The Red Review | Issue #33 (June 2026)
A Socialist Action Journal
Conference Proclaims a New Socialist Movement!
By Barry Weisleder
Nearly four hundred people, with over one hundred attending in-person in Toronto, and many more on-line across the country, gave birth to a new Socialist Movement (SM) at a day-long conference on May 24, 2026. It was the inadvertent product of two sequential socialist campaigns for the federal New Democratic Party leadership. Both bids were bureaucratically blocked by party controllers in 2025/2026, resulting in a bogus election that anointed the slightly left-of-center social democrat Avi Lewis. In the course of the campaign, thousands of NDP members endorsed and financially backed the comprehensive ‘Capitalism Can’t be Fixed’ policy platform espoused by renowned anti-imperialist author Yves Engler, and star political organizer Bianca Mugyenyi.
CLC 2026 Convention Breaks with Zionist Histadrut
By Julius Arscott, NUPGE delegate
Over 2,250 delegates representing workers across the country attended the triennial Canadian Labour Congress convention, May 11-15, in Winnipeg. The convention acclaimed an uncontested slate of very uninspiring incumbent top officers. UNIFOR, Canada’s largest private sector union, was absent as it has not been affiliated with the house of labour since 2018 due to a dispute over inter-union member ‘raiding’. Palestine solidarity activists, many active with Labour for Palestine (L4P), were prominently present. Heading into the convention, L4P advanced the “Hot Cargo” campaign where workers refuse to handle Israeli or Israel-bound weapons and cargo. They urged the CLC to break ties with Israel’s Histadrut, a so-called labour central that has been complicit in genocide and colonization in Palestine since the 1920s.
New Toronto Tenant Union takes on Financialized Landlords
By John Wilson
On April 18th, 300 tenants from across the GTA gathered to found the Toronto Tenant Union (TTU). Its mission: “to fight hikes, win housing justice, and protect our homes.” Two of TTU’s largest components, the York South-West Tenant Union (YSWTU) and Toronto Climate Justice have strong track records in taking militant action against real estate investment trusts (REITS), corporate landlords, private equity firms and serial “renovictors” and winning victories. In 2023-24, YSWTU organized the largest rent action in Toronto’s history with 500 tenants striking for nearly 16 months against Dream Unlimited and Barney River Investments. Victory was reached with lower rents, compensation to reflect the significant repair backlog and, unprecedentedly, the YSWTU was made the official liaison between the tenant association and the landlord.
CANADA STRONG FUND, A Boondoggle to Transfer Risk from Billionaires to Workers
By Gary Porter
Ottawa is launching Canada’s first so-called national sovereign wealth fund—the Canada Strong Fund. According to Mark Carney, it is about making sure that the returns, if any, from Build Canada Strong are shared widely. The mission, according to the Department of Finance, is to give Canadians a perceived direct stake in (but no control over) the Build Canada agenda. Clearly, it is a government of Canada fund – in other words, an instrument of the capitalist state. The fund will invest in strategic projects and companies, alongside other investors—with a clear objective to achieve commercial returns to build the wealth of Canadian billionaires. This is how the Canada Strong Fund will work: Initially, the government will borrow the initial $25 billion over 3 years, on a cash basis, to seed the Canada Strong Fund.
Is War Addiction Really Something to Celebrate?
By Yves Engler
We won. But please don’t ask exactly what. For the foreseeable future a major Canadian city is set to be a central node in linking global finance to arms production. Montreal, Toronto, or whichever city ‘wins’ hosting rights for the global war bank will become a symbol of militarism for decades to come. Last month Canada was formally selected to host a new multilateral war bank. It’s now up to the federal government to decide which city will host the Defense, Security and Resilience Bank. The DSRB will further marry investment agencies and major banks to arms producers. One aim of the multilateral financial institution is to draw the major commercial banks and large investment agencies, like the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, into closer ties with the arms industry.
Who Took the Hit on TMX?
By Gary Porter
The history of the Trans Mountain Pipeline (TMX) is a story of colossal ambition, depicting the shift from a Cold War-era energy project to the most controversial, destructive and expensive infrastructure endeavor in Canadian history. The original 1,150 km pipeline was built in a record 30 months, following the major Leduc oil strike in 1947. It was seen as a strategic necessity during the Korean War to move crude from Alberta to refineries in Burnaby, BC, and Washington State. The first oil arrived at Burnaby on October 17, 1953. By the early 2000s, the original line was full. Kinder Morgan proposed the expansion in 2012 to increase capacity from 300,000 to 890,000 barrels per day. However, the project faced fierce opposition from environmental groups and Indigenous communities over oil spills and tanker traffic, leading to years of legal battles and policy changes.
In Quebec and Everywhere, Anti-Racism is Essential to Class Politics
By Richard Roys
In early 2023, Quebec’s political class erupted in indignation over comments made by Amira Elghawaby, newly appointed by Ottawa as Special Representative on Combatting Islamophobia. Her offense was straightforward: she suggested that many Quebecers seemed disturbingly indifferent to the rise of anti-Muslim sentiment in the province. What followed was immediate, furious, and entirely predictable. Rather than treat her remarks as an invitation to reflect on the social reality of racism in Quebec, the political and media establishment transformed them into a national affront. The terms of the debate were rapidly reduced to an absurd binary: either one stood with Elghawaby and, by extension, with Ottawa, or one stood with Quebec. In that framework, there could be no nuance, no complexity, no space for anyone attempting to hold together two basic truths at once: