1. 23. 2026

Crisis as Class Strategy

Mostafa Henaway

On March 22, 2025, Canadian prime minister Mark Carney tweeted: “Elbows up, Canada.” The phrase was quickly seized upon as a symbol of defiance against US president Donald Trump and US economic coercion. Yet Carney’s invocation of Canadian nationalism was less a genuine challenge to American power than an attempt to seize upon the crisis posed by the US-Canada trade war, positioning the Liberal Party under Carney as the only political force capable of defending “Canada” and “Canadian values” in an era of instability. Facing a legitimacy crisis of their own making, the Liberals moved with remarkable speed and met with little resistance after the electoral defeat of the Conservative Party, even branding their fiscal plan the “Canada Strong Budget.” While Carney has framed the trade war with the United States as part of a broader “transformational” moment in global capitalism, much of his self-described mission has been to safeguard profitability and access to markets for resources. The Liberals under Carney have skillfully manipulated this moment as a way to deflect from the real source of the crisis experienced by working-class Canadians: the entrenched power of domestic capital.

In the wake of Carney’s election, some on the left briefly believed the worst had been averted. The fact that Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre had not come to power was interpreted as a victory amid the global rise of the far right. But within weeks, it became clear that this was a dangerous illusion. What is unfolding is a generational attack on workers: austerity, the scapegoating of migrants, mass deportations, and the continued colonial conquest of Indigenous lands. For the left within the Canadian state, the stakes could not be higher. 

This conjuncture has laid bare both our weaknesses and the urgent tasks ahead. If we do not squander the moment or move in the wrong direction, there remains an opportunity not only to resist these attacks, but to help forge an alternative politics grounded in real mass struggle. What is critical, however, is to clearly understand what is taking place and how we should organize as socialists, anarchists, and the radical left more broadly.

Reconfiguring empire: militarization, land grabs, and mass deportations

When Canada hosted the G7 meeting of heads of state in Kananaskis, Alberta, this past June, Mark Carney sought to position himself as a defender of global capitalism and the free flow of capital and trade, while bolstering NATO and Canada’s role in it. He framed this as building a more “resilient global economy” through a critical minerals alliance, supply-chain infrastructure, energy security for AI development, and expanded G7 cooperation on infrastructure financing for the Global South. While it has been presented as a response to Donald Trump and a supposedly antagonistic US empire, this vision is not at odds with US power but aligned with it. Carney’s agenda seeks to resolve contradictions within global capitalism by incorporating US demands into Canada’s competition with China and Russia, while propping up the fundamentals of capitalist globalization. 

This agenda is already reshaping the political landscape. The drive for resource extraction, border securitization, and expanded militarization has become the hallmark of the Carney project under the guise of a trade war with the United States. Consider Bill C-5, the Building Canada Act. Passed in June 2025, this legislation slashes approval timelines for major infrastructure projects from five years to two, dramatically reducing oversight and parliamentary deliberation. Even mainstream Indigenous leadership bodies expressed alarm. Former justice minister Jody Wilson-Raybould, who is Indigenous, noted that the bill was developed “behind closed doors,” warning that the federal government would now “make decisions and build projects on its own terms, at its own pace, and based on rules it [chooses] to make up as it goes along.” The fast-tracking mechanism undermines environmental protections and Indigenous rights frameworks, including obligations under the Indian Act. Similar legislation passed in Ontario enables the creation of “special economic zones” where firms can seek exemptions from provincial and municipal laws. Together, these measures give concrete form to what we might call the Carney doctrine.

Under this emerging framework, Ottawa has declared support for a new liquefied natural gas (LNG) pipeline from Alberta to British Columbia and for ending the longstanding oil tanker ban on the BC coast, with the goal of facilitating exports to Asian markets. In exchange, Alberta is to modestly strengthen its carbon pricing regime and support carbon capture projects. Similar deregulation and intensification of resource development is happening in northern Ontario, where the region known as the Ring of Fire is suspected to contain more than $60 billion in critical minerals. 

Investigations by The Narwhal into the federal government’s fast-tracked project list confirm the pattern: the first 17 projects slated for expedited approval fit squarely within the existing architecture of Canadian capitalism. Every one involves critical mineral extraction, oil and gas development, or infrastructure to move these commodities to export markets. None prioritize public goods such as social housing, long-term care, or publicly owned industrial capacity. State power is mobilized instead to subsidize domestic capital and multinational firms, particularly those tied to resource extraction: firms such as ExxonMobil, Blackrock, the Chinese National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC), and PetroChina hold substantial interests in Canada’s fossil fuel industry, though the tar sands fall increasingly under Canadian ownership. The budget is a win for capital in these sectors. The Financial Post is explicit about the kinds of organizations that stand to benefit from Carney’s budget: firms that will be helping to transport LNG or building infrastructure to Ring of Fire critical mineral projects. Despite all this, capitalist voices such as those represented by the Canadian Chamber of Commerce and the Business Council of Canada continue to call for even further deregulation.

The federal budget also reflects a historic rightward shift driven by growing anti-migrant sentiment. Bill C-12, the Strengthening Canada’s Immigration System and Borders Act that passed in the House of Commons in December 2025, sharply restricts asylum rights, denying protection to those who cross irregularly from the United States and to individuals who wait over a year to apply for asylum once in Canada, retroactive to June 2020. It also grants the immigration minister sweeping powers to cancel or suspend individuals’ legal residency status, placing vulnerable people at heightened risk of deportation. Combined with the $1.3-billion Border Plan and the hiring of an additional 1000 Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA) agents, the Liberals have aligned themselves with rising racism and xenophobia while placating Trump.

Beyond the attack on migrants, a central element of the budget and Mark Carney’s policy is increasing to unprecedented levels the size and funding of the Canadian military. Under the Liberals, Canada’s role in NATO is likely to aggressively expand. Military spending is set to rise from less than two percent to five percent of GDP by 2035, with $9 billion in new defence investments allocated for 2025-26 alone. A new Defence Investment Agency will oversee long-range strike capabilities, armoured vehicles, and expanded Arctic militarization. The budget’s $81.8-billion commitment to rebuilding the Canadian Armed Forces exposes its true priorities. 

These investments will be paired with fresh assaults on public services. Under the banner of “fiscal responsibility,” the federal government plans to cut $13 billion annually from public spending and eliminate approximately 40,000 federal public service jobs by 2029. Unions such as CUPE and PSAC have sounded the alarm that these cuts would be tantamount to the dismantling of public services at the federal level. According to Marc Lee at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, the Build Canada Homes project to speed up the construction of new housing, though promising, will build just 4000 new homes in 2026, and it will be complemented by a 56 percent reduction in planned federal spending on housing programs: from $9.8 billion in 2025-26 to $4.3 billion by 2028-2029. At the same time, the budget boasts of Canada’s low debt-to-GDP ratio and ample “fiscal space.” This suggests that austerity is not an economic necessity but a political choice, albeit one that’s constrained by pressures from global capitalism, expressed in part through bond and currency markets. 

The 2025 federal budget is capitalist austerity cloaked in the language of “nation-building,” “sovereignty,” and “generational change.” Mark Carney appears to believe his role is to prop up Canadian capital through bailouts, access to new markets, and maneuvering for advantage in the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA) negotiations, partly by giving steep concessions to the US and thus preserving Canadian capital’s access to the US market. At the same time, his agenda works through the Canadian state in the interests of the international capitalist class as a whole, with the aim of saving the project of capitalist globalization. Canada is not withdrawing from global conflict, but deepening its insertion into an imperial order defined by resource competition, geopolitical rivalry, and coercive state power. The war at home has become inseparable from the beating drums of war abroad.

Fragmentation and possibility: towards a new common front

The challenges we face as social movements are historic, and any honest assessment of the present moment must be sober. To understand where we stand, it is useful to look backward. When the G7 plus Russia met in Kananaskis in 2002, social movements converged from across the country and beyond. Despite real differences in strategy, a broad coalition mobilized to disrupt the summit. Opposition to neoliberal globalization was inseparable from resistance to the so-called “war on terror” and the looming invasion of Iraq. Thousands gathered both in Kananaskis and in Ottawa to shut down the summit and reclaim the country’s capital city as a site of popular power.

By contrast, when the G7 returned to Kananaskis in 2025, the response by social movements was far more muted. There were rallies, but little sense of convergence, despite the enormity of the historic moment: the genocide in Gaza continuing, war raging in Ukraine, tensions with Iran escalating, and trade wars intensifying. Our response hasn’t met the moment. The question is why? 

Long preoccupied with blocking a Poilievre government, much of the radical organized left and social movements have lacked the capacity, vision, and coalitions to mobilize effectively. Parts of the left have appeared disoriented, responding to Trump’s protectionism by implicitly defending globalization rather than building alternatives rooted in global working-class solidarity. In this vacuum, the populist right – including the far right – has increasingly seized the mantle of “anti-globalization,” reframing it in nationalist and reactionary terms.

One urgent task, then, is to reject Canadian nationalism as the basis for mass struggle. Nationalism will not unite the working class; it will fracture it. As Todd Gordon reminds us in an article for Midnight Sun, nationalism is a political dead end for the Canadian left. The threats we face come not from external enemies, but from a Canadian capitalist class determined to preserve profitability through austerity, militarism, and extraction. But just as critically, we must return to a radical left position that rejects the infrastructure of capitalist globalization such as CUSMA. We should not demand a renegotiation of CUSMA, but insist instead that such agreements only pit workers against each other – workers from Mexico, the US, and Canada – and benefit multinational corporations and financial capital. 

Forms of left populism that are detached from mass struggle pose additional dangers. Claims that Canada’s social democratic New Democratic Party (NDP) can simply become a broad left alternative ignore hard lessons. Not anchored in a mass radical movement and independent organizations outside the party, the NDP has repeatedly accommodated capital in pursuit of electoral viability, diluting its politics to chase the illusion of broader appeal. By contrast, the mayoral victory of Zohran Mamdani in New York City was rooted in forces beyond electoral politics: migrant justice movements, organisations such as Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM) and the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, and Palestine solidarity organising. 

Our difficulty in meeting the moment is not primarily about the objective social and economic conditions we face, but rooted in the absence of organizational structures capable of supporting mass convergence. Too much of the organized left remains absorbed in NDP party-building and leadership contests rather than the slow, difficult work of mass organization – a road travelled before, with predictable results. What is required instead is a left capable of advancing an analysis that connects global capitalist restructuring, trade war dynamics, and the drive to militarized conflict with renewed attacks on workers, migrants, and Indigenous communities at home. Canadian nationalism serves only to obscure these connections: the ways that the global capitalist economy constrains all capitalist governments to repress workers and oppressed peoples, to varying degrees, for the sake of profitability. 

Struggles abroad help show us what’s possible. During the general strike wave in Italy in fall 2025, for example, social movements and grassroots unions such as the Unione Sindacale di Base (USB) and Sindacato Intercategoriale Cobas (S.I. Cobas) led mass industrial action, alongside student walkouts over the country’s budget and war agenda and the genocide in Gaza. As the USB’s notice of the November 29 general strike asserts, “We want at least a €2,000 base [monthly] salary, a maximum retirement age of 62…reduced working hours while maintaining the same salary, guaranteed housing rights, public sector hiring, free and universal public healthcare… These are essential needs for an exhausted country, incompatible with the government’s warmongering.” The Italian General Confederation of Labour (CGIL), Italy’s largest union, also played a central role in the strike wave. Italy provides the most potent current example of the type of action needed to confront Carney’s agenda.

Here in Canada, too, opposition has emerged. As organizer and writer John Clarke observes, “The attempt to put the burden of the trade crisis on the backs of workers and communities is producing the deep injustices and the simmering anger that can unleash [a powerful] movement.” In 2025, key struggles erupted across many sectors of the Canadian economy. Canada Post workers confronted attacks aimed at the Amazonification of public services: the erosion of home mail delivery and the imposition of “flexible” schedules on workers, hollowing out stable employment. Air Canada flight attendants struck. Education workers in Alberta mobilized against cuts and restructuring. These protracted class struggles reveal both the determination of capital to minimize concessions and the growing recognition among workers that only collective action can shape outcomes. Even amid trade-war pressures, unionization drives and workplace organizing – documented by social movement writers such as Scott Neigh – have continued to make important gains. 

Resistance to Bill C-12 has included direct actions at CBSA detention centres organized by Weaving Our Worlds, sustained mobilization by the Immigrant Workers Centre and Solidarity Across Borders in Québec, and organizing by Palestinian Youth Movement and others. These struggles are vital, but insufficient in scale and coordination to confront the full scope of the Carney doctrine. The problem is not just levels of militancy, which tend to be low in the Canadian state outside Québec, but also the absence of a unified political horizon capable of binding these fights into sustained mass opposition.

Carney’s agenda has generated unease within the Liberal Party itself, reflected in former environment minister Steven Guilbeault’s resignation following the announcement of the federal government’s support for a new pipeline. This instability is likely to be intensified by Indigenous resistance and public opposition to further pipeline expansion. Our task is not to protect the Liberals from the right, but to expose their contradictions and deepen the crisis generated by an agenda that bails out Canadian capital at the expense of workers, Indigenous peoples, migrants, and the poor. We should look to examples, such as those in Italy, that propose not an electoral solution but mass struggle and economic disruption – with the aim not just of opposing the agenda of the ruling class, but also of putting forward an alternative that speaks to the crisis the working class faces. 

This fall, two important convergences took place: the international Draw the Line mobilizations this past September linking climate justice, peace, and migrant justice, along with November’s union-led mobilization in Québec. The latter brought more than 50,000 people into the streets, demonstrating both the latent power of working-class resistance and a mass appetite for broader solidarity. While unions may have formed the backbone of that mobilization, social movements under attack recognized themselves as part of a broad common struggle around migrant justice, healthcare, and community services. 

Yet what is missing is a broader framework – one that recognizes why a common front is not optional, but necessary. A common front means weaving the fightbacks together: public sector workers, migrants, Indigenous land defenders, anti-war organizers, and climate justice movements acting in concert. The strategic question now is how to build a mass, multiracial, working-class resistance to Carney at the scale required, capable of sustained confrontation. Unions will necessarily play a central role, though it remains unclear whether their leaderships will rise to the challenge. Indigenous struggles have provided powerful rallying points. The task is to broaden these struggles, develop shared strategies, and clarify the relationship between mass mobilization and electoral politics. This requires advancing systemic critiques without apology, and committing, over the medium term, to building independent, multiracial working-class organizations rooted outside existing institutional structures and capable of anchoring real mass resistance. We can’t wait for spontaneous actions of opposition to align, or for salvation from electoral politics. We must actively build and organize a new common front from below.