Central Committee Plenum March 2025 

The Situation in Canada for Youth 

The Upcoming Election 

Since the last time our Central Committee met, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was replaced as leader of the federal Liberals and as prime minister by the former governor of the Bank of Canada, Mark Carney. We now await the imminent call for a federal election. Our southern neighbours also have new spokespersons for the bourgeois state, Donald Trump and ​​Claudia Sheinbaum were elected presidents of the U.S. and Mexico. 

In the fall, it seemed as if the Liberals’ days were numbered and a Conservative majority was certain. Now, with a new helmsman and an enriched war chest the Liberals have a fighting chance of remaining in power. On Carney’s first day in office he eliminated the consumer carbon tax. With no Trudeau and no carbon tax, the Conservatives have lost their main campaign slogans in a single day. No doubt the threats of annexation by Trump have hurt the Conservatives thanks to their endorsements from Trump and Elon Musk. 

When it comes to the election, we know working-class youth will not have their interests served by one of Harper’s cabinet ministers or Harper and David Cameron’s central banker. Both Tories and Grits alike seek to place the burden of the capitalist crisis on the backs of the working class, especially the youth. The deepening of the crisis and the willingness of all parties in Parliament to bow down to Trump’s demands for a blank check for militarism blurs the distinction between the parties of monopoly. 

Of those parties that will win seats but cannot form government, we also know what role they seek to play. One just has to look at the governments of BC or Manitoba to realize the NDP has nothing to offer for the working class. The BCNDP is preparing an austerity budget and going after public sector unions, and the leader of the Manitoba NDP has criticised the federal Liberals for not sending striking rail workers back to work soon enough and not meeting Trump’s demands for more military spending. As for the Greens, they call for turning away from social issues—that is, the capital-labour conflict—in favor of ecological demands that are harmless to the business class but decidedly anti-worker. And in Quebec, the Bloc plays the card of nationalist one-upmanship, whether left or right, to satisfy the interests of a section of Quebec’s business class seeking to integrate into the North American imperialist framework through a potential Quebec independence. 

The only option that represents the interests of young workers in this election is the Communist Party and its platform calling for ‘Peace, Jobs, and Democracy’. All our clubs must be mobilised during this campaign to support the candidates and platform of the Party. This election is also a critical time to raise the issue of NATO and our campaign with young workers. We must expose the link between the tariff attacks and Trump’s demand for more militarism. 

The Class Struggle in Canada 

For working class youth, the trends we observed continue. The economic crisis continues to intensify. Wages continue to stagnate as the cost of living soars. All across the country, we observe working-class youth living in substandard housing, working zero hour contracts, piecing together gig work and part time jobs. The drive towards privatization of our public social services has a disproportionate impact on young workers, as the quality of healthcare and education services are deteriorating and yet these essential services are also becoming more inaccessible. 

In the labour movement, the most notable struggles that we must refer to specifically are the strike of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers and the exodus of Amazon from Quebec. 

Amazon, who raked in USD 59.25 billion in profit last year, used every trick in the book to try to prevent the workers at the Laval plant from organising. When the monopoly could not get its way, it decided to close all of its warehouse operations in Quebec. These closures have an immediate impact by laying off thousands, including many young workers, but it is also a clear threat to Amazon workers in the rest of Canada: unionise at your own peril. 

As Young Communists, we know we must raise the call for a public monopoly on parcel deliveries. We saw the Canadian Union of Postal Workers strike last year was not just for better wages or working conditions for the membership, but rather it was on behalf of all working Canadians to have access to this fundamental public service. CUPW has put out its vision of what Canada Post could look like with a mandate to serve the public interest in its platform ‘Delivering Community Power’, which calls for important expansions in services such as postal banking.

In December of last year, the federal government ordered the CUPW back to work, ending the strike action without a contract; just as Conservative and Liberal governments did in 2011 and 2018. We will follow closely, as the Industrial Relations Board imposed an extension of the contract until May of this year. The government used section 107 of the Labour Code, just as they did to rail workers in the summer, to order postal workers back to work without a debate in Parliament. 

The YCL-LJC opposes the draconian elements of the Labour Code such as sections 107 and 108. We continue to call for a Labour Bill of Rights that would include the right to strike. 

It is clear that the Commission that the Industrial Relations Board struck has a mandate to facilitate the move to privatize Canada Post. Already the Commission has ordered CUPW to examine closing post offices and ending door-to-door mail delivery. There was already a mass opposition country-wide to these initiatives in 2015. And closing post offices just means continuing the ‘franchise’ model of contracting out public services to the monopolies such as Shoppers Drug Mart. 

We must expose the game the state is playing on behalf of the ruling class to attack our public social services. We call for public monopolies on all social services to create new full-time quality jobs for young workers, push for democratic control over state expenditures and to raise the social wage.

The CUPW released a statement with a clear analysis about what side of the class conflict the state intervenes in: “This order continues a deeply troubling pattern in which successive federal governments have used back-to-work legislation or, in this case, its arbitrary powers to let employers off the hook from bargaining in good faith. What employer would move on anything when they know the government will bail them out? Once again, the government has chosen capital over workers by taking away our leverage to get a good deal.” We extend our full solidarity to the postal workers. We will be prepared to hit the picket lines and provide all the support we can, whatever the outcome is in May. 

We applaud the stance that some unions such as CUPE have taken in the face of the Trump tariffs. CUPE has called for increasing public ownership of key infrastructure, building publicly owned manufacturing, and guaranteeing the right to a job for young people. 

The power of the Common Front strike of over half a million public sector workers in Quebec in 2023 has provided an exemplary model for the rest of Canada. We welcome the developments in Alberta where the largest public sector unions in the Alberta Federation of Labour as well as Unifor have come to the table together. There are preliminary agreements to attempt to line up the expiration of collective bargaining agreements and already there have been solidarity pickets organised by the public sector unions for the different strikes. 

No doubt the willingness of unions to work together in Alberta is also a response to harsh attacks on social services and unions by the United Conservative Party, especially under the leadership of Danielle Smith. We will follow the developments in Alberta. Our militants in the union will work to proselytize the Common Front model elsewhere in the country. 

As we stated at our last plenum, we must “agitate among the young workers and students for a public monopoly on social services, with universal, not tiered or qualified, access. We call for public monopolies on all social services to create new full-time quality jobs for young workers, push for democratic control over state expenditures and to raise the social wage: education, healthcare, childcare, transportation, culture, recreation, and more.” We Young Communists issue the battle cry: not only boycotts of Amazon, now is the time for socialization! This is our answer to the union busting, mass layoffs, and attacks on our public services by the ruling class.

We know that Trump’s threats of annexation are just a maneuver for further concessions from the Canadian ruling class. It has been clear that the monopolies want to continue to have Canada as a basin for natural resources and electricity production for the U.S. seeking to build up its industrial capacity. 

We know the U.S is committed to building its industrial base as it seeks to compete with China for the summit of the imperialist pyramid. This is best exemplified by the announcement this month that the Taiwan semiconductor company TSMC plans to make a fresh $100 billion investment in the U.S. that involves building five additional plants for chips. One just needs to look at how the silicon monopolies lined up behind Trump during this election to see the strategy of the bourgeois. 

Canada is a mineral-rich land with a large capacity for producing electricity, the U.S. wants these resources for its technological arms race with China in the inter-imperialist struggle. It does not want Canada to develop its own value-added manufacturing capacity, it wants a subservient appendage of the U.S. that will hand over unprocessed minerals, cheap oil, gas, and electricity, and provide a market for U.S.-manufactured commodities. 

We are patriots, but we are not narrow chauvinistic nationalists. We understand that national liberation is tied to the liberation of the class. Our patriotism is a devotion to the interests of the working class. We fight against these attacks from the south with the majority of the working people, not with the maple syrup-drenched monopolies. It is the working class that provides the crucial link between the fight for popular sovereignty and fights for oppressed nations. We continue to fly the flag of proletarian internationalism from coast to coast. 

As Young Communists, we need to put forward the slogan of popular sovereignty. We want real democracy, to us this means putting the commanding heights of the economy and all social services under democratic control, this means empowering those that work not the parasites and vampires. We fight for a dictatorship of the proletariat. 

The International Situation and the Youth 

The End of Neoliberalism

Since the last plenum of our Central Committee the observations we made have continued but we must note many are accelerating. 

The ruling class is becoming more desperate in its attempts to make the working class pay for the crisis of capitalism. As we know, the working class youth are more vulnerable to mass layoffs, a declining social wage, and stagnant wages. Capitalism in its highest stage continues to rely on speeding up the circulation of capital as well as lowering working conditions to increase the rate of exploitation. As Young Communists, we must inject our perspectives and style of work into the various movements, ultimately working to link them together under the leadership of the proletariat against the ruling class and the system that necessitates the exploitation of person by person. 

What is needed now is not the unity of ‘left’ forces but the unity of our class. We need to work to build the youth component of the anti-monopolist, anti-imperialist alliance. We do not fight for a new CERB, we fight for a decent job for all young people. Some on the ‘left’ promise rebates for rent or groceries whereas we seek better jobs with higher wages; for a left of labour not a left of allocations. 

It has become clear to us that in its desperation the ruling class is willing to move past neoliberalism. Trump represents the most crystalised vision of what will replace neoliberalism. But elsewhere we can see models being advanced and implemented: Meloni in Italy, Orban in Hungary, and Milei in Argentina. The global shift away from neoliberalism does not mean that the collapse or defeat of imperialism is imminent. 

We are not cheerleaders for one fraction of the bourgeois over another. When we observe the history of bourgeois rule since its upheaval of the domination of the aristocracy and feudalism, we can see that it has had different ideologies and approaches to statecraft. These different ideologies are a reflection of the economic base and reaction by the ruling class to the crisis of capitalism as well as the balance of forces, the level of organisation and consciousness of the working class. 

As new trade routes and markets were sought during the rise of colonialism, the mercantilism of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, and James Steuart was replaced by the liberalism of Locke, Ricardo, Voltaire, Burke and Smith.

Classical liberalism led to the massive build up of productive forces before and during World War One followed by the wide scale destruction of these new production capacities during the war. This trend led to a massive accumulation of capital which inevitably gave way to the great depression.  

Keynesianism was the bourgeoisie answer to the Great Depression, leading to creation of state monopoly capitalism after the Second World War with the massive investment of the state into new industrial techniques developed during the war. State monopoly capitalism brought about the advent of the IMF, World Bank, GATT, and Bretton Woods. 

The heavy investment into industry by state monopoly capitalism led to an increase in competition between the capitalists. The stagflation crisis of the 70’s led the bourgeois to take drastic measures and brought about the domination of Neoliberalism. The ideological architects of neoliberalism Friedman and his Freshwater School were greatly influenced by Hayek and the Austrian School. Freshwater economics proposed massive cuts to social services and opening up of free trade. The Freshwater school used Pinochet and Chile as a laboratory for their experiments in neoliberalism, breaking the unions, jailing and murdering the communists, and destroying the country. 

Neoliberalism led to free trade deals such as the FTA between Canada and the United States and the creation of the World Trade Organisation in 1995. Despite what Friedman or Hayek may have written, the truth is that Neoliberalism was not a shrinking of the state but rather a reinforcement of state monopoly capitalism. With the state playing an even bigger role in the market, as we have seen with militarism, massive investments into policing, and bailouts and handouts to the largest monopolies. 

The result of the plundering of the world and unheralded accumulation of capital in the most financialised economies caused the 2008 crisis. In 2020 the breakdown of supply chains exposed flaws in the globalised economy with different components of production being thousands of kilometres apart. The rise of China, nearing the summit of the imperialist pyramid and now in competition is causing a reappraisal of neoliberalism. Trump and his acolytes are maneuvering to bring production back to the United States, using protectionist tariffs, and seeking to further integrate North America; with Canada providing electricity and raw resources and Mexico providing oil and manufacturing capacity. The strategy and tactics of the bourgeois may change, but what remains as a fundamental thread throughout is the class division inherent in the mode of production. 

It is the historic mission of our class to dig the grave of capitalism. It is not our historic mission to build a fantastical imaginary new capitalism divorced from its material basis and functioning, somehow able to ensure peace, multilateralism (or multipolarism for that matter), decolonisation or the leadership of the global south or any country not in the ‘west’, artificial intelligence, environmentalism, and or equity seeking outcomes. We laugh at the asinine charlatans that propose a capitalism with a human face. 

We are young revolutionaries in favour of scientific socialism, we want to do our part in building the dictatorship of the proletariat. It is not our role as the youth of the working class to burden ourselves with such distractions being offered by those that might try to disguise themselves as progressive. The sisyphean task of saving capitalism from itself, the task of taming imperialism does not belong to us. 

We are opposed to exploitation as the root of the system. We do not seek to replace the United States’ position on top of the pyramid with a new master, we work to build the collective strength of the proletariat and its allies to topple the whole house of cards.  

As we have written in our program, “Imagine a slave-owner who owned 100 slaves warring against a slave-owner who owned 200 slaves for a more ‘just’ distribution of slaves. Would the question be which side to take, or is the question how to get rid of slavery?” 

Globalised Capitalism is War 

At our last plenum we highlighted Sudan, Ukraine, Palestine and socialist Cuba in our analysis. Again we need to return to the situations in these countries to examine the most vicious onslaught of globalised capitalism. 

Before we put forward our collective analysis, we must express our utmost solidarity with the young workers, students, and masses facing the unconscionable violence that imperialism requires. We salute our comrades who continue their ever more necessary work in the most difficult conditions. 

With Trump once again residing in the White House, socialist Cuba faces the most intense attack on its revolution. We knew the real danger the Cuban people faced when Trump named the gusano Rubio as his Secretary of State. Immediately after taking office, the new U.S. administration put Cuba back on the State Sponsors of Terrorism list. Inclusion on the SSoT exacerbates the existing genocidal economic warfare policy of the blockade. We know we must redouble our efforts in bringing youth and students into the Cuba solidarity effort. The situation is the most urgent it has been in any of our members’ lifetimes. 

We must note the position of solidarity taken by the National Farmers Union at its last convention as an example of the work we need to continue to bring Cuba solidarity into all the popular movements in Canada.  

The inter-imperialist war in Sudan continues to devastate the civilian population. Now the war is threatening to spill over into South Sudan. The street fighting in Khartoum adds a new deadly dimension to this conflict. We must work to make peace and humanitarian aid for the people of Sudan an election issue. 

The imperialist forces fighting for the mineral wealth and fertile land of Sudan are also using other parts of Africa to gain a foothold in their imperialist rivalries and competition. As we have seen in the Sahel, where France is being pushed out while Russia is entering this vacuum. But France tries to maintain its influence, most noticeably by siding with Morocco on the Western Sahara conflict. 

We must also note the so-called progressive government of Spain is also shifting its support to Morocco in a betrayal of the Sahrawi people and the United Nations-mandated obligations of the Spanish state.

In the Middle East, there have been many notable developments since we last met. We continue to look to the Party and the IMCWP for their analysis of this shifting situation. 

We obviously must note the collapse of the Baathists in Syria; usurped by islamo-fascists who have already committed deadly crimes against Alawite civilians, and ceded land to both the zionist project and sultan Erdogan. It is clear that the biggest outcome of the changes in the middle east is Turkey expanding its sphere of influence. 

In Palestine, a ceasefire was reached. Palestinian prisoners and Israeli hostages were exchanged. Now Gaza is once again under fire, with Trump giving the IDF the green light. Trump’s comments that Gaza would become a new Riviera and the insane AI generated video he released on social media gave the zionists carte blanche. The airstrikes and push for new settlements in the West Bank is an extremely dangerous escalation that cannot be ignored. 

All of our clubs continue to be engaged in the Palestine solidarity movement. We must do more centrally to coordinate the efforts of those comrades assigned to this struggle. Our focus in the upcoming election is recognition of Palestinian statehood and concrete work on the BDS campaign. 

At our last plenum, it seemed as if the deadly conflict in Ukraine was reaching an entrenched stalemate. However, the election south of the border has changed the situation. Trump’s policy is not a divergence from Biden’s. Despite the excitation around the circus in the White House featuring a comedian and reality tv host, the United States is taking a pragmatic approach for their interests. What we are seeing is the United States announcing they have reached their objectives: gas is not flowing from the Russian Federation into Europe, European leaders are committing to buying more weapons from the U.S., Putin lost his client in Syria, expended a lot of resources on the war, and is now in a weakened economic position. Now, the U.S. monopolies can reap their spoils of war in the form of the natural resources of Ukraine. 

The Ukrainian economy has been sufficiently privatized and the organised labour movement has been smashed. Now, the U.S. can walk away with the rare earth minerals and refocus its attention to the Asia pivot. The outcry by European and Canadian bourgeois spokespeople is not an ideological defense of western democratic values or whatever manure they will try to sell us with their media apparati. No, the calls for continuing the war is simply because they want a return on their investment. 

Trump is leaving his allies holding the bag while he walks away with the prize. The demands to keep the war going till the last Ukrainian standing is clearly just a call for a share of the booty. 

It is evidently clear what Trump hopes to achieve with his threats of annexing Canada with economic coercion and Panama as well as Greenland with military force. Seeing the global economy slipping from under the feet of U.S. imperialism, he wants Greenland because it has 34 of the 40 strategic raw materials identified by the European Union, and Panama for the geostrategic keystone canal. 

With Canada, Trump aims to cripple any value-added industry and thus any economic independence – in addition to access to previously protected markets such as farming, banking, public services that all are currently facing insidious efforts at privatization by the various provincial governments. But this is not a new development, but a continuation of decades of policy of all the parties in Parliament. This is why our electricity flows North to South, just like our oil exports, 81% of which are exported with 97% of those exports going to the U.S., even as a significant portion of oil consumed in Canada is imported.

Trump wants to impose the full integration of the Canadian economy into the imperialist war economy of the U.S. It is clear it is not just the federal Conservatives who are in favour of capitulation to yankee threats. In his first week in office, Mark Carney announced we would foot the bill for a $6 billion new NORAD missile detection system. NDP leader Jagmeet Singh called for building F-35 jets in Canada, before changing his mind and calling for a new bidding process for fighter jets. Singh went on to say if the NDP was in government, it would increase defence spending to 2% of Canada’s GDP by no later than 2032. 

We will work to further our understanding of the world situation. In particular, we must have a deeper understanding of the role the post-election Canadian government will play in the ‘pivot to Asia’. We must also strengthen our analysis of the divisions and competition between monopolies that will be exposed as the bourgeois react to the crisis of capitalism. We continue to be the stalwarts of proletarian internationalism amongst the youth in Canada and we cannot take that lightly. This is best exemplified in our membership in WFDY, the Canadian Peace Congress, Movement québécois pour la paix, and the Canadian Network on Cuba. 

We have an obligation as the youth to help build the organisation and campaigns of the CPCon and MQP as the members of the World Peace Council in Canada. The most important contribution that we can make is working to bring young workers, students and their democratic organisations into the umbrella of the anti-imperialist peace movement. 

We are exalted by the announcement that finally the World Federation of Democratic Youth will go forward with a long overdue General Assembly to take place in Namibia in May. We support the decision that we took part in at the General Council to hold the General Assembly in the Africa region. We look forward to hearing from our counterparts and sister organisations as well as making our interventions and sharing our perspectives. We remain committed to building the campaigns of WFDY and bringing together the youth of the world under the shared banner of social transformation and ridding the world of imperialism.