Avi Lewis says Carney’s ‘nation-building’ agenda is trampling workers’ and Indigenous rights

Prime Minister Mark Carney is using his majority government to push through a suite of legislative changes Liberal voters did not give him a mandate for, ones that would “make Stephen Harper blush,” federal NDP leader Avi Lewis said during a visit to St. John’s over the weekend.

The democratic socialist slammed the Liberal government’s Building Canada Strong Act, Bill C-39, an omnibus bill that, if passed, will make sweeping changes to federal legislation as part of Carney’s efforts to speed up resource development projects that the Liberals deem to be in Canada’s “national interest” in response to the Trump administration’s trade war on Canada.

Speaking to a room full of New Democrats at the Newfoundland and Labrador NDP’s convention, Lewis said while he supports resource development, it shouldn’t come “at the expense of workers’ rights, not at the expense of our precious natural environment that we love so deeply as Canadians, not at the expense of Indigenous rights and the social safety net that holds up the most vulnerable among us.

“We want to build big things – the right things under the right circumstances by workers who are paid a fair wage and where workers’ rights are left intact.”

Carney’s investment summit part of Carney’s ‘privatization agenda’: Lewis

Lewis’s visit came two weeks after Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Tony Wakeham held a special sitting in the provincial legislature during which the Progressive Conservatives pushed through government support for a proposed non-binding deal with Quebec on expanded hydroelectric development of the Churchill River in Labrador.

That sitting of the province’s House of Assembly coincided with Carney’s Canada Investment Summit, where billionaires, bankers and corporate leaders from around the world descended on Toronto to vie for opportunities to profit from Canada’s infrastructure, natural resources and labour.

“Mark Carney does not have a mandate to put three hundred billion dollars of […] tax giveaways and public subsidies in front of a room full of the biggest private equity players on planet Earth to sell off Canadian resources and assets,” Lewis told NDP members and delegates in a hotel conference room Saturday.

“He does not have a mandate to sell our airports,” he added, referring to Carney’s controversial decision to privatize Canada’s four largest airports. “We can’t be fooling ourselves with this privatisation agenda that’s been unleashed.”

Among those attending the summit was American billionaire Larry Fink, CEO of multinational investment firm BlackRock and “a card-carrying member of Trump’s inner circle,” Lewis noted. “I don’t know why [Carney] felt he needed to have [Fink] come to Toronto to buy up our assets and natural resources when we’re supposed to be protecting ourselves from the United States.”

During the summit Carney singled out Newfoundland and Labrador’s non-binding memorandum of understanding with Quebec on Churchill Falls, calling it the “largest clean energy investment in North American history [and] the functional equivalent of 18 Hoover dams – enough to light, heat and cool every home in Toronto, Montréal, and Vancouver combined.” As part of the proposed deal, the feds have put up to $10 billion in funding on the table. “That is what an energy superpower looks like when it decides to act like one,” the prime minister said.

During the NL House of Assembly’s special sitting on Churchill Falls, Energy and Mines Minister Lloyd Parrot said Carney “is prepared to move heaven and earth to get this deal through, and we are the beneficiary of that at this moment.” The federal incentive prompted Wakeham to break one of his key election promises – to put any deal with Quebec on Churchill Falls to a referendum.

Carney noted the August announcement of the proposed agreement in St. John’s was jointly made with the Innu Nation, which represents Innu communities in Labrador. While Innu leaders were invited to the announcement, they were not part of it. In fact, the Innu Nation has since explicitly said it does not support the deal in the absence of the government’s failure to uphold the Innu’s right to free, prior and informed consent.

Carney’s 2025 Building Canada Act limits Indigenous nations’ participation in resource development processes, a move that has angered First Nations, Inuit and Metis communities across the country.

Bill C-39 is an attack on workers’ rights, say labour leaders, NDP

If passed in its current form, Bill C-39 would also infringe on workers’ right to strike, Lewis and labour leaders at the convention said. Buried beneath legislative changes to infrastructure approval processes, environmental protections, species-at-risk and fisheries laws, the bill makes sweeping changes to the Canada Labour Code’s collective bargaining provisions in industries regulated by the federal government. 

Most controversially, the bill gives the federal labour minister additional powers to end a strike. While Labour Minister Patty Hajdu has characterised the proposed amendments as “guardrails” for Section 107 of the Labour Code, which successive Liberal governments have used in recent years to legislate workers back to work, the NDP and labour leaders say the additional powers would normalise that trend.

At the convention Saturday, Newfoundland and Labrador Federation of Labour President Jessica McCormick noted that workers’ right to strike is recognized by the Supreme Court of Canada “as an essential part of meaningful collective bargaining,” and that workers’ ability to withhold their labour is the strongest tool workers have to fight for just wages, working conditions and benefits.

“If an employer expects the government to intervene, they’re not motivated to make the compromises necessary to reach a deal,” McCormick said.

The Canadian Labour Congress President Bea Bruske also slammed the move. “Taking away the legal right to strike does not make a labour dispute disappear. It forces workers to choose between giving up their rights and defying the government,” she said last week.

Meanwhile, the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) has vowed it will “defy the Liberal government’s Bill C-39 limiting the constitutional right to strike if it is passed unamended through Parliament.”

On Sunday, the NL NDP passed an emergency resolution to oppose Bill C-39 and any legislative or policy changes from the Carney government that infringe on workers’ rights. CUPE NL President Sherry Hillier called C-39 “a turning point for the labor movement,” arguing that if the bill passes, “we are up to our neck in you-know-what because this labor movement – [Carney] will destroy us.” 

NL NDP leader Jim Dinn also slammed Bill C-39. “Let’s be real here – once you lose a right, it is damn difficult to get it back,” he said, explaining he wrote to Carney last week cautioning the prime minister that he “cannot strengthen the sovereignty of Canada while undermining the sovereignty of unions who are representing our workers, pure and simple.”

NDP’s job to ‘tell the truth and to raise the alarm’

Sally Housser, a St. John’s-born New Democrat who now lives in Saskatchewan and serves in that province’s legislature as an MLA in Regina, said Saturday that the Carney government is strategically rushing the sweeping legislative through Parliament. “ Speed kills. They want to get it done and under the radar before people really start waking up,” she said. “They can see – they feel this unrest, they know that’s coming, and they want to hobble it as quickly as they possibly can.”

In his speech, Lewis laid out the task at hand for New Democrats across the country. “It is the work of the NDP in this moment to tell the truth and to raise the alarm for Canadians about what is happening, and to try to shake this country out of the dream, in our crisis moment, that we have adopted that we somehow have a government which is moving us towards a progressive future. We know and we see clearly what’s going on,” Lewis said in his address to NL New Democrats Saturday.

But with just five seats in Ottawa and two in Newfoundland and Labrador, the federal and provincial New Democratic Parties have a steep hill to climb. 

When Lewis visited St. John’s in March during his leadership campaign, he recalled, he “wasn’t sure what to expect in terms of numbers and reception.” Lewis says he “met person after person who was hungry for the fight and ready to embrace the sacred work of fighting for change. And I realised we are the many fighting against the money. This is real.”

“We are the many. They are the few. And even in this epic, terrifying time, we all feel better when we escape the endless spiral of the endless scroll on our phones, when we put down our devices, and we get in a room face to face, and we do that hand-to-hand, heart-to-heart politics.”

Lewis said the “antidote to despair is action, and the best kind of action is person-to-person organizing, our special sauce.”

At the convention, members and delegates spoke to the party’s need to continue growing its membership and start knocking on doors, particularly in rural districts.

A new party executive was elected, with former NDP candidate Laurabel Mba replacing Raj Sharan as president. 

Party leader Jim Dinn also received 89 per cent support in a vote on whether to hold a leadership review.

Justin Brake is a Local Journalism Initiative reporter based in Newfoundland, on a new beat covering Atlantic Canada for Ricochet Media and The Independent. Contact him with tips and story ideas at justin.brake@theindependent.ca.