When a plurality of Canadians voted for Mark Carney’s Liberal Party in 2025, their hope was a leader who would protect and preserve Canadian values from the American onslaught of Donald Trump. Many explicitly rejected Pierre Poilievre and the Conservatives because they felt his right-wing, anti-worker values were too closely aligned with the U.S. Republican Party.
So it might disappoint Canadians to know that Mark Carney is not only continuing Justin Trudeau’s controversial labour relations regime, but quickly expanding his attack upon the working class, couching in it neutral buzzwords like “modernization” all while making it clear that the goal is to make the capitalist class happy by assuring them Canadian workers have fewer rights than they used to.
You don’t have to take my word for it; you can see the doublespeak from key members of the Carney cabinet. First up is Minister of Jobs and Families (remember, Carney refuses to have a real Minister of Labour) Patty Hajdu, who went onto the CBC to defend her government’s attack on the right to strike. Puzzlingly, Hajdu suggested that while Carney supports strike rights, their new legislation will seek to address the five per cent of cases where strike action becomes disruptive. But herein lies the trick that Hajdu even admits: collective bargaining works, because 95 per cent of the time, there are no labour stoppages. That five per cent number? Hajdu is effectively saying that she wants workers to have the ‘right’ to strike, so long as they don’t use it in the five per cent of cases they currently do. A right that exists so long as it isn’t exercised, in other words.
Indeed, more candid reporting from CTV confirmed that Carney’s objective is to go even farther than Trudeau and Stephen Harper: to not only use back-to-work legislation, but propose new legislation that “will be aimed at introducing binding mediation before strike action is taken.” This is a shocking escalation of anti-labour policy, even for the already right-wing Mark Carney. The reason is even more chilling as per CTV:
Industry’s message to the government was that its traditional tool to use for binding arbitration, Section 107 of the Canadian Labour Code, can only be applied too late in the labour dispute process and from its perspective, does not adequately prevent the damage caused from a work stoppage.
Put another way, corporations feel the government’s anti-labour tools aren’t strong enough, and that the only way to ensure investors are happy is to stop strikes before they can even manifest. But this defeats the whole purpose of strikes: they are indeed rare, but when they do happen, they must be disruptive to enact vital economic victories that benefit union members and the wider working class. This is something Avi Lewis and the NDP made clear in strong opposition to Carney’s union-busting scheme. If Carney and his capitalist buddies argue that strikes can only happen when they cause zero economic disruption, they are effectively calling for an abolition of the right to strike in practice.
This focus on pleasing investors was the central and explicit concern of Minister of Transport Steven MacKinnon. In a discussion with Rosemary Barton, MacKinnon parroted Hajdu’s insistence that while the right to strike still exists, workers better not use it: “It harms investment, harms employment, maybe even particularly in unionized environments. So we need a better framework for getting to agreements between employers and their employees.”
Again, the crux of the Carney argument is that workers’ rights are bad for business. And that if any company fears a union could strike for better wages, improved working conditions, and fair and equitable treatment, that would hurt the bottom line, and they might be less likely to invest. So, for Carney to entice the Trump-aligned American capitalists that Canadians wanted protection from, he must crush the workers under his boot, including their basic right to withhold their labour as guaranteed by the Charter.
Carney may say he opposes Trump, but his ideal Canada is a Republican dream of an anti-union southern Red state. The man elected to save Canada? He’s the one dissolving it from the inside for the benefit of capitalists, including American businessmen who supported Trump. Once Carney’s done selling away our rights and our infrastructure with the help of American banks like Morgan Stanley, he’ll be fine. But Canadians will be left picking up the pieces of a Trumpified Canada for generations.
Christo Aivalis is a political commentator and historian, holding a PhD in Canadian History from Queen’s University. His writing has appeared in Jacobin, The Breach, Canadian Dimension, Maclean’s, the Globe and Mail, and the Washington Post.
