In a brave action that faces the attempt of the Canadian ruling class to effectively abolish the right to strike, 10,500 Air Canada flight assistants are challenging an order to return to the work of the liberal federal government.
His challenge to the government and its capitalist “law and order announces an intensification of the class struggle worldwide. The dispute between the imperialist powers, led by the United States, to distribute the economic world and territorially through the commercial war and the military conflict is being fought on the backs of the working class, pushing it to undertake mass struggles.
Less than four months after the liberals returned to power under their new leader, former central banker Mark Carney, a militant movement of the working class is challenging the decree of the Government and plunging it into a political crisis.
The flight attendants began the strike shortly after midnight on Friday to oppose Air Canada’s refusal to pay them for the work done before the departure and after the landing, which amounts to an average of 35 hours of unpaid work per month, and to fight against the years of falling real wages for the ten -year contract that its union, the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), imposed in 2015.
Less than 12 hours after the strike began, the Minister of Labor, Patty Hajdu, invoked the ambiguous section 107 of the Canadian Labor Code that the Government recently “reinterpreted” to run the power to unilaterally illegalize the strikes, without going through Parliament. According to the reinterpretation invented by the Government, Hajdu ordered the undeveloped Canadian Board of Industrial Relations (CIRB) to declare the strike illegal and impose a binding arbitration.
First, Justin Trudeau and now Carney, the Liberal Government has repeatedly used section 107 in the last twelve months to illegalize the protest actions of rail workers, port workers and 55,000 Post Canada workers. In all previous occasions, bureaucratic trade union devices, CUP included, have been conspired with the government to enforce strike prohibitions.
If this time the CUPE bureaucrats felt forced to authorize the challenge to the order to return to work, it was due to their fear of losing all credibility and political control on a militant and outraged basis. Air Canada’s flight assistants had voted 99 percent in favor of the strike with a participation of more than 94 percent of the staff.
The CIRB has officially declared that the challenge of workers to their order to break the strike of section 107 makes it an “illegal strike.” This clears the way for the Government and/or Air Canada to obtain judicial orders against the strike, which makes individual workers, trade union officials and cupe subject to strong fines. Union leaders could be imprisoned.
The confrontation between the government and the AIR Canada flight assistants expresses the irreconcilable conflict between the ruling capitalist elite and the working class that is reaching a boiling point in Canada and throughout the world.
The challenge of flight assistants has denied the myth of the “national unity” promoted by the Canadian ruling class, its political representatives and the union bureaucracy in response to the commercial war of US President Donald Trump and the threats of annexing Canada.
Throughout 2025, the official political life has been dominated by a dirty nationalist campaign, stirring flags, in which the union apparatus, the social democrat new democratic party and the pseudo -left have joined behind the “Canada team” of the ruling class, urging “all Canadians” to join to “save” the country.
High labor bureaucrats have joined the Canada-United States of Prime Minister, responsible for developing the strategy of the Canadian ruling class in response to Trump’s repudiation to the traditional association between the United States and Canada. At the same time, the entire union apparatus has mobilized to defend the retaliation tariffs aimed at US, Chinese and others.
As the Air Canada strike attack demonstrates, behind the nationalist rumble, the Canadian ruling class is adopting Trump -style policies. This includes authoritarian government methods to reinforce economic “competitiveness” and the strategic-military position of Canadian imperialism and thus guarantee their interests, in the words of Carney, which is a predator, not a dam, in the imperialist redistribution of the world.
The Carney government has promised hundreds of billions of dollars increasing military spending during the next decade, launched a wide austerity campaign, introduced legislation that destroys the rights of refugees and courted Trump, flattering the possible dictator and offering political support, with the hope of ensuring a renewed economic and military and security alliance with Washington and Wall Street.
When challenging the assault of the ruling class for the right to strike, Air Canada’s flight attendees have struck a blow on behalf of the entire working class.
But for this militant struggle to become the catalyst of a true counteroffensive of the working class, its implicit repudiation of the “Canada team” and the subordination of the working class to the strategic imperatives of Canadian imperialism must be made explicit: through the development of an independent political movement of the working class, based on a socialist-internationalist strategy.
The rival rival classes are shaking nationalism and anti -immigrant chauvinism to divide workers at home and drag them behind their commercial wars and military conflicts. But workers are united as never before for the global production process, under the aegis of transnational corporations whose operations cover the entire planet. The workers, in addition, are the main victims of the predatory struggles of the capitalist powers.
A call from workers in Canada for a joint struggle with their class brothers and sisters in the United States, Mexico and beyond would find a powerful support. Unpaid work is a problem for flight attendees in the US through new technologies, such as programmed rail transport accurately through the railway networks of North America or dynamic routing in Post Canada and US delivery companies.
The main obstacle to fighting such a struggle is the nationalist and prochabitalist trade union bureaucracy. The union leaders are redoubled their calls to the Carney government for close cooperation.
On Sunday, the Canadian Labor Congress issued a statement after an emergency meeting that asked Carney to withdraw the strike prohibition and worked to achieve a “fair treatment” for AIR Canada workers through the negotiation process. But you can’t talk about a “fair treatment” for workers through negotiations that involve a government that is fighting a classes war on the name of the employers. What bureaucrats are really asking Carney is to recognize their role in the application of new wild attacks against flight attendees and other workers.
The statement included the disgusting nationalist statement that Carney, who has spent his entire adult life as a servant of the financial oligarchy, was “chosen to fight Trump … to protect our jobs and our communities.” This is a lie, aimed at facing workers with each other in a nationalist commercial war led by the capitalists themselves and their political spokesmen who are attacking jobs, wages and workers’ conditions.
The role of the Canadian trade union apparatus in the promotion of nationalist propaganda as the class struggle intensifies is far from being unique. In the United States, the United Auto Workers (UAW) union and other unions have aligned in support of the “United States first” tariff reactionary imposed by Trump. The president of the UAW, Shawn Fain, has put t-shirts with b-24 bombers and the slogan “arsenal of democracy”, a direct reference to the alliance of the unions with the ruling class to suppress the strikes during World War II in the interest of US imperialism.
In Europe, the union apparatus is located in the first rows of the mass rearmament campaign of the imperialist powers, which is feeding the assault of the ruling elite to what remains of the democratic and social rights of workers throughout the continent.
Air Canada’s strike shows that workers strive to assert their class interests. To succeed, they must abolish the bureaucratized union apparatus and transfer power to the bases, where it belongs.
The International International Committee and its Socialist Parties for Equality have initiated the International Workers Alliance of Base Committees (AIO-CB) to provide organizational and political means for this struggle. Through the development of Base Committees, workers can promote demands based on their needs, not on corporate profits; counteract the sabotage of the bureaucracy; and mobilize its immense social power in coordinated struggles through industries, borders and continents.
The development of the AIO-CB is a crucial element in the struggle to assemble the growing resurgence of the working class with a socialist-internationalist program that must guide the fight against imperialist war, the dictatorship and the destruction of the social and democratic rights of the workers, and by the labor power.
(Article originally published in English on August 19, 2025)
