The Legault government

338 Canada Poll December 7

PQ 30.7%

CAQ 25.4%

QS 16.3%

Lib 14.7%

Con 11.5%

Other 1.4%

https://338canada.com/quebec

In September the Web Socialist Web Site (WSWS) described what was coming as Legault's assault on public sector workers, which has been in the planning for a long time, heated up. The public sector workers are determined "to put an end to decades of declining real wages and increased workloads. Moreover, there is mass popular anger over the deplorable state of public services. Polls show widespread support for public sector workers’ demands for improved wages and working conditions and major investments in healthcare and education." This assault has been going on for decades not only under CAQ, but also under PQ and Liberal governments in Quebec, just like in the rest of the country. The original offer was a 9% increase over 5 years, amounting to a further large decrease in real wages as well as further increases in workloads. Like elsewhere, the number of "illegal" strikes are growing out of frustration with a system designed to put more and more money in the hands of the extremely wealthy while leaving everyone else poorer.

Almost six months after the expiry on March 31 of collective agreements covering 650,000 Quebec hospital workers, nurses, public school teachers and other public sector workers, the leaders of the Common Front—an inter-union alliance representing 420,000 of them—have announced that they will poll their members on a possible strike. 

These votes will be held in an explosive social and political situation. On the one hand, the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) government, with the full support of big business, is determined to impose massive concessions on public sector workers. On the other, workers are determined to put an end to decades of declining real wages and increased workloads. Moreover, there is mass popular anger over the deplorable state of public services. Polls show widespread support for public sector workers’ demands for improved wages and working conditions and major investments in healthcare and education.

Section of the 100,000-strong Sept. 23 demonstration of Quebec public sector workers

Workers’ determination to fight was on display last weekend at a Common Front protest in Montreal in which more than 60,000 participated. The World Socialist Web Site will report separately on the September 23 demonstration in coming days.

In announcing the strike votes, Common Front leaders said they were “facing a wall” at the negotiating table. This was a tacit admission that that their “strategy” of pursuing “social dialogue” with Quebec Premier François Legault and treating his CAQ government as a “partner” has utterly failed.

The CAQ is determined to intensify the assault on public services and working conditions mounted by its Liberal and Parti Québécois predecessors. It is maintaining its provocative offer of a 9 percent wage increase over five years—a massive real-terms pay cut when inflation is taken into account. It is seeking pension rollbacks and more “flexibility” in the workplace, meaning increased workloads for workers, and vowing to press forward with privatization. The government’s contempt for public services and the working people who depend on them was highlighted by the recent comments of the minister of education, the notorious right-winger Bernard Drainville. Faced with a shortage of thousands of teachers, Drainville announced that the government’s objective was to have “an adult”— i.e., not a trained teacher—“in every classroom.”

The leaders of the three major union federations (the CSN, CSQ and FTQ), joined by the ATPS, have dubbed their temporary public sector alliance a “Common Front” to lend themselves a false air of militancy. In workers’ minds the term Common Front is associated with the militant struggles of the early 1970s, when workers repeatedly defied anti-strike court injunctions and laws and made important gains.

This fraudulent posture of militancy and the strike votes are part of the union bureaucracy’s maneuvering to avoid a political confrontation with the CAQ government while maintaining control over a restive rank and file. Workers have repeatedly shown that they are ready to fight, including through a wave of “illegal” nurse sit-down strikes over the past two years. Many workers have made trenchant criticisms of the union leaders on social media.

The strategy of the unions, including those outside the Common Front—the Fédération autonome de l'enseignement (FAE) and the Fédération interprofessionnelle de la santé du Québec (FIQ)—remains the same as it has been for decades. That is, confine the struggle within the narrow framework of “negotiations” over a collective agreement for which the financial parameters have been fixed in advance by the government and which the unions have no intention of seriously challenging. String out the negotiations for as long as possible, to defuse worker anger and demoralize the rank and file; then use the adoption or threat of a law criminalizing job action to impose sellout agreements.   

It is through their suppression of workers’ struggles that the pro-capitalist union bureaucracy maintains the corporatist relationship it has developed over the past four decades with the bosses and the state—the basis for the six-figure salaries and other privileges it receives in return.

The last thing the union leadership wants is an indefinite public sector strike, which would have the potential to become the spearhead of a working class political counteroffensive against the ruling class’ austerity program in Quebec and across Canada.

This is demonstrated by recent comments from the union leaders themselves. They have insisted that any indefinite public sector strike, over whose timing they exert exclusive control, must be “preceded by strike sequences,” i.e., a lengthy series of partial and rotating walkouts.

From the union bureaucrats’ point of view, these strikes would be designed not to mobilize workers as an independent social force and rally public support against the dismantling of public services. Rather, they see them as another “pressure tactic,” a vain appeal to the government to drop its hard line, and whose principal purpose is to demobilize and divide workers.

FTQ (Quebec Federation of Labour) President Magali Picard said she hoped to reach an agreement with the government before Christmas if it presented “respectable offers with at least wage catch-up.” In other words, the union bureaucrats want to continue negotiating behind closed doors with the government for many more months, while reserving the right to call off any and all job action, under the pretext of having secured another “historic agreement” with the government. Such an agreement would in fact be full of concessions. Union leaders have also made clear that they are committed to ensuring that all the anti-worker essential services legislation, which curtails the basic right to strike, is strictly observed.

Should union leaders find themselves forced under pressure from the rank and file to call an indefinite province-wide strike, they would immediately use the threat of back-to-work legislation to say that “nothing can be done” and that their members must bow to the government's anti-worker diktats. This is exactly what they did in 2015 in the face of mounting rank-and-file opposition to their acceptance of wage cuts and inaction in the face of massive social spending cuts implemented by Philippe Couillard’s Liberal government.

Public sector workers must recognize that they are facing a political struggle. This is not just because their employer is the government, but because their demands for quality public services, better wages and decent working conditions conflict with the vital interests of the ruling capitalist class, in Quebec and across Canada. This is true regardless of the political label of the party in power—whether it’s the CAQ, the indépendentistes of the Parti québécois or the federalists of the Quebec Liberal Party at the provincial level; or the social-democrat NDP, the Conservatives or Justin Trudeau's Liberals at the federal level.

The intransigence of the CAQ and Legault, himself a multimillionaire ex-CEO, expresses the demands of the banks and big business. They see public services, wages and pensions as an unacceptable drain on their gigantic profits. They are also waging class war against private sector and manufacturing workers, whose wages Legault has denounced as “too high.”

This is the same anti-worker attitude adopted by the ruling elite in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. Desperate to maintain the flow of profits, the CAQ pushed for a premature reopening of schools and workplaces, leading to successive waves of the deadly coronavirus, which continues to evolve and spread. The unions have fully supported this homicidal policy, which has accelerated the deterioration of public services and resulted in as many as 10 percent of all front-line health workers contracting Long COVID.

The chauvinist laws that the CAQ has made central to its rule, such as Bills 9, 21 and 96, are all designed to divide workers along ethnolinguistic lines and inflame Quebec nationalism. The latter, defended tooth and nail by both the ruling class and the unions, is the reactionary ideological cement of the Quebec bourgeoisie’s rule. At the heart of Quebec nationalism is the false idea that French-speaking workers have more in common with French-speaking capitalists than with their English-speaking and allophone class brothers and sisters in North America.

The urgent task facing workers is not to demand “respect” from the CAQ government, but to turn to their natural allies: the working class throughout Quebec, the rest of Canada and internationally. Public sector workers must see themselves as an important contingent of the international working class, which is returning to the path of mass struggle. The majority of workers in Quebec speak a different language from their North American brethren, but they are all facing the same treacherous unions and the same capitalist class determined to make them pay for the profound crisis of global capitalism and its ruinous wars. 

No struggle can move forward without challenging the subordination of society to a handful of the ultra-rich. To win their just demands, public sector workers must organize independently of the union bureaucracy, forming rank-and-file committees that will take as their starting point the needs of workers, not what the ruling class says it can “afford.”

These committees will enable workers to communicate, exchange information and coordinate their struggles with their powerful allies throughout the working class, in Quebec and beyond. 

This must be combined with a political struggle to break the monopoly of the rich on social life and reorganize society’s resources rationally and democratically, on the basis of human need, not private profit.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/09/26/vyxk-s26.html

Leger Poll Feb. 5 2024

PQ 32%

CAQ 25%

QS 16.0%

Lib 15%

Con 11%

Other 1%

Dennis Codere says he may run for leadership of the Liberals. The poll found that he would lead among Liberal voters with 27% compared to second place Marc Tanquay with 12%. If he ran as Liberal Party leader his support according to the Leger poll would the Liberals up to 21%, just 2% behind the CAQ, but with the concentration of Liberal votes in Anglo ridings would give the Liberals more seats than any other party, except the PQ, which would be at 32%. 

"If the Liberal Party were led by Dennis Codere who would you vote for?"

PQ 32%

CAQ 23%

Libs 21%

QS 14%

PCQ 9%

https://leger360.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/11679-272-Politique-Fev....

The World Socialist Web Site discusses how the Parti Quebecois, with the help of media-telecommunications mogul and former PQ leader Pierre Karl Péladeau, is using anti-migrant chauvinism to boost its popularity in this article titled "Behind the “revival” of the Parti Québécois: as class struggle mounts, ruling class intensifies anti-immigrant chauvinism". With many of the migrants coming from the Francophonie and therefore French speaking, the old argument that immigrants, temporary workers and asylum seekers will dilute the French language percentage of the population won't work, so racism against migrants from Haiti and Francophone Africa has now become the new tool as the elite diverts the middle and working class from the major problems that they face. "Rather than laying the blame on decades of austerity and the worsening social inequalities caused by predatory capitalism" the PQ now peddles fear of any kind of migrant to Quebec. The once left-wing Parti Quebecois is now to the right of Premier Legault's right-wing CAQ. Of course this approach is also part of "the federal Conservatives of Pierre Poilievre, an ardent supporter of the far-right “Freedom” Convoy".

An ultra-nationalist section of the Quebec elite has launched a concerted campaign to resurrect the Parti Québécois (PQ), which for half a century ending in 2018 was one of the ruling class’s two parties of government in Quebec, Canada’s second most populous and sole francophone-majority province. 

The imposition by PQ governments of brutal austerity measures, anti-strike laws and other anti-worker attacks caused its electoral base among working people to collapse. In the 2018 provincial election it finished fourth and in 2022 it fell further still, losing official party status in the National Assembly. 

Faced with the resurgence of the class struggle, sections of the ruling class are now frantically seeking to revive this big business party, which—with the crucial assistance of its longstanding allies in the trade union bureaucracy—has repeatedly been used to divert and derail the militant struggles of Quebec workers.

The upsurge of the working class in Quebec finds its clearest expression in the ongoing contract struggle of the 600,000 provincial public and para-public sector workers, the vast majority of whom launched a seven-day strike last Friday.

Even though the PQ has just four members in Quebec’s National Assembly, its leader, Paul Saint-Pierre Plamondon, receives abundant and favorable coverage in the mainstream media, particularly in the Journal de Montréal and other right-wing tabloids controlled by the media-telecommunications mogul and former PQ leader Pierre Karl Péladeau.

The media hype orchestrated by the ruling elite is having an impact. The PQ won the Jean-Talon (suburban Quebec City) by-election in early October and now leads in voting intentions according to several polls. Meanwhile the other opposition parties, including the pseudo-left Québec Solidaire, are treading water.

PQ leader St-Pierre Plamondon is seeking to revive the PQ and its reactionary project of Quebec independence by intensifying its identity-based appeals around the “defense of the French language” and promotion of crass anti-immigrant chauvinism. He is thus following in the footsteps of Marine Le Pen in France, right-wing extremist Geert Wilders in the Netherlands and the former US President and would-be dictator Donald Trump.

In a recent press release, St-Pierre Plamondon deplored increasing “social disruption,” pointing to the “housing crisis” and the “crisis in essential services.” But rather than laying the blame on decades of austerity and the worsening social inequalities caused by predatory capitalism, the PQ leader railed against the federal government’s “astronomical [immigration] thresholds,” “changes to airport rules to facilitate asylum claims” and the “timidity” of the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) provincial government’s response.

In his xenophobic communiqué, the PQ leader also tied immigration to the supposed “crisis of the French language.” This underscores that St-Pierre Plamondon and the PQ are determined to develop and amplify the agitation initiated by the most extreme chauvinists, who are clamouring that “excessive” immigration is an existential threat to the “Quebec nation” and has placed its very existence “in peril.” A key player in this agitation is the Journal de Montréal and its stable of far-right commentators. Last May, it launched a hysterical campaign around a supposed Trudeau government supported, federalist “plot” to drown the “Quebec nation” in a mass of English-speaking immigrants.

St.-Pierre Plamondon’s PQ stands to the right of Quebec Premier François Legault’s CAQ, which has made anti-immigrant agitation and the adoption of chauvinist legislation central planks of its appeal and program. As for Trudeau and his Liberal government, the PQ’s demagogic accusation of their being “too open” to immigration flies in the face of reality. Earlier this year the Trudeau government closed the Quebec-US border crossing at Roxham Road, the main gateway for asylum seekers to enter Canada.

That the anti-immigrant venom of St-Pierre Plamondon and the Péladeau-owned tabloids currently sets the tone for establishment politics in Quebec is bound up with a longstanding and ever-accelerating shift to the right of the entire capitalist ruling elite. Important stages in this process included the manufactured 2006-07 scandal around supposed “unreasonable accommodations” to ethnic minorities, the Marois PQ government’s attempt to impose a “Charter of Quebec Values,” the Couillard Liberal government’s Bill 62, which targeted Muslim women, and the CAQ’s chauvinist Laws 9 and 21, which also target immigrants and religious minorities.

This toxic politics is part of the ruling class’s increasingly frantic efforts to divert the growing social anger and opposition caused by mounting capitalist crisis against immigrants. They have been embraced as “legitimate” and “necessary” by Québec Solidaire (QS), the pseudo-left party that defends the interests of affluent sections of the middle class.

This chauvinist, anti-immigrant turn is far from unique to Quebec. Feeling threatened by an upsurge in workers’ struggles, the capitalist ruling class is everywhere whipping up xenophobia, and increasingly inciting and relying on fascist elements. Such is the case with the federal Conservatives of Pierre Poilievre, an ardent supporter of the far-right “Freedom” Convoy, which menacingly occupied downtown Ottawa at the beginning of 2022 to demand the lifting of all remaining anti-COVID measures. Another example is Trump in the US, who sought to overturn the outcome of the 2020 presidential elections by mobilizing fascist thugs as part of his January 6, 2021 coup attempt.

The “housing crisis” and the “crisis in essential services” referred to by the PQ leader have a common cause: capitalist austerity imposed by all levels of government, regardless of the political label of the party in power, and the subordination of home-building, like other crying social needs, to capitalist profit.

When it was in power in the early 1980s, the PQ pioneered austerity in Quebec, which it imposed through draconian anti-worker legislation, including savage “emergency” back-to-work laws. In the 1990s, in close collaboration with the union bureaucracy, and in the name of balancing the budget and creating “winning conditions” for a third referendum on Quebec independence, the PQ imposed the biggest social spending cuts in Quebec history. It slashed billions from health care and education, closed hospitals and eliminated tens of thousands of jobs through early retirement schemes.

These cuts were intensified by the Quebec Liberal Party governments of Charest (2003-12) and Couillard (2014-2018) and the brief 18-month minority Marois PQ government (2012-14). Now the CAQ is enforcing “post-pandemic” austerity, as evidenced by its privatization push and the massive real wage cuts it wants to impose on the more than 600,000 public sector workers. The dismantling of public services has been accompanied by massive tax cuts for the rich and big business, leading to an enormous transfer of wealth from the pockets of the working class to the better-off.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/12/10/etxv-d10.html

As the PQ's popularity soars while CAQ's falls and with 56% of asylum seekers living in Quebec, Legault has asked Trudeau for full control of immigration to Quebec. Trudeau's response is no but he is willing to make some adjustments. 

Quebec will not get full power over which immigrants it takes in, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on Friday after meeting with Premier François Legault.  At the meeting in Montreal, Legault, who has said Quebec cannot take in more asylum seekers, asked Trudeau for the federal government to transfer all immigration powers to Quebec.  But, speaking to reporters afterward, Trudeau said he had declined Legault's request.  "No, we're not going to give more powers (to Quebec) in immigration," Trudeau said in French. "It's not a question of jurisdiction, it's a question of finding solutions." But Legault told reporters after Trudeau's appearance that the prime minister had demonstrated some openness to his requests. 

Trudeau seemed willing to transfer some powers to Quebec, such as the ability to admit some temporary workers, previously a federal responsibility, Legault said.

Pointing to a graph showing a steep increase in the number of asylum seekers and temporary immigrants in Quebec over the past two years, Legault said Quebec is, essentially, full.  "Our capacity to welcome them has been surpassed," he said. "We lack teachers, we lack nurses, we lack housing and it poses a real problem for the future of French in Quebec."

Quebec and Canada have an agreement that allows the province to keep some measure of control over the number of immigrants it accepts. But the federal government is responsible for national standards related to immigration and the admission and control of visitors. 

Legault pointed to the sharp rise in asylum seekers in recent years as something that has placed too much pressure on Quebec's ability to integrate and provide services for newcomers. His government has asked Ottawa to reimburse $1 billion in funding that Quebec says it has spent providing services for asylum seekers.

As of Dec. 31, 56 per cent of asylum seekers currently residing in Canada — 160,651 people out of 289,047 — are in Quebec. 

Trudeau said he recognized that Quebec was doing "more than its share" concerning asylum seekers. He said his government had worked to slow the tide of asylum seekers by working with the U.S. government to close the Roxham Road illegal border crossing and, more recently, reimposing visa requirements for Mexican visitors. 

On Thursday at the National Assembly, Legault faced pressure from Parti Québécois Leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon over immigration and said he would ask Trudeau for Quebec to achieve full control over its immigration system.

Mostafa Henaway, a community organizer with the Montreal-based Immigrant Workers Centre, criticized the tone Legault and Trudeau struck on Friday and said both levels of government should work to reduce the barriers that prevent migrants from working or participating in Canadian society. "When barriers are removed, whether it be temporary status, whether it be closed work permits, whether it be non status, whether it be excruciating, high tuition fees as an international student, then that equality allows people to actually grow and to develop," he said. "Because right now we have an immigration system that says, you know … we want your labour, but then possibly we just want to get rid of you."

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/legault-immigration-ottawa-trude....