The Rightward Shift of the Carney and Legault Governments and the Conditions for the Response
by Bernard Rioux
The climate crisis and the collapse of biodiversity are not isolated phenomena that fall solely within the environmental sphere. They constitute a structuring factor in the economic, political, and social situation in Canada and Quebec. These phenomena permeate and disrupt all dimensions of collective life, and reveal the destructive direction of the choices made by current governments. The Canadian and Quebec governments continue to rely on a model of unbridled extractivism and on fossil fuel projects that are in direct contradiction with the imperatives of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and preserving ecosystems. This ecocidal course fuels deforestation, water pollution, and the destruction of living environments, while deepening structural dependence on highly polluting sectors. All social movements must seek to coordinate their actions to force governments to back down, impose their demands, and save the planet.
The situation of the Canadian economy and the conservative turn of the Carney government
Trump’s tariff war is hitting the Canadian economy hard. Punitive tariffs on steel, aluminum, and lumber are directly threatening tens of thousands of jobs in key sectors. Major industrial regions across Canada are seeing layoffs pile up. Meanwhile, rising inflation, particularly in the food and housing sectors, is strangling households. While workers with permanent, unionized jobs have managed to increase their wages beyond inflation for 2024, the setbacks experienced during the years 2020-2022 have not yet been overcome. Part-time, non-unionized employees have seen their purchasing power deteriorate. Unemployment, which had been falling for several years, is now on the rise again.
Canada’s dependent capitalism, anchored to the United States, reveals its extreme vulnerability to imperialist pressures that translate into attacks on the popular majority. The Liberal government is banking on accelerating the implementation of major infrastructure projects, energy corridors, and mining. To this end, it adopted the Canadian Economic Unity Act to reduce environmental protection standards, favoring the profits of multinationals linked to fossil fuel and mining capital, at the very cost of worsening the ecological crisis. The First Nations, impacted by these measures, firmly oppose the exploitation of their territory and the non-recognition of their rights.
This ecocidal logic is interwoven with a geopolitical and military dimension: international competition for access to resources and control of energy routes is pushing Canada to increase its military budgets and further integrate itself into the imperialist strategy of the United States and NATO. Rather than defending the country’s economic and social sovereignty, the Carney government intends to inject billions of dollars to achieve a 2% increase in arms spending, to the detriment of public services, which are themselves threatened with significant cuts. The arms race and support for the expansion of the military industry thus become another driver of environmental destruction and the diversion of public resources, which could otherwise finance an ecological and social transition.
On immigration, Prime Minister Carney is complying with Trump’s demands to tighten Canadian immigration policy and control the borders. He is strengthening border patrols, reducing the number of workers and students who can return to the country, reducing the rights of refugees, and directly attacking the right to asylum.
The Trudeau and Carney governments did not hesitate to attack the right to strike of railway workers, longshoremen, and flight attendants, using repeated injunctions to force them back to work. Today, it is Canada Post workers who are under attack: the end of home mail delivery, threats of partial privatization, and the closure of rural offices.
The Legault government champions law and order
In Quebec, the Legault government is experiencing a major setback in voting intentions and growing discontent with its policies. His response: a sharp shift to the right. He wants to tie Quebec businesses to the windfall of arms contracts, transforming the economy into an appendage of the military-industrial complex. His speech at the last CAQ convention glorified “law and order.” Premier François Legault is preparing to launch an offensive against unions: control of union finances, restrictions on the right to strike under the pretext of “essential services,” and changes to the negotiation method in the public sector, deemed too “rigid.”
Cuts are raining down on the public sector: layoffs and hiring freezes, leading to thousands of job losses. This is exacerbating the chronic underfunding of schools and hospitals. Services to the public are significantly deteriorating.
The environment is being sacrificed: cuts to the Ministry of the Environment, a rollback on the electrification of transport by lifting the ban on the sale of new gasoline-powered vehicles by 2035, limitations on environmental monitoring for closed mines, and a weakening of environmental protection. In addition, there are plans to weaken GHG reduction standards, and entire renewable energy sectors are being left under the control of private companies.
Legault is relaunching his demagogic rhetoric against migrants and resurrecting a project of identity-based and authoritarian secularism, particularly targeting Muslim women. He is presenting a project of cultural integration that is part of an assimilationist logic . He is banning the government’s use of inclusive writing.
The trade union movement faces major challenges
The unions are on the defensive, but anger is rising. Since 2022, strikes have multiplied: teachers, nurses, transport workers, municipal employees. These struggles demonstrate the will to resist, but the strategy of social dialogue still prevents an active break with the established order. Debates within the union movement (e.g., the General Assembly of Trade Unionism) open the door to a reorientation: toward greater unity, more offensive action, and a link between economic and political struggles. But for now, the response will have to become more radical if it is to match the brutality of the employers’ and government offensive.
The women’s movement and the environmental movement
The women’s movement remains one of the most important centers of resistance. The World March of Women can galvanize the response. The same is true of Mothers at the Front, which unites social, environmental, and feminist struggles. Their strength lies in mobilizing around concrete issues, such as the climate crisis. The network of feminist associations remains dense and active.
The environmental movement is waging a series of struggles across a wide range of fields: protecting natural environments, opposing polluting industrial projects and the expansion of hazardous landfills, fighting forestry reforms that give private sector power, defending urban green spaces, and, above all, denouncing the inaction of the Carney and Legault governments in the face of the climate crisis. While many groups are very active, the struggles remain marked by fragmentation, the dispersion of energies, and often strictly local roots.
Ethnic minorities face unashamed racism
In the current climate, ethnic and religious minorities are subjected to systemic and unashamed racism, fueled by the rhetoric of nationalist parties and relayed by complacent media. Islamophobic and xenophobic attacks are on the rise. The anti-racist movement is responding courageously but remains focused on the communities directly affected, hampering its ability to generate broader solidarity. And conservative nationalism is driving down support for independence by excluding recognition of Quebec’s plurinational reality and obscuring the emancipatory nature of inclusive independence.
Building the convergence of struggles around an emancipatory project
Faced with austerity, the commodification of our lives, and the rise of reactionary rhetoric, we affirm the need for a clear break with capitalism and its institutions. Trade unions that defend the right to strike, environmental movements that oppose extractive megaprojects, feminist movements that denounce both violence against women and the precariousness and overexploitation of women in the care sector, and anti-war movements that reject the militarization of the economy are facing increased repression.
A successful resistance from the popular camp can only be based on the convergence of struggles: those for collective control of energy and resources, those for massive reinvestment in our public services, those for the universal right to housing, for women’s rights and gender equality, those for resistance to racism and for migratory justice, those for the redistribution of wealth through a policy of access to housing and tax reform, etc.
It is only through such a convergence of struggles that we will be able to reverse the balance of power, break the conservative hegemony and reopen the path to an egalitarian, feminist, ecological, anti-racist and truly democratic alternative. This convergence of struggles will be able to culminate in the realization of a project for a democratic society: the independence of Quebec.
Unions, feminist, environmental, anti-racist, and grassroots movements must coordinate their actions and overcome divisions. They must create local, regional, and national convergence assemblies capable of defining common demands and strategies and building a social and political front capable of articulating social struggles and a disruptive political project, capable of breaking with capitalism, defending our rights, and building a just, ecological, feminist, united, and independent Quebec.
Reprinted from Presse Gauche.