For the occasion of the International Workers’ Day, the YCL-LJC sends a warm and fraternal salute to the youth and the working class struggling both in Canada and across the world for better wages and working conditions, for the extension of democratic rights, for peace and for socialism.

This year’s May Day celebrations take place in increasingly hostile conditions for the people and the youth of the world marked by an increased crisis of capitalism, imperialism and of the environment. Today, 1% of the people in the world possesses 80% of the wealth we produce. To maintain the system  and put the burden of the crisis on working people, the ruling class needs to increasingly rely on its most reactionary and violent elements.

This means that social services and democratic rights gained through massive mobilisations – including the Winnipeg General Strike that happened 100 years ago – are under severe attacks. Reactionary governments have been elected provincially in Ontario, New Brunswick, Alberta and recently in Prince Edward Island, as well as in Québec, using populist demands and promising « change » to a population increasingly molested by years of neo-liberal and austerity measures. However, these new governments have been quick to show their loyalty to defend and even expand anti-people austerity agendas.

In Ontario, the Ford government, right after getting to office, ordered a freeze on public sector hiring and put an end to the long-waited minimum wage increase to $15 per hour. It then severely attacked the quality of high school education, empowered the ultra-right to get organised on campuses, attacked Franco-Ontarien rights and access to post-secondary education – all  in only a year!

In Québec, since the election of far-right CAQ, austerity measures are still on the table – despite a historical budget surplus. An increasingly restrictive immigration law has been voted through, while oppression, discrimination and islamophobia are to become official policy with the currently debated bill on secularism. All the while, this government is openly taking the side of the corporations against working people. It recently announced its intention to get rid of school boards and just offered an unprecedented gift to Uber against cab drivers.

The same is to be expected in other provinces such as New Brunswick where the Tories had to ally with a far-right populist anti-Acadian party to form the government, or in Alberta where the victory of Jason Kenny foresees further attacks on the youth,workers, and the environment.

In the meantime, Federal Liberals, were also elected in October 2015 with a promise of change but have gone on defending corporate power over workers’ and people’s rights. All of their  important promises they were elected for were never delivered. Instead, the ones who, once again, benefite from this government’s rule are big corporations. Oil and gas monopolies benefit from Trudeau’s commitment to build more pipelines, contravening the right to self-determination of Indigenous peoples and nations, and also contravening the Paris Climate Agreement. Canada Post corporate administrators also found in Trudeau an ally in their endeavour to further crush postal workers’ rights, as exemplified by the back-to-work legislation imposed on  CUPW last December. The working class of the whole country will also pay the price of a new NAFTA deal, an actual corporations’ Bill of Rights which is set to further attack employment as well as social services and workers’ rights.

But the crisis of capitalism isn’t just about attacking workers rights at home. It is also about the increased aggressiveness of imperialism throughout the world and the drive to war, posing the threat of a world war at a stage never reached since the last 50 years. The people of Venezuela, DPRK, Palestine, Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Brazil, etc. are victims of imperialism and of its proxies fighting to instal ultra-right governments. Shamefully, Canadian imperialism is doing anything it can to prevent the above countries from choosing their own path of development and fighting for their own emancipation.

This is not only a sideline to the struggles of the working class. International solidarity, that is, the solidarity of the peoples of the world against their main enemy : capitalism and imperialism, is at the core of the struggle of working people. No working people around the world benefit from imperialism nor from capitalism.

This is why we have seen, in the past year, in response to increased attacks of capital, increased fightback from the youth and working people across the world and in Canada. General strikes in India, uprisings in Sudan and Algeria, the people of Venezuela defending their right to sovereignty in the face of an ongoing attempt of coup d’État by imperialist countries and its proxies in the country, a students strike in Colombia, women defending their right to abortion in Argentina, amongst others, show imperialism and capitalist forces that the youth and the working class of the world have not said their last word.

In Canada, Ontario high school and university students, Québec’s movement against unpaid internships, postal workers, Indigenous people resisting pipeline constructions and extractivism also show that one hundred years after the Winnipeg General Strike, the working class, the  youth and the people in general are still ready to unite and resist against the attacks waged by capitalism and that another world exempt of crises, exploitation and war is worthy to build and fight for.

Long live the peoples’ struggles for peace and social transformation!

Long live International Workers’ Day!