatà:ke to Palestine
by Nick Gottlieb
A review of Ellen Gabriel and Sean Carleton’s When the Pine Needles Fall
At 5:15 am on July 11, 1990, the Sûreté de Québec (SQ), the provincial police force, along with the RCMP and other paramilitary units, marched on a blockade on a dirt road in Kanehsatà:ke, about 50 kilometres west of Montréal. As Katsi’tsakwas Ellen Gabriel tells it in her new memoir, When the Pine Needles Fall: Indigenous Acts of Resistance, written in conversation with Sean Carleton (a former Canadian Dimension editorial board member), there were just five women at the blockade that day, including Gabriel, when the police arrived. After a three-hour standoff, the SQ began shooting at the land defenders. Gabriel and the other women took refuge in an area known as “The Pines,” the forest that the Kanien’kehá:ka have been actively protecting since Sulpician missionaries first arrived in the region that is now southwestern Québec in 1717.
Dispelling the “Forgotten War” Myth
by Sudan Solidarity Collective
Sudan Solidarity Collective on the war in Sudan and Canada’s silence and complicity
On a spring day at the end of April 2023, Leena Badri’s phone lit up: her university administration had put out a statement on the war in Sudan. The war had started two weeks prior, and Sudanese students and faculty at the University of Toronto were spread thin. Every day they spent hours messaging family and friends back home and sending money for supplies. Some delayed their degrees to support their community, incurring additional tuition fees.
Badri opened the statement hoping for some support and details about how the university would accommodate Sudanese students and support those fleeing the war. She was soon disappointed. Vice-president Joseph Wong expressed his “concern and sympathy for those affected by the war in Sudan,” but offered no meaningful assistance to affected students and staff, or to people in Sudan. Everyone was expected to carry on as usual.
Capitalist Democracy is a Sham! For Socialist Democracy!
by Murray Smith, Tim Hayslip
“Vote for the candidate of your choice, but vote!” is a frequently invoked platitude at election time in Western liberal democracies, one often accompanied by the (non-sequitur) admonition: “If you don’t vote, you have no right to complain.” Arguably, the most important reason that the overlords of public opinion in Western societies care so ritualistically about “getting out the vote” is that low voter turnout may call into question the popular mandate of a government. It’s common knowledge, after all, that a party can form a government (either on its own or in coalition with others) with much less than 50 percent of the total vote if the latter is split among several parties.
Julian Assange, “I am Not Free Today because the System Worked"
by Jeff Mackler
We proudly reprint here WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s address in France Tuesday morning, October 1, 2024 to the Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE). The remarks include Assange’s responses during the Q&A period. We are deeply impressed by Assange’s bitter honesty when he stated before the assembly that “My naivete was believing in the law. When push comes to shove, laws are just pieces of paper, and they can be reinterpreted for political expediency. They are the rules made by the ruling class more broadly.” Assange continues by explaining that these laws can, of course, be appealed to the US Supreme Court, implying that there too the result is the same, that is, deference to the political needs of the US ruling class and its national security state.
Ukraine: No to the US-orchestrated War and US-backed Fascist Coup
by Jeff Mackler
Some critical history for the antiwar movement
Serious political analysis on the left always begins with the facts. Substituting abstract theories not based on facts is always a deadend for the socialist movement, today terribly divided over how to evaluate and act on the unfolding and complex events attendant to the Ukraine War and the Russian invasion. Let us begin with some hard facts and context that are today tragically absent from much of the debates among the left today.
The Ukraine tragedy began in February 2014 when rooftop fascist snipers opened fire on Maidan Square Kiev protestors assembled to resist the Victor Yanukovych government’s corruption and austerity measures. The fascists murdered almost 100 in cold blood, including some of their own for good measure. Yanukovych, the elected president, was instantly blamed and pilloried by the world’s corporate media, paving the political road for what followed. He fled for his life.
Looking back at 2024, and Going Forward in Struggle
by Barry Weisleder
Socialist Action is a revolutionary workers’ party that puts a great emphasis on political education. At the same time, SA is an activist organization. It has many practical accomplishments to its credit. Presenting candidates in local elections, fighting to build a class struggle left wing inside mass working class organizations including unions and the NDP, and promoting international solidarity are examples. From Palestine to Haiti, from railroad workers to dock workers, to the strike by postal workers across the country now, 2024 has been a year of revolt against austerity and repression.
While a ceasefire was declared for south Lebanon, it has been violated multiple times by Zionist forces. Meanwhile, the genocide continues in Gaza. According to news reports on Nov. 17, more than 3,400 people were killed in Lebanon by Israeli fire. In Gaza, where the suffering is horrendous, officially over 44,400 are dead due to Zionist state bombardment. The Lancet medical journal estimates that mortalities exceed 200,000 due to famine and the destruction of housing and medical facilities in Gaza. Shootings by settlers and house demolitions in the West Bank add hundreds more to the deadly count.