The 32nd Ontario Convention of the Communist Party of Canada was held online on November 23rd and 24th, 2024. The following political report was amended and adopted.
The deepening crisis – internationally and across Canada
The 32nd Ontario Convention of the Communist Party of Canada is being convened as the dangers of war and reaction grow and the capitalist economic and environmental crises deepen. As the Central Committee laid out earlier this year:
Since we last met, the international situation has become more acute, with US imperialism’s dangerous drive from Cold Wars to hot wars around the world, including the Middle East, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
As the general crisis of capitalism deepens, specific problems also deepen. Everything is magnified.
The political climate has become increasingly dangerous. Far-right and fascist movements and political parties are growing in many parts of the world, attacking labour and democratic rights, the rights of women, migrants, the 2SLGBTQIA+ community, BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour), and the rights of religious and national minorities, combined with the assault on secularism, science, education, free speech, and assembly. In fact, truth is the first victim of war and reaction…
…Yet despite imperialist violence, voices for peace, environmental justice, democracy, sovereignty, and fundamental change are increasingly being heard.
The impact of global warming has been starkly visible in various regions, including in Canada, where it has intensified environmental calamities. For instance, rising temperatures and prolonged dry spells have led to increasingly severe wildfire seasons, resulting in significant damage to properties and forcing many from their homes. Meanwhile, in the GTA, recent heavy rainfall events have overwhelmed drainage systems, leading to extensive urban flooding. This has damaged homes, disrupted transportation, and placed a considerable strain on these cities’ infrastructure. These climate-related disasters not only cause immediate disruption but also pose enduring economic challenges for the affected communities, highlighting the broader implications of climate change, which are on track to get far worse as the capitalist system clings to fossil fuels and only adopts new technology if substantial profits can be gained.
In the past sixty years, the world has never been closer to nuclear conflict, with an increasingly aggressive imperialist drive to war and a relatively weak global peace movement. Military spending has surged by 20% in the last decade, led by the U.S., whose annual war budget nears a trillion dollars, making up 39% of global military spending. Canada’s military budget hit $36.7 billion last year, with NATO commitments pushing it to at least $70 billion by 2032, funded by coming cuts to healthcare, education, EI, and CPP. Large auto and aerospace manufacturers have branch plants in Ontario and elsewhere which manufacture military equipment such as Light Armoured Vehicles (LAVs) sold to the Canadian, New Zealand, Saudi, and Israeli armies. Canada’s information-technology sector is also highly embedded in the development of surveillance and battlefield deployment technology for NATO armies and the Israeli regime and stands to profit from increased military spending. The surge in military spending driven by imperialist motives diverts crucial resources from addressing the housing and climate crises.
The economic crisis is deepening with layoffs taking place in industries across the board. Job cuts have continued steadily in sectors from technology to manufacturing. The rise in the cost of living exacerbates these economic challenges, particularly with rents and housing prices continuing to climb, placing additional financial pressure on working people. This economic strain is evident in cities across the world, where the housing market has been financialized and ballooned, making affordability a critical issue in capitalist countries around the world.
Globally, there are growing mobilizations against declining living standards and for democratic rights and peace. There have been significant strike waves across various sectors worldwide, where workers demand better pay, job security, and improved working conditions. In Canada, 2023 saw the most days lost to strikes since 1986. Massive solidarity movements have arisen to protest the imperialist-backed genocide of the Palestinian people. Ontario is certainly no exception.
It is the important task of Ontario’s 32nd Convention to apply the political line set out by the Central Convention and Central Committee to the particular manifestations of the capitalist crisis in Ontario. In addition to organizing the Party in Ontario to carry out the international and Canada-wide initiatives set by the Central Party, our Convention must play an important role in discussing and analysing the nature of the corporate attack in Ontario to give direction to the incoming Provincial Committee and our clubs and members across the province.
The nature of the Ford government
In some ways, the Progressive Conservative Party at Queen’s Park is comparable to other provincial governments with conservatives currently in power in seven of ten provinces. However, as the government of the largest provincial economy in the country, the Ford government is especially dangerous in advancing the corporate agenda and plays a leading role in some key areas.
The Ford government in Ontario reflects and serves the interests of the province’s most aggressive sections of capital. Their agenda includes reducing taxes for corporations and the wealthy, weakening labour rights, and defunding and privatizing social services, health, and education. This approach boosts corporate profits while further impoverishing the working class. Ford’s administration has consistently undermined labour, student movements, municipalities, environmental protections, advocacy groups, and Indigenous rights, ignoring legal and bourgeois democratic norms to consolidate power and favour corporate interests. Examples include providing businesses more tax loopholes; suppression of labour rights through legislation like Bills 124 and 28; significant education funding cuts; historic healthcare privatization schemes; the attempt to deliver protected lands in the Greenbelt to corporate developers; and the use of the notwithstanding clause to override court decisions.
While the Ford government’s broader strategy to empower corporate interests while eroding protections and support systems for working people is not unique, its willingness to ignore democratic norms has set a particularly dangerous precedent that cannot be allowed to stand. The Ford government is attacking democratic rights with the Strong Mayors Act, Bill 39 (Better Municipal Governance Act, 2022). Originally planned for Toronto and Ottawa, the Ford government has now given those powers to many other municipal mayors. The mayor, with only one-third of the councillors, could remove environmental policies and regulations to allow developers to buy land and evict tenants to develop unaffordable homes to meet the Ford government’s 1.5 million target by 2030.
The corporate attack on wages and living standards in Ontario
The steep decline in working people’s standard of living continues in Ontario. With core inflation at 3.9% in 2023, prices on basic necessities such as food, fuel, and rent are soaring, while wages fall behind. The price of a food basket rose 7.8%, while food insecurity rose and food banks struggled to keep up with demand. Children make up 33% of food bank users while representing only 20% of the population, and seniors represent 8% of food bank users, with their rate of increase far outpacing other age groups. Meanwhile, Loblaw’s profits jumped by nearly 10% to $2.5 billion last year.
The skyrocketing cost of housing is the largest factor in the decline of working-class living standards. Bank of Canada interest rates around 5% are causing mortgage payments to increase by up to $1,000 more per month. This has increased bank profits; RBC brought in $41.6 billion in gross profits, and TD brought in $37.4 billion.
The Bank of Canada continues to keep interest rates relatively high. This is, as Bank of Canada Governor Tiff Macklem has admitted, a deliberate move to increase unemployment and drive down wages in response to gains won by increasingly militant strike struggles. Unemployment has risen to 6.6% in 2024 from 5.1% in 2023, and young people are bearing the brunt, with youth unemployment sharply increasing to 14.5% in 2024 from 11.2% in 2023. Wage settlements went up to 3.7% in 2023; however, this is still below 2023 inflation after trailing far behind inflation in 2022 and remains far below increased costs of basic necessities.
In Ontario, the Ford government continues to do its best to restrain wages despite losing important legal battles overturning its 2019 wage restraint legislation, Bill 124. The legacy of Bill 124 continues to hurt the working class in Ontario, which robbed over one million public sector workers of their right to free collective bargaining as well as damaging Ontario’s public services. Ontario’s Financial Accountability Office estimates that the Bill robbed broader public sector workers of a collective $2.1 billion in wages.
Although recent settlements have provided back-pay, it has been uneven and inadequate. For example, healthcare, which continues to struggle to maintain and build necessary staffing levels to overcome emergency room closures and record wait-times, saw hospital workers’ wages decrease from $1.41 less than the all-industry average in 2017 to $4.41 behind the all-industry average in 2023.
Attacks on public sector workers in general have disproportionately affected women, who comprise a majority of workers in the sector. However, this impact becomes especially lopsided in the Tories’ two favoured targets: public education (where 75% of teachers and 70% of education workers identify as women) and healthcare (in which an estimated 80% of workers are women). The gender wage gap in Ontario has been increased by the Ford government as part of a targeted strategy of wage repression against female-dominated, public sector jobs. In 2018, when Ford was elected, women earned 88 cents for every dollar made by men, compared to 87.2 cents in 2023. The impacts of these attacks on women’s equality have an enormous cascading effect through to retirement. According to Stats Canada, across Canada, 21% of elderly women live in poverty.
Meanwhile, the Ford government has kept social assistance rates far below the poverty line. Ford has failed to increase financial aid for Ontario Works recipients, leaving them sinking farther into poverty with rising costs. The social assistance program allocates $642 per month for shelter and $360 for basic needs to a single parent with one child, amounts that have not changed since Premier Ford’s tenure began in 2018. This stagnation is an attack on Ontario’s most vulnerable residents and is a key factor in maintaining the huge reserve army of desperate working people.
The Province, like its federal counterparts, has opened the floodgates for labour import schemes that allow employers to exploit these workers, drive down wages, and circumvent labour regulations won by workers through struggle, while also rewarding parasitic immigration recruiters and consultants. According to Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC) data, employers were cleared to hire 239,646 foreign workers under the temporary foreign worker programs (TFWP) in 2023 – a 220% increase from 2018. Over 31% of these were destined for Ontario, which saw a 165% increase in such workers from the previous two years. A UN report released in July 2024 found that temporary foreign workers struggle to access health care in Canada.
Migrant workers as a whole are now being scapegoated for the worsening economic situation of many working families over these last years. As a response, Ottawa has placed stricter caps on the number of temporary foreign workers per employer, tightened from a maximum of 20% to a maximum of 10% (although this will not apply to health care, construction, and food service sectors).
The Doug Ford government’s policies on the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP) have significantly impacted people with disabilities, pushing many into even deeper poverty. Despite an inflationary increase of 6.5% in 2023, which raised the maximum monthly benefit for a single person to $1,308, this amount remains far below the poverty line – in fact, $752 short – leaving recipients struggling to cover basic needs such as housing, food, and healthcare, which are on average even higher costs for people with disabilities compared to people without disabilities. Consequently, many people with disabilities continue to live in severe financial insecurity, highlighting the need for social assistance rates to provide a livable guaranteed annual income to ensure a dignified standard of living.
The failure of the market to deliver housing
Finance capital in housing has created Ontario’s absurd contrast of empty condominiums while workers are unable to obtain housing and basic needs. Meanwhile, bank profit margins have climbed as high as 30%. This is not just a correlation. The housing crisis directly benefits banks at the expense of workers. Ontario has the highest rate of housing insecurity in Canada. A 2023 study by the Ontario Association of Municipalities showed that 45% of tenant households pay more than 30% of their income on rent. Homeowners are also struggling to keep up with skyrocketing housing costs, with the average single-family home selling for $950,000 in Ontario.
Thirty percent of Ontarians rent their homes (in Toronto, the figure is nearly 50%). Over the last decade, the number of those renting in the province has increased at double the rate of home ownership. This indicates an overall increase in housing precarity, a burden that is over-represented in younger generations.
The monopolization and financialization of housing by corporate landlords is taking place alongside the rise of cruel new tactics to find loopholes in rent control legislation, such as renovictions. Canada’s largest 25 financial landlords, which include Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs), now own 20% of the country’s private, purpose-built apartments. This trend highlights the increasing financialization of the housing market, where rental properties are viewed primarily as investment vehicles, leading to higher rents and decreased affordability for tenants. The housing crisis is a stark example of how an extremely profitable industry can totally fail in meeting the needs of working people and their families.
In 2023, rents grew 4.9% annually to an average of $2,456, with one-bedroom rents up 5.1% to an average of $2,239 across the province. This is while rent control was set at 2.5% in 2023. That rents increased at twice the rate of the supposed cap shows the total inadequacy of the current rent control regime, which has many loopholes. The sky’s the limit on any rental units first occupied after 2018, thanks to the Ford government lifting rent controls on new units when it took office. The policy of vacancy decontrol on all units means that there is a growing incentive for landlords to evict tenants, often through nefarious means, to get around the limited rent control that does apply.
The Ford government has promised tenants very little and instead has focused on home ownership. The fact that home ownership has become a pipedream for the vast majority of the working class over the last twenty-five years, especially in the GTA, is met with one answer: supply. What kind of supply, whether it is at all affordable or whether this new development is creating livable cities and environmental sustainability, is ignored. Ontario’s profit-driven land use policies are also putting our food sovereignty in danger as valuable farmland is sold off to create quick profits for developers.
To the Ford Conservatives, largely financed by developers, the supply of housing must only be determined by the development industry, and they have thus focused on removing municipal and provincial regulations on the industry. As house prices finally decrease slightly and sales reach new lows not seen for more than twenty years, the total inability of the private sector to provide adequate housing has been laid bare.
The government is now partway through its third year of a ten-year plan to build 1.5 million new homes. The plan included targets of 150,000 per year with quotas assigned to municipalities. The last two years have failed to reach even two-thirds of the target, with construction this year slowing to a pace not seen since 2018. Only 19 of the 50 largest municipalities in Ontario hit the new home targets assigned to them. Failing to meet those targets means that the majority of these cities will not get access to the $1.2 billion fund to help cover costs of housing-related infrastructure, further exacerbating the crisis.
Deregulating development has not led to an increase in affordable housing supply, and it is clear that market factors such as housing sales, interest rates, labour, and construction material costs are the determining factors in for-profit developers building an adequate supply. Worse still, developers are asking for zoning and planning approvals to push up the value of their land without building housing, to flip the land as a form of speculation. This is the logic of the market.
Instead, Ontario needs to treat housing as a public utility, building publicly owned housing and providing it on the basis of need. Only then can the right to decent housing be realized in the province, with housing as a human right. Focusing on Ontarians who are most in need of housing and ensuring mass construction takes place will have the greatest impact on bringing down rents. There is a 14-year, 80,000-household-long waitlist for subsidized housing in the city of Toronto. Mayor Olivia Chow’s plan to build 65,000 “affordable” units by 2031 falls far short, with only 6,500 being actual Rent-Geared-to-Income (RGI) units. This is not just a Toronto problem. Ottawa has a five-year waiting list, Kingston a more than six-year wait, and Hamilton an eight-year wait for a subsidized one-bedroom. As of December 2022, 176,804 households were waiting across the province.
The Ontario government is shamefully neglecting the dire situation of homelessness, with 234,000 people living without stable housing according to the Housing Ministry’s own document. Concurrent with the housing crisis is the mental health, addiction, and opioid crisis. Among street homeless people, over 30% live with addictions, and the opioid crisis has seen staggering and increasing death rates. In 2021, one in six people who died from an overdose were unhoused people. The government’s failure to acknowledge and act on these alarming numbers is a blatant disregard for Ontario’s most vulnerable. The decision to underfund supportive and emergency housing, while cutting funding to safe consumption sites, also means very poor health outcomes and even death, while increasing pressures for this growing population and straining emergency health services, which are also underfunded.
The province’s shelter system is 97% full, with a rising number of seniors seeking emergency shelter. There are 27,000 adults with a developmental disability waiting for residential supports and services, according to the Ministry’s internal documents. People experiencing acute homelessness or being turned away from over-capacity shelters have no choice but to seek shelter in a tent at one of the 1400 encampments that have grown across the province. Many municipalities are seeing this for the first time and have turned to the criminalization of homelessness as a doomed strategy. Encampments have appeared in cities which have not seen them before. While encampments should not be evicted and residents in them harassed, they are not a solution to the homelessness crisis. Emergency shelters need to be expanded immediately, along with social and supportive housing.
It has never been more obvious that we need an emergency social housing construction program across Ontario. This would include building 200,000 new, publicly owned, social housing RGI units, along with upgrading and retrofitting existing units, as well as building 550,000 units of affordable housing; 15,000 units of transitional housing (to support people leaving situations of domestic violence, incarceration, homelessness, or shelters); and maintaining levels of affordable housing based on need. Furthermore, Ontario needs legislated rent rollbacks and controls for all renters to ensure no one has to pay more than 20% of their income on housing.
The corporate theft of publicly owned assets
Since its election in 2018, the Ford government has been characterized by an especially aggressive privatization agenda, which is nothing less than the organized theft of public services and assets in Ontario.
In late 2022, the Ontario government announced the expansion of private health clinics, contradicting their earlier election promise. This was enabled by Bill 60, facilitating the privatization of hospital services and reducing public oversight. Private clinics often result in extra charges, unnecessary upselling of procedures, and increased government expenditure. It was revealed in late 2023 that the government had paid a private clinic 249% the rate they pay public hospitals to perform cataract surgeries. For knee surgeries, the government paid the same clinic between 239% and 317% of the cost to hospitals. Bill 60 also introduces lesser-skilled, lower-waged health workers, potentially degrading healthcare quality and affecting wages, particularly for women, who make up 80% of healthcare workers. The expansion of private clinics also means these clinics will compete for staff from the public sector, which is already experiencing a healthcare worker staffing crisis.
Corporate interests are exploiting the healthcare capacity crisis, with several areas like dental, pharmaceuticals, and vision already heavily privatized. The privatization push is evident in companies like Loblaw, which has expanded into the health sector. This trend mirrors the US, where a dominant corporate health sector has led to high medical costs and poor health outcomes.
Privatization has further strained public healthcare resources, with underfunding and privatization being interlinked issues. The Ontario Health Coalition highlighted this in a referendum campaign in 2023 where nearly 400,000 Ontarians (98% of those who voted) overwhelmingly opposed privatization. The shift to private services not only increases costs but also reduces the quality and accessibility of healthcare for the public.
Another key area where the Ford government has expanded privatization is in alcohol sales. Privatization of the LCBO will mean a major loss in revenue, resulting in more severe cuts to health, education, and public services. In late 2023, the Conservative government announced that grocery stores, big box stores, and convenience stores would be permitted to sell beer, cider, wine, and premixed cocktails without restrictions starting in January 2026. This was done by announcing that the agreement with the brewer monopoly-owned Beer Store would expire, which limited where beer could be sold in Ontario, also clearing the path to further privatize LCBO sales.
Even this pace of privatization of alcohol sales is insufficient for the capitalist ruling class. The Ford government announced in June that it would pay out $225 million in public funds to the international brewery monopolies for the contract to expire this year and allow Ontario’s corporate stores to start selling alcohol earlier.
Under the guise of choice and convenience, the province is undermining social responsibility, decent union jobs, and a significant source of public revenue that is used to finance public services, such as public health programs which partially mitigate the negative effects of alcohol addiction. The sell-off will benefit the retail monopolies, in particular Loblaw and Circle K, an industry the government has consistently supported with a variety of policies at the expense of the public.
A further example of the Ford Regime’s cheapening of social norms, gouging of working people, and enriching corporate friends is its deliberate encouragement of gambling and gambling culture. In April 2022, single-game sports betting was legalized in Ontario – the only province to do so. Ontario now ranks among the five largest iGaming jurisdictions in North America. True to political form, they have not restricted wagering to the publicly owned Ontario Lottery and Gaming but have thrown it open to private companies. There are now well over a million active player accounts in the province, with their average spend $250 a month; that works out to $250 million a month, or $3 billion per year. Inevitably, the social costs – addiction, impoverishment, family breakups, crime – are enormous. But the Ontario government doesn’t care because it takes 20% of the profits while enriching another segment of the fat cats who bankroll its campaigns.
The Ford government’s decision to relocate the Ontario Science Centre and redevelop Ontario Place are clear examples of privatizing public spaces to benefit developers and businesses. The plan involves moving the Science Centre to a smaller location at Ontario Place and converting the current site into a residential and commercial area. This bold move by the government has shown that despite the retreat on dismantling the Greenbelt, developers are still calling the shots in Ontario.
Ontario Place, originally a public recreational area, will see significant changes, including a luxury spa and entertainment complex operated by private entities. The involvement of private enterprises like the Therme Group, which will operate the spa, highlights the profit-oriented nature of the redevelopment. The 95-year lease given to the Therme group by the province contains many considerations not afforded to local residents, such as only requiring an increase in rental payments if revenues rise and keeping payments low in years when revenues are low. The province has also promised to pay Therme Group $5/day for every parking space not ready by 2030.
The Ford government’s rationale for closing the Ontario Science Centre was full of holes and recognized as such by much of the public. The plan to relocate the Science Centre to Ontario Place was a tactic to facilitate lucrative real estate projects at the expense of a long-standing educational institution.
The rollout of the federal daycare program in Ontario is another example where the Ford government has ensured the preservation of a costly and totally inadequate system which relies heavily on the private sector. Despite much public fanfare when it was announced in April 2021, more than three years later the federal government’s “$10-per-day” childcare plan has become a sad joke. Much, but not all, of the blame rests with Doug Ford and other right-wing premiers who have insisted on heavy involvement of for-profit operators. Lengthy waitlists exist across the province, and there is still a serious staffing shortage. Trudeau’s promise to create 250,000 new spaces by 2026 costing an average of $10 a day was shown to be impossible to deliver through a privatized system.
Now, even the spaces that exist that have signed on to the funding to cut costs are at risk of closing. The Ontario government has pegged replacement funding for the daycares to cut fees by half of what daycares were charging in March 2022, with annual increases far below inflationary pressures. The rapid rise in the cost of living and the need to improve the pay of child-care staff to cope with a severe shortage of workers and pay decent wages in the sector have far exceeded those increases, threatening many daycare centres with closure. Adequate funding and a fully public system of daycare centres with no user fees is what is necessary to make daycare truly accessible to working families.
Doug Ford’s cuts to education in Ontario have significantly impacted children’s learning and the quality of schools. Since Ford’s election in 2018, education funding has been drastically reduced. The 2019 provincial budget cut $1 billion from education over four years, leading to larger class sizes and fewer resources. The Ford government is actively encouraging the privatization of public education in Ontario through various measures. By implementing substantial budget cuts and increasing class sizes, the government has strained the public education system, making it less effective and less attractive. Additionally, Ford’s administration has promoted the expansion of e-learning and private educational options, which often lack the regulatory oversight and standards of public schools. These moves are seen as paving the way for private entities to play a larger role in providing education services. Most recently, the de-streaming of high school classes has meant that more students are seeking out extra tutoring. While streaming led to a two-tiered education model which often resulted in racist and class-based outcomes in education, de-streaming has meant that some students have a lot of material to catch up on, which will lead to a higher failure rate and an expansion of private tutoring if proper supports are not put in place in the public system.
The story is the same in post-secondary education, where the government has moved towards a “performance-based” funding model. This market-based performance funding ties 60% of all funding to arbitrary “skills and job” outcomes, allowing for public funds to be allocated more towards education that produces workers for particular industries or towards the creation of profitable intellectual property for corporations. This is greatly accelerating the corporatization of post-secondary education.
In 2019, the Ford government cut a grant system that provided nearly free education for low-income students, froze post-secondary funding, and reduced domestic tuition fees by 10%. To compensate, they launched a program to attract international students, whose tuition fees are significantly higher. They also permitted public colleges to partner with private entities to establish “satellite campuses” in the GTA, often located in strip malls and offering inferior facilities. As a result, Ontario became central to the expansion of this process throughout the country, with just 10 Ontario colleges accounting for nearly 30% of all Canadian study permits issued in the last three years.
International students face exploitation by education brokers, academic institutions demanding high tuition, and employers offering precarious and often illegal working conditions. Many students will not achieve their desired permanent residency, especially with rising unemployment. While post-secondary institutions, employers, and governments benefit from low-wage, high-skilled labour and high tuition fees, the influx strained housing and infrastructure, while also allowing both the federal and provincial government to scapegoat international students for the housing crisis. The federal government has imposed a cap on study permit applications, which will likely decrease international student numbers by 50% in Ontario and result in a $1.5 billion loss in tuition revenue. Unless revenue from international student fees is replaced with comprehensive public funding, further cuts may potentially lead to privatization of post-secondary education.
A major tactic for privatization that the Ford government is using is not the outright takeover of public services by the private sector but the expansion of already-private sections of public services. This includes the necessary expansion of private parts of the healthcare sector because of the ageing demographics in Ontario, most notably long-term care and home care. Transit is another area that is seeing covert privatization. The creation of the Ontario Line in Toronto by Metrolinx was originally proposed as an alternative to a straightforward expansion of the TTC. While Metrolinx is public, its mandate is to use Public Private Partnerships (P3s) in the development of transit infrastructure. It is reasonable to assume that Toronto’s experience with P3s will be similar to the experience of Ottawa’s Light Rail Transit (LRT), which has become a boondoggle. The Ottawa LRT has proven extremely unreliable with numerous breakdowns in service while Ottawa pays $5 million a month to the Rideau Transit Group, a private consortium. The expansion of P3s in this and other sectors means massive public expenses, massive private profits, and dysfunctional services.
Development for profit or development for people and the planet?
The Ford government, supported by the Federal government, is placing large bets on positioning Ontario as a start-to-finish location for the manufacture of electric vehicles (EV), from mining battery materials to final assembly. This new “green” industrial policy amounts to public handouts to profitable corporations. The risk is huge, as investor confidence in EVs has already faltered, causing Umicore to halt its $2.8 billion battery-material manufacturing plant and Ford to delay its Oakville EV plant by two years. Even if these bets do pan out, the development that Ford is pushing will come at the expense of workers, public spending, the environment, and Indigenous sovereignty.
Ontario and the Federal government have pledged tens of billions of dollars to Stellantis, Volkswagen, Ford, and Honda to build EV and EV battery plants in Windsor, Alliston, Oakville, and St. Thomas. The Volkswagen plant is expected to cost the governments $14 billion in tax subsidies, double what Volkswagen is investing in the facility. According to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, it will take 20 years for the federal and Ontario governments to break even on the $28 billion in public subsidies for the Volkswagen and Stellantis subsidies alone. Honda will receive $5 billion in public funds, and Ford will receive $590 million.
This level of investment puts the policies of state monopoly capitalism on full display. It also demonstrates that sections of capital are moving towards supposedly “green” investment; however, it shows the limits and the continued environmental devastation that will take place in the name of this transition. The Biden administration’s “Inflation Reduction Act” similarly provided billions to industry to transition to supposedly green technology. This has led to Canada offering the same massive handouts of public funds as multinational automakers shop for the best deal. This race to the bottom once again demonstrates the need to get out of free trade deals and develop Canada’s own publicly owned industry. This would necessarily include a democratically controlled and operated light vehicle industry by putting the largest auto corporations under public ownership, to produce electric cars, light industrial vehicles, and mass public transit.
As long as Ontario has a relatively geographically dispersed population, personal cars will likely continue to be necessary for a large section of the population; however, quality mass public transit is the truly sustainable form of transportation of the future. This necessarily includes the need to expand inter-city mass transit through the development of a high-speed rail system and the nationalization of abandoned bus infrastructure, such as Greyhound, and the creation of a province-wide public inter-city bus system. The expansion of rail, in particular, would provide at least as many jobs as the development of climate-destroying pipelines, which are currently being advanced by governments across the country. A development model based on the continued expansion of privately-owned cars, even if they are electric, will continue to expand environmentally damaging extractive industries as well as the roads and infrastructure for massive amounts of traffic. Instead, we can see that the Ford government is doubling down on cars with this year’s new “Get It Done Act,” which guts environmental assessment regulations to force through new highways, such as Highway 413 and the Bradford Bypass. A strong fightback by those concerned with its environmental impact is growing.
Much of the mining for EV battery materials would take place on Indigenous lands in Northern Ontario, called the Ring of Fire, which threatens their sovereignty. The large spike in mining claims on Indigenous lands in the North sidesteps the rights laid out in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). The First Nations Land Defence Alliance has been formed by five First Nations to fight Ontario’s facilitation of mining companies’ theft of Indigenous land. In the summer of 2024, the Grassy Narrows First Nation took the Province to court, claiming that the government has a duty to consult and obtain informed consent before registering mining claims on its territory. It is seeking an order that would halt all current projects and could require the province to rescind thousands of existing mining claims. In Grassy Narrows, 90% of the community show signs of mercury poisoning from pulp and paper mills. The Federal and Ontario governments have not cleaned the poisoned rivers even though they have had fifty years to do so. Attawapiskat is another community that has repeatedly had to declare emergencies while a lucrative diamond mine close by has made massive profits. Neskantaga First Nation in northern Ontario has been under a boil water advisory for nearly 30 years. There are active boil water advisories in 19 First Nations communities, with most being in Northern Ontario. In addition to EV battery materials being found on Indigenous territories, lithium and other materials are found in countries whose peoples are struggling to prevent imperialism from stealing these resources, including from mining companies headquartered in Canada.
In addition to the big financial favours lavished on mining, smelting, and manufacturing corporations, Ford’s Conservatives have rolled out the welcome mat for land developers and highway construction companies. The scandal over the GTA Greenbelt two years ago has proven to be a minor bump in their road. Heartened by his success in driving commuter and transport highways through agricultural and environmentally sensitive lands, Ford has now concocted an asphalt-tinged fantasy of building tunnel roads under towns. His bogus mantra of “getting shovels in the ground” masks a transfer of billions of taxpayer dollars into the pockets of his corporate backers.
Ontario Tories are staking their political bets on car owners, stirring up hostility to federal gas and carbon taxes, and using populist gimmicks like eliminating vehicle sticker fees. The so-called “war on the car” has become a dog-whistle to arouse a sense of grievance and entitlement among motorists, pitting them against less affluent city-dwellers who depend upon – and are more concerned about – public transit, pedestrian safety, bicycles, parks, etc. The latest example is their use of the bike lane issue (surely a matter for municipal, even parochial attention; hardly Provincial) as a handy stick with which to poke the bear.
Political landscape at Queen’s Park
There is no question that the Ford Conservatives are the biggest danger to working people in Ontario. While it was the Liberals who laid much of the groundwork – partly through their own programs and partly by building on the foundation laid by the Harris/Eves Conservatives before them – this is a government that has accelerated the austerity agenda and is more willing to run roughshod over democratic rights, as evidenced by their repeated willingness to use the notwithstanding clause.
The Conservatives’ first government saw growing opposition in 2019 and unpopularity then and later when their many crimes against public health measures were exposed during the pandemic. Nevertheless, the 2022 election saw the Ford Tories returned to Queen’s Park with an increased majority of seats. However, the Conservatives received 400,000 fewer votes than in 2018, with the support of only 18% of eligible voters. This is partly because the 2022 elections had the lowest voter turnout in Ontario’s history.
Ford was handed re-election by big business, who were firmly united, aided by an ineffective opposition whose weak reformist proposals and narrow electoral strategies failed to garner support. The unity of big business behind the more aggressive Conservative agenda in Ontario was seen in the massive fundraising dollars that went into the party, as well as in the corporate media, which refused to seriously challenge the record of the Ford government in the lead-up to the election.
This remarkable unity behind the Ford government can be clearly seen by the ongoing disparity in fundraising between the Ford Conservatives and the other parties, especially the Ontario Liberal Party, which is capital’s other major political party in Ontario. In 2023, the Ontario PCs fundraised a $9 million surplus in party coffers. This surplus was four times the surplus of the NDP, which was $2.2 million, and 3.5 times the Liberals’ surplus of $2.6 million. In early 2023, Doug Ford presided over a banquet fundraiser that raised an astounding $3.75 million – one of the most successful political fundraisers in Canadian history. The event attracted significant attendance from business leaders and executives primarily from the real estate, construction, and finance sectors. While the major sections of capital behind Ford have been the development industry and retail monopolies, as clearly shown by his political priorities which benefit these sectors in particular, capital as a whole in Ontario does not think that it needs to change horses.
Because of the unity of business behind Ford, and because the Conservatives federally have been successful in getting many Canadians to blame their increasing impoverishment on the Trudeau Liberals, the Ford Conservatives are considering calling a snap election next Spring. Since 1963, the party that won in all but one of the last 17 Ontario elections was different from the party in power federally at the time. Ensuring that a Provincial election occurs before the Fall 2025 federal election would allow Ford to use the federal Liberals as a scapegoat, and the political fundraising terrain gives him the advantage. The probability of an early election speculation ramped up when Ford announced plans to allow convenience stores to sell beer, wine, and ready-to-drink cocktails in September 2024, when it was previously set to take place in 2026.
Part of corporate Ontario’s unity with the Ford government stems from an ineffective opposition at Queen’s Park, which has allowed the Conservatives a good deal of success in delivering major legislative changes that have benefited corporate Ontario. The Conservatives have faced some dips in the polls, especially around the Greenbelt scandal; however, they have remained in majority government territory most of the time over the last two years. The Ontario NDP, although it has 19 more seats than the Liberals, has failed to consolidate Liberal voters behind them. It doesn’t help that the corporate media continues to give the Liberals disproportionate airtime; however, a major factor is that the NDP has mounted a weak reformist opposition to the Conservatives. The long-term strategy for the ONDP is to successfully replace the Liberal Party in Ontario as a party of big business, as they have done in Western Canada. Wanting to replace the Liberals, while not being the Liberal party, has meant that business has not adopted the NDP as theirs, and working-class Ontarians have not been inspired to support the ONDP. The Liberals have led the NDP by 3-8% since Bonnie Crombie was elected leader of the Liberals in late 2023.
Despite the apparent strength of the Ford government in terms of fundraising and polling relative to the other parties, working people should take heart that there have been several times since 2018 where the Ford government has been forced to back down and reverse course, most notably with the Greenbelt development and the draconian anti-labour legislation brought in against education workers in 2022. We should remember that only 18% of voters elected this government and, according to a recent Angus Reid poll, only Francois Legault and Blaine Higgs are less popular Premiers across Canada. While business is united behind Ford, the vast majority of working people in Ontario can be brought into the fight.
So far, the opposition parties have not tried to mobilize working people against the Ford government because they do not want to put forward the kind of agenda which would unite the working class and allies against the corporate agenda.
Very few have been fooled by Bonnie Crombie thus far, who also speaks for the development industry at Queen’s Park. We can only expect continuity from the Liberal party, who did not live up to their promise of reversing most of the cuts of the Harris years. Instead, they enforced fifteen years of austerity through a slow-boil strategy. The austerity-by-attrition approach of the Liberals may seem preferable to the Conservative slash-and-burn strategy of the current government; however, the working class can afford neither, and a sharp break with corporate power is necessary to address the deep capitalist crises we are currently facing.
While speaking up against privatization of health care and education cuts, the New Democrats are not offering an alternative program that challenges corporate power. The ONDP have rejected mass labour and people’s mobilization and instead have tried to position themselves as more responsible stewards of capitalism with a human face.
More fundamentally, the social democratic roots of the NDP have always been based on class compromise as opposed to class struggle. They have abandoned some of the traditional demands of social democracy, even if much of their labour base still supports these policies. Social democracy’s decades-long shift from a working-class base to the middle strata, including professionals and the petty bourgeoisie, has caused significant rifts within the party, and these have echoed to some extent into the labour movement. Tensions have built between the party’s right-wing leadership and its left-leaning members and supporters. These internal conflicts have spilled over into the labour movement, as can be seen with the expulsion of MPP Sarah Jama, which was a catalyst for bringing divisions within the NDP and labour into the open.
What is necessary is not a return to a less compromised social democratic party, but a genuine People’s Coalition built through struggle in the streets and workplaces with a parliamentary reflection. Only the extra-parliamentary struggle can be decisive in stopping the corporate agenda at Queen’s Park at this juncture. Parliamentary representation of a People’s Coalition is very different from what social democracy advances, where extra-parliamentary struggle tails the parliamentary struggle.
A People’s Coalition would be a broad, democratic alliance led by the working class to challenge monopoly power and promote public ownership and job creation, and fight for policies that can raise wages and living standards, take action to combat the climate and housing crises, and expand health, education, democracy, and equality. This would be a coalition of movements whose interests collide with monopoly capitalism.
The working class must take action now to demand a fundamental break from corporate austerity and to win progressive reforms such as those in the Communist Party’s People’s Alternative for Ontario.
Unite and fight!
The good news is that people are fighting and there have been inspiring mobilizations and struggles against the corporate agenda across the province since our last Ontario Convention. However, much more must be done in the labour and peoples’ movements to link struggles, build unity, and mass escalating action to win a People’s Agenda.
We should remember that we have seen the seeds of mass action and the unity necessary to take on this government in the recent past. We only need to look to February 21st, 2020, when we saw two million students out of class as close to two hundred thousand teachers and other education workers held a coordinated strike. Members of ETFO, OSSTF, the Ontario English Catholic Teachers Association (OECTA), and l’Association des enseignantes et des enseignants franco-ontariens (AEFO) were all off the job together for the first time since 1997, in a show of nearly unprecedented unity. Sadly, this major strike was dampened by the onset of the pandemic.
However, just after the Ford government’s second election, we saw another major strike force the Conservatives to retreat. Education workers geared up for a fight over their low pay and the massive rise in the cost of living, especially food, fuel, and rent during the fall of 2022. The Ford government’s strategy was to crush education workers and break the union in a show of force. The government introduced Bill 28 in an unprecedented attempt to eliminate workers’ right to strike and bargain freely and impose a significant wage cut after inflation. The legislation used the “notwithstanding clause” embedded in the Constitution as a loophole to try and circumvent labour rights. This was the first time in Canadian history that the notwithstanding clause had been used to attack labour rights. Fortunately, a wildcat strike by the education workers and the massive and united support from labour – with unions across Canada in both the public and private sectors, including Unifor – threatening a general strike, forced Ford to withdraw Bill 28 in its entirety and limp back to the bargaining table.
These are two excellent examples that show it is possible for labour to engage in mass action to defend its rights; however, it will take more agitation and organization for an offensive class struggle approach in the labour movement. The ongoing strike wave is also a reason to be optimistic. In 2023, more than 2.5 million workdays were lost due to work stoppages across the country. This is the highest level since at least 2005. The major driver of this strike wave is clearly the inflationary attack on wages and the skyrocketing cost of living combined with blatant corporate profiteering. While inflation has come down from its 2022 peak, the cost of living crisis continues, and we can safely say the strike wave is not over. For the first time in decades, unions are fighting for COLA clauses, and the average wage settlements have reached levels not seen in 30 years. However, they are still below recent inflation levels.
A number of recent high-profile strikes started with members voting down tentative agreements. Clearly, much of the labour movement leadership is not prepared to lead these battles.
Shamefully, several building trades unions endorsed and campaigned for the Conservatives in 2022. Their support was rooted in the view that Ford would encourage construction – largely by supporting private developers over Indigenous, workers’, or environmental interests. It marked a level of opportunism among construction union leaders, which flew in the face of class consciousness, labour solidarity, or community and social interests.
While most affiliates and labour federations are still dominated by right-wing social democratic leadership, there is more effort being made to bring together left caucuses both at conventions and in between them on the basis of building independent labour political action. The right must be isolated and defeated in the trade union movement by winning the centre to the left. We must counterpose this approach of winning the centre with the ultra-leftist approach of some, which effectively isolates the left, allows the right to masquerade as centrist, and abandons the centre to the right wing. Unity will be won on a class struggle basis that builds solidarity and mass action. Caucuses need to involve both grassroots labour activists and leadership who are committed to class struggle positions. Left caucuses also need to be built at the Labour Council, affiliate, and local level.
In addition to the objective conditions driving labour militancy, there have been some positive subjective factors in the leadership of the trade union movement that helped make this possible. This includes changes of leadership in the OFL, Unifor, and OPSEU in recent years to leaders that have more of a social unionist perspective.
With the promise of more important strikes around the corner, there is reason to be hopeful that we can link up strike struggles with the broader political necessity of building labour action against the Ford government and the corporate agenda. The Ontario Public Sector Employees’ Union (OPSEU) LCBO strike showed the power of labour unions combining shop-floor bargaining issues with broader political and social issues by linking precarious employment and privatization of the LCBO to underfunding of important social services.
The 2023 OFL convention had mixed results. The newly elected leadership is much the same as the previous one, despite two of the three table officers being newly elected. There was a commitment on paper to social unionism but not a clear plan of action on how to build towards the mass action necessary to defeat the Ford government and the corporate agenda. However, there was a stronger Action Caucus than there had been for quite some time, which managed to force an important debate on the need for the OFL and affiliates to commit serious resources to build towards mass action.
However, there was almost no mention of the unions outside of the CLC at the OFL. The need to unify the whole labour movement on a class struggle basis, including Unifor, the Teamsters, and other unions outside the CLC, needs to be put back onto the agenda. As the Quebec Common Front showed, when it mobilized half a million public sector workers in five different union centrals, unity in struggle can achieve powerful results. Informal unity can also be built on the ground with strike solidarity and local political action.
With less than a year before a possible Provincial Election, right-wing social democrats will try harder to turn the labour movement in on itself to decide which reformist horse to back. It is our job to bring together left caucuses that combat this and fight the ideological and organizational battles necessary to build independent labour political action. What we need is the working class to take on the fightback in its own name and on its own terms.
The fight for housing is increasingly important with rising rents, mortgage rates, and consequent rises in homelessness. Tenant union activity appears to have grown in the last few years, with several major rent strikes being organized. Encampment support groups sprung up during the pandemic but in large part have succumbed to splintering and disintegration, even while encampments continue to exist and grow in many places. In housing struggles, there appears to be some ultra-leftist resistance to organizing around political demands at a provincial government level, instead limiting their focus to struggles with individual landlords; or, in some other tenants unions, right opportunist tendencies that tail the NDP – sometimes advocate for market “solutions” like inclusionary zoning. Tenants unions, housing advocates, and labour need to unite to fight the political battles necessary to build mass social housing and bring in immediate and comprehensive rent controls and rent rollbacks.
The Ontario Health Coalition (OHC), to which the Communist Party is a member, has been instrumental in mobilizing against the Ford government’s most aggressive privatization efforts in healthcare, which have taken place in the last two years. Many local health coalitions have formed or grown through the mock-referendum campaign in 2023, which fought Ford’s privatization of hospital surgeries. This year’s mass rally at Queen’s Park on May 30th showed that mobilization had grown since the previous rally in the fall, with the participation and unity of most of the healthcare unions. Health coalitions have always been important but are an immediate priority because of this government’s focus on privatizing hospitals, which are the cornerstone of our public system.
The most significant growth in popular movements has been the massive surge in Palestinian solidarity in response to Israel’s ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza. The response to the genocide by people around the world and in Canada has been one of consistent mobilization that has lasted for almost a year. This includes massive days of action with hundreds of thousands on the streets across Canada simultaneously. It includes militant actions such as the picketing of arms manufacturers, disrupting appearances by federal politicians, and the occupation of MP offices. Building broad and lasting coalitions to struggle for Palestinian liberation is generally the strongest organizational form we can help build. Boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) is an important tactic of the movement which can help educate, agitate, and organize people with a focus on local targets.
BDS turns a spotlight on the role of Canada’s big business and international capital in servicing Israel’s military apparatus and enabling the repression and slaughter of Palestinians. The call for a total arms embargo is a particularly urgent aspect of this campaign. The renewed Palestine solidarity movement is clearly the largest upsurge of a peace and solidarity movement since 2003 and the anti-Iraq war movement, and this length of sustained mobilizations has not been seen since the resistance to the US war on Vietnam. It is a time in history where it will be remembered which side political parties and people were on.
We should be proud that our Party across Canada and in Ontario is contributing and, in some areas, helping to lead this movement. At the same time, we need to continue to build on our involvement to build the broader movement and make sure we have a coordinated and organized approach across the province. We should also take note of some of the weaknesses in the movement, including an analysis that sees Canada’s support for Israel as having shared colonial ideologies as the main driver, as opposed to Canadian imperialism’s economic and geopolitical interests in the region. The popularization of anti-colonial ideas that have come to the forefront in this struggle is also a window to make connections to link up the struggle for the liberation of Palestine with the broader peace movement and inject an anti-imperialist analysis. Building local peace councils and joining the Canadian Peace Congress is imperative. This is especially urgent as all major political parties are now supporting Canada’s deepening involvement in NATO and Canada’s rapid militarization.
While people’s movements against racism and anti-police brutality have started to find their feet in the recent period, reactionary movements have also found a resurgence with the spread of anti-science myths and resistance to public health measures. The lack of economic support in place for the millions of people affected by the pandemic has created fertile soil for those on the ultra-right who peddle conspiracy theories with the easy solution that we should ignore the pandemic. Many of these movements are directly connected to racist and ultra-right movements, seeking to divert people away from a systemic analysis of capitalism and towards convenient scapegoats: Muslims, Jews, China, BLM, Women, “Critical Race Theory”, Antifa, Anti-Zionists, Communists, etc. In particular, the ultra-right has been busy targeting the rights of Trans people and public education in the last couple of years as their focus moved on from vaccine conspiracy theories. The rise of Palestine solidarity has led to a radicalizing of Zionist activism, which has links to the broader ultra-right. Moreover, the Conservative Party and the corporate media have also been driving xenophobic narratives designed to distract people from the real cause of the housing crisis. A November 2023 Leger poll revealed that 75% of Canadians believe immigration is contributing to the housing crisis. Blaming new immigrants for the housing and economic crisis has also added fuel to growing fascist and ultra-right forces.
The objectives of the ultra-right in criminalizing and attacking trans people and public services like education and health care through various conspiracies are clear. Hiding behind the shibboleth of ‘family values’, the project of the ultra-right is to shore up private, patriarchal power in the form of the bourgeois family against the expansion of public, socialized care institutions which had been instrumental in expanding the freedom of workers, particularly Indigenous, women, queer, and immigrant workers.
The Ford government since its beginning has had an on-again-off-again relationship with the ultra-right. Early on, Ford dragged his feet in dissociating himself from fascist mayoral candidate Faith Goldy. However, there have been a number of caucus expulsions of MPPs who are visibly interacting with the ultra-right, the most recent being Goldie Ghamari. It is true that Ford himself has moderated his own chauvinistic statements in recent years, and during the last provincial election, the corporate media was keen to point out that Ford had “learned and evolved.” While a smoother exterior may allow for broader appeal in business circles, the substance of his policies has not changed, and objectively these pro-corporate policies have helped move Ontario towards fascism. The Ford government has furthered the immiseration of the majority and the erosion of bourgeois democratic norms, which paves the way for fascism. And even while Ford has moderated his rhetoric over recent years, there still remains the occasional dog whistle to the ultra-right, such as Ford and Stephen Lecce supporting anti-Trans student legislation in other Conservative provinces, as well as the creation of a mandatory anti-Communist curriculum in Ontario high schools which is focused on, but not limited to, the so-called Holodomor.
One development in the tactics which are being used to erode these norms and attack the growing fightback has been the cynical invocation of anti-semitism in response to the growing Palestinian solidarity movement. Criticisms of Israel are being falsely labelled as anti-semitic to provide the basis for restrictions on democratic rights in the country – this is of course despite the fact that some of the leading figures and organizations in the Palestine solidarity movement are themselves Jewish. Worse, this cynical weaponization of hate comes at a time when hate crimes are on the rise, particularly anti-Arab and anti-semitic hate crimes, and not only casts aspersions and confusion on the cause of said rise but in fact reinforces some of the mechanisms contributing to it through falsely conflating racial, ethnic identity or religion and political ideology.
While this is not in itself a novel approach, the breadth of the application, the speed of the crackdown, and the nearly unanimous support from the social democratic parties, despite growing dissent from their own members, makes it notable. These attacks have included bills, by-laws, and motions drafted directly by lobby groups like the Centre for Israeli-Jewish Affairs (CIJA) for use at Queen’s Park, city councils, and school boards across the Province. While they vary somewhat in their content, the pieces of legislation seek to crack down chiefly on the right to free speech and free assembly; this is accomplished through restrictions on where, when, and how protests can occur, as well as by increasing extra-judicial penalties for speech and conduct which remains legal.
Toronto Councillor James Pasternak highlighted the ways these laws could be useful to capital at a later date, motivating for a by-law which would restrict the right to protest in the city by adding that on top of restricting protests in support of Palestine, it would be useful to restrict tactics engaged in by trade unions during negotiations. This moment of honesty showed the true goal of corporate interests quite plainly. These same cynical ploys have been used to attack leaders in the labour movement like Fred Hahn as well, whose prime sin is being an effective and outspoken trade union leader, but whose support for Palestine is a more effective cudgel against him for now.
The potential return of the Trump movement to power will likely embolden far-right forces, as was the case during Trump’s 2016 victory. While some well-intentioned but adventurist forces advocate small groups that are ready for physical confrontations, broad coalitions and mass mobilizations against ultra-right and fascist actions are the most successful in shutting down their organizing. It is essential that these reactionary forces are isolated, defeated, and that people are brought to understand that there is a real alternative to capitalism and the harm it inflicts on them and their communities.
While the militancy of the fightback is growing and we have seen evidence that unity is possible, this militancy is mostly siloed in different areas of struggle. We need to return to tactics such as building local anti-cuts committees and escalating Days of Action which were organized with the material help of the labour movement. The strategy needs to unify disparate and concrete social struggles into coherent and organized political resistance against this government with an escalating action plan.
As the capitalist crises continue to deepen, the Communist Party has an important role to play to strengthen the fightback, to put forward immediate necessary demands for a People’s Agenda, and to fight for socialism as the only alternative to capitalism. These three tasks are complementary and urgently necessary.
