Written, Debated and Adopted in 2023.            Released January 31, 2024.

Preamble

The (New) Communist Party of Canada, (N)CPC, pursues two innately linked objectives:

• a) Establish working-class rule in the economic and political spheres of Canada; and
• b) Usher in a new, non-colonial, equal and fraternal type of relations between all nations which today remain forcefully and unequally united within the Canadian state.

Neither one of these goals is likely to be achieved in a lasting, meaningful way without the other. Working-class power without national liberation and national equality would have to be built on an illegitimate, coercive basis. National liberation without working-class power would mean a mere reform of Canadian law, or else create powerless statelets that would fall prey to any of the multiple imperialist powers contending for domination and survival in the world today.

The program of the (N)CPC aims to provide a sharp, scientific analysis of current conditions in Canada, a strong overview of the history of people’s struggles and communist party-building in this country and an illuminating way forward that can mobilize and unite all our class’s most dedicated, relentless fighters in the pursuit of a bright socialist future.

This program is a tool for building the future and a weapon for fighting the enemy. It should be taken up, studied, understood, sharpened and further improved by all those who share the two goals outlined above.

Capitalism

We are living in an epoch that has seen a far-reaching, though temporary, triumph of capitalism. Capitalism is a mode of production based on the private ownership of the means of production (factories, tools, land, infrastructure) in the hands of a small elite owning class (capitalists). Virtually all production under capitalism is commodity production, that is to say, production for the sake of exchange on the market. Producing commodities with the sole purpose of selling them in the market and realizing a profit, thereby accumulating an ever-greater quantity of wealth (capital accumulation), is the only purpose of all production under capitalism. In order to produce commodities, however, the capitalist must exploit the labour of the vast swathes of the world population that own nothing and have nothing to sell except their labour, since the use of the highly-developed means of production available today requires collective labour. Thus, wage-labour becomes the generalized form of exploitation and of extracting surplus value from the workers (proletariat). Capitalist relations of production have prevailed the world over. Even in those regions where pre-capitalist relations of production have been maintained, these relations have been subsumed and integrated into the world capitalist economy.¹

Capitalism relies on and continuously creates two main classes: the proletariat or working class and the bourgeoisie or capitalist class. The proletariat, dispossessed to various degrees, is forced to either work for the capitalists’ benefit or fall into abject poverty and death. The capitalist class, in order to remain viable, must continuously expand its operations and compete with itself. The proletariat could very well use the means of production and run society as a whole on its own. It does not need the bourgeoisie — it can work by itself, for itself, to fulfill all its needs. Schematically, this is what creates the potential for socialist revolution. Such a revolution, however, must contend with the vast apparatuses that the bourgeoisie has put in place to protect its property and its status and maintain rule.

Imperialism

We presently live in the era of modern imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism. In this era, the immense concentration of production has led to the domination of the markets by huge monopolies, cartels and syndicates, signalling the closure of world markets and the end of the free-competition stage of capitalism. The large concentration of production and capital has led to the merger of bank and industrial capital, giving rise to finance capital and consequently a new parasitic section of the monopoly bourgeoisie: the financial oligarchy, which has overwhelming control over the political and economic spheres of life. The concentration of capital leads to overproduction and surplus capital which must be invested abroad in order to remain profitable. Thus, the export of capital, as distinct from the export of commodities, gains considerable importance in the present imperialist stage.

This drive to export capital inevitably leads to the division of the world both among the monopolies (in the economic field) and among a few key countries, the imperialist great powers (in the political-military field). The monopolies, and the imperialist states which represent them politically and serve as their purveyors of brute force, are engaged in a never-ending struggle to continuously redivide the world among themselves, with each faction of monopoly capitalists and state powers aiming to come out on top as the dominant, hegemonic power.

This struggle for the re-division of the world is always playing out in economic, political and diplomatic ways. Often, this rivalry carries over into actual military confrontations. As the world economy faces pressure from climate change, pandemics and natural disasters, all either provoked or made exponentially worse by capitalism-imperialism itself, and as new great powers are entering the fray, confrontation between rival imperialist camps becomes more likely and more intense. These clashes between the contending imperialists are the cause of the displacement of hundreds of millions of people, who have left their home countries for no reason other than trying to climb out of the poverty imposed on much of the world or trying to escape war and simply survive, who then end up packed into camps or slums and are subjected to abject exploitation if they do ever reach their “promised land.”

When this struggle to redivide the world takes the form of open conflict, it kills and maims tens or hundreds of thousands of working-class people. When these inter-imperialist conflicts blow up into a world war, as they did twice in the 20^th century, tens of millions perish; and such a war today between two or more of the imperialist great powers would, by reason of their nuclear stockpiles, pose a direct existential threat to human civilization as a whole. The imperialist world system is, in short, an unmitigated disaster which we must get out of and do our utmost to stop. The powerful political and economic forces which endeavour to preserve this system and to prosper within it are the greatest criminals of human history, their hands stained with the blood of hundreds of millions. Caring only about their profits and the supremacy of their social class, they are jeopardizing the future of humanity itself and condemning the coming generations to untold suffering — if they are not stopped.

The Great Powers and the Periphery

All in all, there are four imperialist great powers in the world today. They are divided into two groups: the new, up-and-coming great powers and the old, well-established ones. The two new great powers are China and Russia, formerly socialist countries which were under working class rule for many years only to have the bourgeoisie take back power and return to the capitalist path. Russia re-entered the capitalist path with only a limited area of influence: among former Eastern Bloc countries. Russia is a great military power, but its economic power relies mainly on a small number of energy sector monopolies and on a modest periphery of Eastern European and Central Asian countries where its monopoly finance capital is being challenged by European and American capital’s ever-encroaching influence. Russia aims to consolidate and expand this area of influence in the face of Western challenges to it and is therefore willing to commit to military action. China, a formerly colonized country, re-entered the capitalist path with virtually no foreign “holdings.” China is both an economic and a military powerhouse, but it is still in the process of shedding its former role as “factory of the world,” asserting its new role as a full-fledged imperialist power and moving to build up its influence in many areas, notably Southeast Asia and Africa. It is therefore still wary of open confrontation, though it is visibly preparing for it. Russia and China are neither the evil “totalitarian” great powers of the world as liberals and reactionaries would have us believe, nor are they some kind of “alternative” to Western imperialists. Rather, they are merely up-and-comers challenging the established masters of the world for supremacy and economic dominance.²

The old, well-established imperialist blocs are the European Union (EU) and the Anglo-American Imperialist Alliance (AAIA) (often referred to together as the Western imperialist powers, but we should note the competing interests among them). The European Union is a supra-national union of former European colonial powers headed by Germany and France. It is dominated by powerful monopolies and relies on an internal periphery in southern and eastern Europe and on neo-colonial relationships with its former colonies and other peripheral countries. Militarily, however, it is divided, used as staging grounds by US troops (mainly in Germany and Italy) and is relatively speaking less powerful overall than the three other great powers. It is therefore, like China, wary of open conflict.

The AAIA is the main imperialist alliance in the world today — a loose alliance of powerful countries coming out of the former British Empire and consolidated around the United States of America (USA) after its emergence as a hegemonic power following the end of WW2. The leading power in this alliance is the USA, followed by the United Kingdom and Canada. Its next few layers include other regionally powerful countries that have been in close alliance with the AAIA over many decades, such as Australia, New Zealand, Israel and Saudi Arabia (the last two being largely propped up by the AAIA as outposts of its imperialist policy in the Middle East). Japan, one of Asia’s two major imperialist powers, is also closely associated with this alliance and serves as a forward military base of US imperialism.

The AAIA is the political expression of the main monopolies in the world today: it holds sway over key transnational institutions (the UN, NATO, the World Bank, the IMF, the Commonwealth, etc.), and it maintains its own central institutions, such as the “Five Eyes” global mass surveillance system. As the main imperialist bloc, it stands to lose the most from the rise of new great powers and imperialist competitors, hence its active and open preparation for military confrontations with Russia and China, while trying to consolidate its alliance with the EU.

Under these four main great powers, there are lesser imperialist or sub-imperialist regional powers: certain non-EU European countries, certain “developing” powers such as Brazil, India or Turkey, etc. Such countries are to various degrees beholden to the main imperialist powers while also pursuing their own interests and attempting to become major players in their own right. In doing so, they usually exert influence over and dominate small areas of influence, usually made up of neighbouring countries (one example being India’s influence over Nepal). Regional powers and major satellites of the main imperialist powers fall into this category.

Below all the above, we find the oppressed countries and nations of the world. When the world is being re-divided, the great powers are doing the dividing and these countries are being divided because their resources and their people’s labour power is absolutely necessary for the imperialist system to survive. They form the absolute majority of all countries and their subordination is key to the imperialists’ continued power. Their local ruling classes either collaborate with one great power or another, or else they try to carve out some limited measure of “independence” by slipping into the cracks between the powers’ areas of influence.³ Some of these countries are fully capitalist, while many remain locked into semi-feudal, semi-colonial relations of production. Many oppressed countries, regional powers or imperialist satellites and all four major imperialist powers have within their borders oppressed nations or nationalities deprived of their own state power, a phenomenon which adds yet another layer of complexity to the imperialist world-system. Among most or all of these categories of subordinate countries and nations, low standards of living, state or paramilitary violence in defence of exploitation and out-bound migratory waves are the norm.

The Four Major Contradictions

The three main relationships and contradictions in the world today are as follows:

• (a) between the imperialists themselves, which means the struggle for the re-division of the world is always in motion, albeit to varying degrees;
• (b) between imperialist countries and oppressed countries, which means imperialist exploitation and oppression, and the struggle for self-determination and independent national development; and
• (c) between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat in each country, which means class struggle and the potential for socialist revolution.

When socialism is brought back to the world by the victorious working class, this will also mean that a fourth major contradiction, between the socialist mode of production and the capitalist mode of production, will cease to be merely potential or latent and become actual and crucial to the whole period at hand. These four relationships and contradictions determine the world situation in which we are acting and attempting to usher in socialism.

Canada in an Imperialist World

As we have stated above, Canada is an integral part of the AAIA. It is a fully-fledged, though relatively small, military and economic partner of the USA and the UK. Militarily, Canada maintains a fairly small, fully professional army that is, by its own admission, specialized in counter-insurgency (for reasons both international and domestic, as we shall see). While Canada is no heavy hitter, it has, since its founding, been a subordinate to the lead power in the AAIA, which has been the USA since 1945. Despite its attempt to portray itself as a “peacekeeper” and its infrequent but highly theatrical and wholly disingenuous withdrawals from a select few AAIA military initiatives,⁴ Canada is closely integrated with the AAIA military apparatus. It is committed to the AAIA as a military alliance aimed at containing, defeating or eliminating the up-and-coming new imperialist powers, as well as thoroughly invested in NATO as the organizational expression of this military alliance.

Economically, Canadian monopolies benefit from the AAIA’s worldwide economic network to rack up profits abroad. Canada is home to major institutions of imperialist monopoly finance capital, namely the “Big Five” Canadian banks.⁵ Along with significant foreign holdings in manufacturing and logistics, Canada specializes in resource extraction, particularly in the mining and fossil fuels sectors. Canadian mining monopolies, such as Barrick Gold, Teck Resources Limited and many others, not only carry out significant domestic and US-based operations (many of them on lands still claimed and often still inhabited by Indigenous peoples) but also hold even more vast assets in Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean (with less significant assets in Asia, Europe and Oceania). Canada also capitalizes on migratory waves largely caused by its allies’ and its own activities abroad to fill the ranks of its working class with desperate people who are often pressed to work in miserable conditions and with insufficient pay.⁶

The Nations of Canada

Canada is not a nation-state. It’s a country first born of the earliest waves of European colonization and consolidated through the process of the development of capitalism-imperialism. There is no single Canadian nation. Instead, within its own borders, Canada constitutes a vast territorial empire, a prison house of nations that’s been built on the violent oppression of Indigenous peoples and which still deprives Francophones and various other national minorities of certain national rights. This empire was built over a half-millenium of colonization and territorial expansion, driven first by the struggle between France and England for the division of the so-called “New World” and later by the Canadian bourgeoisie’s need for new economic frontiers.

This process started with the establishment of the French colony of New France. It continued with conquest by the British Empire and the annexation of neighbouring British colonies. It went into high gear with Confederation in 1867 and the following westward expansion. Canada only assumed its current shape in 1949 upon the absorption of the British colony of Newfoundland. Even to this day, the Canadian ruling class is working to consolidate its grip on the Indigenous-majority, resource-rich North. The gradual expansion of Canada under the bourgeoisie’s rule has created a situation where some nations are openly, violently oppressed and denied their collective rights while the proletariat of all others are subjected to the ruling class’s power and whims.

The peoples of modern day Canada can be divided into distinct categories in two different ways. The first of these divisions consists in separating the historic national groups of Canada from the national minorities stemming from recent immigration. The historic groups are historically anchored in more or less delineated territories, with shared languages and usually a common economy, forming stable national minorities and full-fledged nations. These include Indigenous peoples as a whole (the First Nations, Métis and Inuit peoples), the Quebecois, Anglo-Canadians, Acadians, Franco-Ontarians and Franco-Manitobans. Other, much smaller (or more fully-assimilated) historical national minorities include the Black Scotians, Celtic Maritimers (Gaelic Scots, Irish Newfoundlanders, etc.), the descendants of early East Asian and South Asian immigrants, French Canadians outside of the three main areas outlined above, Eastern and Southern European immigrants in the prairies, and more recent immigrant groups wherever they are found in large numbers and concentrations. By contrast, national minorities stemming from more recent immigration, despite sharing common national traits such as common origin, language and culture, lack the territorial or economic features of full-fledged nations, and rather exist as dispersed families and fluctuating communities across Canada, within and across the multinational popular classes as a whole.

The second division of Canada’s nations is based on their relationship with the Canadian State and the degree to which they are currently able to enjoy their national and cultural rights freely. There are three such groupings of nations. First, we find the two dominant nations: Canadians and the Québécois. These nations’ economies are built around monopoly finance capital and both enjoy state power (whether federal or provincial), which ensures their national rights are upheld. Second, there are the colonized nations: Native people as a whole. Canadian colonialism is its own historical phenomenon, distinct from other historical forms of colonialism. In the present day, it is a relationship based on unequal legal rights and a separate legal status between Canadian citizens and “Status Indians,” whose aim it is to enable the dominant-nation ruling class to continue seizing more and more land and resources from these peoples. The third grouping of nations consists of non-colonized nations without state power, whose national and cultural rights are neglected or repressed to various degrees. Non-Indigenous national minorities fall into this category as a rule.

The First Peoples

Long before the European colonization of what has since become Canada, a wide range of ethnic-cultural groups of people inhabited the lands today claimed by Canada. They were the peoples of a whole continent, speaking over 60 different languages (at least in the lands presently under the control of the Canadian State), living under distinct modes of production (from classless, communal societies to societies in early phases of class stratification, and even a small number of slave-holding or proto-feudal societies). These are the Indigenous peoples. Though their lands and population shrunk dramatically under the genocidal effects of colonialism and capitalist expansion, they remain key players in Canadian political reality. These peoples are formed of numerous distinct national groups which have slowly but steadily been taking on common characteristics by the dual action of Canadian colonialism and their collective resistance against it. Legally divided between First Nations, Inuits and Métis, they can be grouped in a common category due to their shared historical experience and relation to the Canadian state. Indigenous peoples account for around 5% of the total population: around 1 million First Nations people, 550,000 Métis and 70,000 Inuit.

Indigenous peoples are the first and foremost victims of national oppression in Canada. First caught in the crossfire of the French and British empires’ colonial expansion and wars from the 1600s on, their population was devastated by wars, disease, displacement, forced relocations and massacres, to a point where entire peoples were decimated. Since Confederation and until recently, violent repression, segregation and forceful oppression were the main tools used by the Canadian State in order to solve what it saw as “the Indian problem.” Since the 1960s–70s, the State shifted to a variety of new, subtler methods of pacification and management, from tokenistic elevation, especially in the field of culture, to mass incarceration and violent policing for much of the working class and unemployed sections of Indigenous populations. In either case, the goal of extinguishing Indigenous nationhood and fully assimilating Indigenous people under Canadian law has remained unchanged, with open violence being wielded whenever deemed necessary by the Canadian ruling-class.⁷

The first, openly brutal phase of national oppression against the First Peoples of this continent has been enshrined into law. Various pieces of legislation have anchored Indigenous national oppression into the Canadian legal apparatus, including the infamous 1876 “Indian Act” which made them second-class citizens. Treaties between these nations and the British Crown or the Canadian government were usually imposed by force or obtained by treachery, and the terms contained therein were, in any case, rarely upheld or upheld in ways advantageous only to the Crown or government.

Native people have been driven into “Indian Reserves” which represent only a fraction of their historical lands, with the most productive or resource-rich lands being particularly targeted for appropriation by the government or private capitalist interests. They were largely deprived of their traditional means of subsistence as well as their right to property under capitalism, forcing them into a relationship of dependency with the State. Their children were forcibly taken away to be assimilated at state-sponsored residential schools operated by the major churches, where many thousands died, making these schools’ slogan of “killing the Indian in the child” terrifyingly literal. These facts paint a grim picture: that of a full-fledged genocide orchestrated by the Canadian ruling class and State in order to appropriate lands and resources by trampling whole peoples underfoot in their march toward ever-growing profits.

Today’s new, more “democratic” phase of national oppression may be less openly violent, but it serves the same purposes as the earlier one. Despite the huge gestures of “reconciliation” that have been promulgated throughout Canada since the election of Justin Trudeau in 2015 by virtually all levels of government and a wide swathe of the Canadian bourgeoisie, Indigenous peoples are still denied their right to self-determination. The Canadian ruling class’s policy in the last few decades since the release of Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s 1969 White Paper remains full assimilation. In trying to achieve this, the Canadian State uses new land agreements as attempts to municipalize reserves and Indigenous governance while employing armed force to quell any national struggles that resist this assimilation agenda. The Canadian ruling class is a world leader in hypocrisy, which it has elevated to never-before-seen heights. The discrepancy between standards of living between Indigenous people and non-Indigenous Canadians remains severe, and is characterized by limited access to education, faulty infrastructure, often including a lack of resources as fundamental as clean drinking water, unemployment, generalized poverty, sky-high suicide rates (eight times higher than the national average), disproportionate rates of imprisonment, etc.

Moreover, the Canadian ruling class’s colonial tactics have created a new barrier to Indigenous national liberation: the emergence of a comprador Indigenous bourgeoisie aligned with the Canadian monopoly bourgeoisie.⁸ This growing class, which wields disproportionate influence in the official institutions, is an important colonial tool to sow division and tame popular resentment. Lower in the pecking order, an Indigenous petty-bourgeoisie and intelligentsia have also been fostered by the State as part of its counter-revolutionary strategy. The revolutionary camp will have to cautiously navigate in building a class alliance that unites the broadest interests of the Indigenous peoples while isolating and struggling against these new reactionary classes.

Indigenous national struggle in Canada faces a series of serious dilemmas. The unequal, often fraudulent treaties which make up a large part of Canada’s legal framework for dispossession of these peoples are also the one barrier preventing them from losing their remaining lands and resources. The infantilizing, segregationist “Indian status” which sets them apart from (and puts them below) Canadian citizens is also the only thing at present holding back the complete extinguishment of their nationhood under the existing laws. The cultural, traditionalist forms of struggle which are often used to affirm their distinct rights and oppose foreign encroachment on their lands are insufficient for them to acquire true sovereignty or carry out all-around national economic development and achieve emancipation from the Canadian state and Canadian monopolies.

The only way to cut the proverbial Gordian knot is for the Indigenous national struggle to link up with the proletarian struggle for socialism in overthrowing the extant Canadian State. Once it is overthrown, new agreements can be reached over the use of land, resources and their sharing between nations. True sovereignty can be enshrined in a new, multinational constitution. This sovereignty can ensure full, distinct national rights without the need for any “Indian status,” which would be replaced by full citizenship in a sovereign nation. Full independence can be achieved by those nations who want it and have the resources needed to sustain it.⁹ Self-directed economic and social development will allow the First Peoples to move forward into a non-colonial future rather than trying to defend what few shreds remain of their pre-colonial past. Native cultures will find a second wind under conditions of political freedom and economic development. This is the path that has been followed by oppressed and colonized peoples the world over, and it is high time for it to finally reach North America and tear up the two imperialist monsters from inside out.

The New Peoples

The colonization of North America by the British and French has transformed the national landscape of the continent, destroying and displacing hundreds of distinct Indigenous peoples, and giving birth to new, full-fledged nations. Unlike many historical colonial societies (the British Raj in India, French Algeria before the Algerian Revolution, and many others), the colonizing nations of Canada have developed into genuine nations with ruling and working classes of their own. They now make up the vast majority of the Canadian population, and their proletariat is today the main force for socialist revolution in this country. These New Peoples of North America comprise the nations of Quebec, English Canada, Francophone and other historical minority groups and immigrant national minorities.

The Quebecois are one of the two dominant nations in Canada, numbering around 7 million people and forming the vast majority of the population in the province of Quebec. Though sharing common origins with other French Canadians, the Quebecois have developed into a distinct nation which has only language and some cultural elements in common with them. Following their conquest by the British, the Quebecois people suffered varying degrees of national oppression and were deprived of linguistic and cultural rights. For a long time, their economy was dominated by the Anglo-Canadian and US monopoly bourgeoisies with a countryside stuck in anachronistic semi-feudal conditions.

Beginning in the 1960s, first under the impulse of popular movements, trade unions and progressive nationalism, then under the leadership of the national bourgeoisie, Quebec went through a vast movement of national affirmation, taking control of its economy, claiming state power at the provincial level, developing a properly Quebecois advanced capitalism and winning back the majority of its national rights (for instance winning key language protections, international representation in certain supranational bodies, etc.). Quebec integrated itself in the AAIA as a junior partner within the larger Anglo-Canadian ruling class, carving out its own, albeit small, place in the centre of world reaction. Twice now, fractions of the Quebec monopoly bourgeoisie have attempted to secede from Canada (in 1980 and 1995) — but they have always made clear that even if they had succeeded in this endeavour, they intended to remain close allies of the Anglo-American imperialists.

At this point in time, it would be incorrect to describe Quebec as an oppressed nation. We must, however, acknowledge the existence of a very real, still existing contradiction between the Quebecois people and the Canadian State, which finds its roots in the historical oppression of the Quebecois and its last few remnants. This contradiction takes the form of “Quebec-bashing” and mutual hostility and suspicion between the Quebecois and other nations within Canada. When these issues appear within the Canadian proletariat, we identify them as a contradiction among the people to be solved by persuasion.

The Acadians and French Canadians are a set of distinct peoples that, in a similar way to Indigenous peoples, can be identified as a single, distinct category due to their common current and historical reality. They account for around 4% of the Canadian population, or 1.1 million people: 300,000 Acadians in the Maritimes, most of whom are located in New Brunswick, and 800,000 French Canadians, mainly in Ontario and Manitoba, with much smaller groups elsewhere in western Canada. All of these groups constitute national minorities within their respective provinces.

Acadians have historically suffered from the highest degree of national oppression ever faced by a non-Indigenous people in Canadian history, undergoing a mass deportation during the events known as the “Grand Dérangement” from 1755 to 1763, during which around a third of the Acadian population died in shipwrecks, famines and massacres and from disease. For a long time they suffered from severe inequalities in development, which were, however, considerably reduced over time. Unlike the Quebecois, Acadians have to this day never developed a properly Acadian advanced capitalism or national state power, even at the provincial level.

French Canadian historical minorities spread through the country first by settling in as-yet non-colonized areas (before Confederation) and later through internal migration. They were once significant minorities in most provinces, but ongoing processes of assimilation have gradually chipped away at them, eliminating their national distinctiveness in some areas and restricting their cultural and linguistic rights everywhere outside of Quebec. Today, they are mostly present in a few areas of Ontario and Manitoba, with much smaller communities surviving elsewhere in the country.

Both Acadians and French Canadians still face cultural and linguistic inequalities. French-speaking minorities struggle to access basic services in their own language, a reality which hinders their fulfillment and possibilities for social ascension. For French Canadians and Acadians outside of New Brunswick, the danger of total assimilation remains very real.

Anglo-Canadians (the “Canadian nation”) now make up slightly less than 50% of the total population. They are the largest national historic group and the main dominant nation in Canada. Though its dominance and Canada’s official policy of multiculturalism make it easy to imagine that it is not a nation at all, it nonetheless possesses all the characteristics of a nation: a common territory, language, economic life and culture. Our task as communists is to recognize it as a nation equal to all others and to bring forward the deeply buried progressive and revolutionary strands in its history and contemporary life.

Tracing its roots to the old British colonies and the Loyalists fleeing the American Revolution, the Anglo-Canadian nation was shaped and constantly reshaped by mass migration, first mainly by settlers and immigrant proletarians from the British Isles (principally Irish and Scottish people) or elsewhere from western Europe and the US (including many Black people¹⁰), then from eastern and southern Europe, as well as Asia,¹¹ in the early and mid-20th century. Nowadays, the Anglo-Canadian nation is once again being reshaped by mass migratory waves mainly from Asia, but also from Central and South America and Africa. Quebec, as the other dominant nation of Canada, is also evolving in a similar way.

English Canada has historically been dominated by Ontario and its ancestor Upper Canada, with massive differences in development geographically. The Greater Toronto Area in southern Ontario remains by far the most populous and economically developed region in Canada and the stronghold of Canadian finance capital. The Atlantic provinces, as well as many rural regions throughout the country, such as in the Prairies, remain relatively poor and underdeveloped. In addition to this, in every Anglo-Canadian region, from major metropolitan areas to fly-over country, it is crucial to draw a clear distinction within the Anglo-Canadian population between the working class and the ruling class, since their ultimate interests are completely at odds with each other. The unity of the Canadian nation must be broken along class lines if we hope to ever rebuild this country on new foundations.

Contrary to the historically constituted national groups mentioned above, national minorities stemming from recent immigration exist as more dispersed and fluctuating communities. They nonetheless exert significant influence on the national landscape. Nowadays, over 20% of all Canadians are people who were born abroad, a number which has varied over time but has always remained relatively high. An additional 22% of all Canadians were born to immigrant parents, bringing those belonging to immigrant families to nearly half of the total population. The ruling class uses immigration in order to: (1) shift the balance around the national question; (2) constantly replenish and recompose the proletariat as a more docile and exploitable force that sees itself as a people with few to no rights; and (3) as a source of economic added value as immigrants arrive ready to sell their labour-power, having been raised from childhood and educated elsewhere and at others’ expense.

Starting from the 1960s, under Pierre Elliott Trudeau, the Canadian ruling class has muted its former national doctrine of Orangeism (Anglo-Protestant supremacism¹²) and replaced it with an official policy of “multiculturalism,” which consists broadly of importing a whole world of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois immigrants from the oppressed countries, sprinkling them across Canadian society and elevating enough of them into the political, cultural and intellectual superstructure of Canadian society to be able to present the colonial and imperialist regime to the masses as some kind of never-before-seen multicultural wonderland.

For the immigrant proletariat, however, things are not so promising. Various administrative and legal barriers can leave them stranded in the lowest layers of the proletariat, facing segregation, imprisonment, deportation and exploitation and living in inhumane housing conditions. Among the ruling class’s most devious methods for exploiting working-class immigrants are the various “temporary” immigration programs, which have been growing over the past couple decades and have massively increased in the 2020s, surpassing the annual number of permanent residencies granted. Temporary foreign workers, under various forms of work permits, often lack basic democratic rights such as the right to mobility and to change employers or access to social programs and assistance. Once, these programs were targeted only to a few specific industries, agriculture being one of the most important. Now, new industries (restaurants, construction, logistics, food processing, etc.) make increasing use of them, and temporary foreign workers are increasingly pushed to work in far-away areas to increase the population and maintain the economic output of small towns and rural areas.

Rampant with human trafficking, fraud, and other formally-illegal-yet-tolerated forms of abuse, the temporary foreign work programs have more and more become akin to a modern-day form of slavery. The workers escaping these systems fuel the constant mass of non-status immigrants, who have no legal rights at all and are subject to even worse forms of oppression and exploitation.

A New Canada

The monopoly bourgeoisie and its State wilfully confuse the potential of Canada for its actual reality. Canada really could be a brand-new type of country, one where national sovereignty is not the preserve of a small parasitic class but is instead granted to the myriad national groups that give it its rich cultural mosaic. We really could all work together to preserve our respective cultures, develop our economy in sustainable ways which benefit all working people, embrace cultures and traditions originating from pre-colonial North America, from Europe and now from the entire world. We could collectively take everything that is old and make it into something new.

But this is not how things stand now — because doing things this way would not allow the ruling class to maximize its profits and remain competitive vis-à-vis its imperialist competitors. Indigenous sovereignty would restrict monopoly capital’s access to key resources and territories. (Thus, the colonial policy of Canada extends right up to the present day.) Linguistic rights for historical national minorities appear as a waste of time and resources to a class which cares only about maximizing profits. Immigrants and refugees are welcomed not as human beings with dreams and aspirations they hope to fulfill in a new land but as a new and ever-growing reserve of cheap labour. Anglo-Canadians and the Quebecois enjoy full national rights, but working-class people in these two nations remain powerless because they are proletarians. They can never control their own fate as long as they do not pursue their own politics, independent from their ruling classes: “Can a nation be free if it oppresses other nations? It cannot.” (Lenin).

Tensions arise between proletarians of all these groups both because of objective conditions and because of ideological influences spread by the monopoly bourgeoisie. Our task is to resolve these tensions by offering a revolutionary political project that unites the long-term interests of proletarians of all nations. Only in this way can we overcome national divisions, racism and mutual suspicion.

Once the working people of Canada take political power into their own hands, Canada’s true potential can be realized — that of a land with many peoples, all of whom deserve to maintain their distinct identity while also contributing to a larger whole. Sovereignty can coexist with political and economic unity; distinctiveness can coexist with togetherness. Not only can this be done but it must be done.

The (N)CPC begins by recognizing oppressed nations’ right to self-determination up to and including secession. But we do not content ourselves with this: we recognize that given the way Canada has been built, total separation between its various nations is likely to be counterproductive. Therefore, we intend to build a new form of political and economic unity, a multinational socialist confederacy whose component parts are not arbitrarily-drawn provinces, but really-existing peoples and nations.

Such a confederacy would need to establish new processes of treaty-making and nation-to-nation negotiations which would no longer be carried out under the constant threat of the ruling class’s repressive apparatus. Indeed, we believe that by excluding the monopoly bourgeoisie from this process entirely, we solve much of the existing problem. People from the working class and from oppressed nations and national minorities need to create their own constitution, establish a new multinational State which preserves the sovereignty of its component parts, redraw Canada’s internal borders according to really-existing national divisions and renegotiate or reaffirm existing treaties. Without the monopoly bourgeoisie and its representatives and lieutenants, we can find common ground and build a confederacy where we thrive and respect each others’ needs and prerogatives.

Social Classes in Canada

Across all nations, Canadian society is split by an even more fundamental divide: social class. Accumulation of capital has reached never-before-seen heights: a tiny class of financial elite and other monopolists hoarding astronomical wealth that reaches into the trillions while the broad masses of the people see their living conditions slip from their hands day by day. As Karl Marx described, “Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other — Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.”

Comprised of all those deprived of the means to produce and forced to sell their labour power to survive, the proletariat is the largest class in society, forming somewhere between 60 and 65% of the population.¹³ At its core are those who work in natural resources, manufacturing, construction, transport, and logistics — labourers at the centre of capitalist exploitation. They are key to the revolutionary movement not only by their large number—around 4 million—but because they are the producers of commodities and wealth. Without labourers there can be no capitalism and no bourgeoisie; thus labourers hold immense importance in their overthrow. Also fundamentally important are those working in industries which allow labour-power to reproduce itself over time — chiefly health care and education — totalling approximately 4 million workers. There are also those working to facilitate the circulation of capital — primarily workers in retail and services with about 3 million workers. Without these workers the bourgeoisie cannot maintain itself in the long run or realize its profit. Together with the labourers, these sections of the proletariat, totalling about 11 million people, hold the potential to establish a new, socialist economy.

Around this core are proletarians who work in unproductive, parasitical, socially unnecessary sectors that only make sense in a capitalist-imperialist society: office employees of banks and financial institutions, workers in advertising, low-level government bureaucrats, etc.¹⁴ These, some 4 million workers, serve the bourgeoisie in the administration of capital, working in alienating, senseless jobs, each day wasting marvellous human potential which could otherwise be used for the common good.

Finally, the proletariat also includes all of those who are dispossessed and comprise an unstable workforce for various reasons, living on the meagre government programs of welfare, retirement, or bouncing between part-time, undeclared jobs. Less strategically placed in production, they nonetheless suffer from acute oppression, social control, poverty and mental and physical health problems.

Across all of the aforementioned sectors are proletarians — usually women — who are mostly unpaid to reproduce labourers for the next working day and to reproduce the next generation of workers. All of the above have everything to win in seizing political power for themselves and building an economy where each can work according to their capacity and receive according to their needs.

Yet, at present, political power is not held by this majority class but by its permanent class enemy: the bourgeoisie, which, despite its small size by population, holds massive wealth and controls the majority of production in society. At the head of this class is a tiny clique of monopoly bourgeois and financial oligarchs. Through convoluted webs of finance they hold immense power, holding shares of banks, sitting in boards of corporations and owning vast media empires and powerful political lobbies. Through the holdings system they control even vaster wealth than they legally possess by instrumentalizing the savings of subordinated classes for their own purposes. They are what we can call the ruling class and are represented by such families as the Thomsons, Pattisons, Desmarais, Irvings. The Canadian monopoly bourgeoisie is a powerful class: in Canada there are more than 60 billionaires — more than in historical great powers such as the United Kingdom, France or Japan — and added to those are more or less 11,000 thousand “ultra-high net worth individuals” with more than 30 million USD in assets. This class is organized in powerful lobbies such as the Business Council of Canada and represents Canadian monopolies in the institutions of world capital such as the World Economic Forum, G30, Trilateral Commission and others. This oligarchy is at the head of the Canadian ruling class’s drive to participate in the re-division of the world.

Below them is a much vaster section of the bourgeois class: those who own means of production and exploit labour power (but not to the extent of monopolies), within which we can count: minor industrialists, small shareholders with no ensuing decision power and the whole array of small and medium-sized business owners. They are a significant class in Canada, representing about 5–10% of the total population and serving as the main base for the open ideological and political defence of capitalist, free market policies. Also part of the bourgeoisie are the “lieutenants of capital” who have amassed their wealth on indirect exploitation by serving as intermediates, senior managers, major technocrats, ideologues and politicians working in defence of bourgeois class interests for the bourgeoisie. They are those who lead the state-owned monopolies and government ministries, those who act as the upper executive structure of large corporations, as well as those hired to protect capital, such as non rank-and-file policemen and soldiers. Though the middle bourgeoisie and the lieutenants of the bourgeoisie hold less power than the financial oligarchs, they often appear as the front-line or most immediate enemies of the proletariat on the field of economic and political struggle. As a whole, the bourgeoisie can be described as the class accumulating wealth within the present capitalist-imperialist system: they are the ones profiting from, directly and indirectly, the exploitation and suffering of the world’s majority.

Between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat lies a vast, oscillating class: the petty-bourgeoisie, numbering about 25-35% of the total population (but who are difficult to quantify precisely). Neither exploiter nor exploited, the petty-bourgeoisie is comprised of a diverse array of “middle class” positions within society overall, including the self-employed and family small business owners, as well as salaried professionals with considerable control over their work. We can think of small trades entrepreneurs, corner store owners, family farmers, as well as university professors, social workers, lawyers, engineers, etc. For a large part of this class, the lower petty-bourgeoisie, living conditions are similar to that of much of the proletariat. Though they are not directly exploited, they suffer from the various oppressions of capital when they leave the workplace: they are affected by inflation, in some regions lack infrastructure and social programs, are straddled with debt and sometimes live in deficient housing. Many of them can be counted among the popular classes — the broad sector of people who are suffering from the effects of capitalism-imperialism to various degrees rather than benefiting from those effects. Stuck between a rock and a hard place, we must win this class to allying with the proletariat for a better life in socialism. The proletariat must struggle to win them over under its leadership in a united front against the bourgeoisie, as they can be powerful allies, holding much influence in universities, trade unions, media outlets, religious organizations and other such institutions.

The fundamental contradiction in capitalist society overall is between socialized production and the private ownership of the means of production, which manifests itself daily as a struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat in the economic, political and ideological spheres. The bourgeoisie at present is overwhelmingly stronger in all fields: it has powerful economic institutions such as the big banks and firms, its interests dominate all major political parties and it has the direct or indirect control of all mainstream media, and holds considerable influence in universities and think tanks.

The economic power of the proletariat is very weak, even weaker than would be suggested by the union membership rate of 29% (less than 14% in the private sector!) as a combination of labour-management partnerships, restrictive labour laws and a general acceptance of those restrictions by union leadership has caused many — if not most — unions to fall far short of their potential fighting capacity. The proletariat does not yet have a political party of its own to match the strength of those of the bourgeoisie. Consequently, its division reigns in the ideological sphere. Yet through its objective existence, the proletariat holds much power, a power that can be unleashed quickly and with strength as has been done countless times in the past. Such is our forthcoming task.

To release this force, the (N)CPC must apply the principle of workers’ centrality. That is, the principle that the workers at the centre of production — and found in great concentration, specifically, the labourers in large-scale industry and the health and education workers in the major service centres — form the heart of the proletariat and the main force for socialist revolution in Canada. The Party must therefore, first and foremost, establish and build itself within these workplaces.

The Canadian Economy

All these classes enter into relation within the monstrous framework of the capitalist mode of production in Canada. As an advanced capitalist country and imperialist power, the scientific advancement, knowledge and labour skill in our country is among the greatest ever achieved in human history. Astounding scientific progress has been made in the fields of mining, engineering, telecommunications, manufacturing, agriculture and pharmaceuticals, as well as in the computer industry. Productivity has reached never-before-seen heights. Despite a population of approximately forty million, Canada’s gross domestic product ranks ninth in the world. Canada’s economy is fundamentally integrated with that of the US, the world’s foremost economic superpower, which claims the majority by far of Canada’s imports and exports. Canada is a lesser yet equal-opportunity partner of US imperialism, as demonstrated by the mutual foreign direct investments between the two countries. The Canadian economy is both strong and strategically placed among the major players in the world.

But we ask, to what end? A prolonged crisis of stagnation and inflation is affecting the popular classes of the country. Living conditions are worsening for most. For many, quality food and housing are becoming unattainable luxuries. What was gained in terms of social services and popular rights by past people’s movements is crumbling due to underfunding, especially in education and health care. Unplanned, chaotic production damages the environment and the people’s ability to benefit from it. Air pollution, floods and forest fires are rising threats to health and livelihoods. Youth are increasingly affected by mental health problems, addiction and petty crime. A feeling of despair sweeps through the younger generations who will inherit this world.

For all this, capitalism is the sole culprit. While a high degree of social organization and scientific knowledge reign in the individual industries, social anarchy defines production as a whole. The sum of scientific improvements are not put at the service of the people but toward the drive for private profit. As great as scientific improvement could be in service of the people, it constitutes a formidable force of destruction when in the service of private accumulation — and such is the nature of our economy.

Canada is a huge country, ranking second in the world by landmass. Thanks to this huge territory it has developed historically as an economic power in the field of natural resources. Canada is a reference point and tax haven for mining industries worldwide, with around 75% of the world’s mining companies headquartered in Canada. More recently, owing to the exploitation of tar sands — a particularly polluting form of oil extraction — Canada has emerged as a petroleum superpower, being the world’s fourth largest producer and exporter of oil. For three provinces (Alberta, Saskatchewan, Newfoundland) and two territories (Nunavut and the Northwest Territories), oil and mining are the largest sectors of the economy.

Aside from natural resources, the Canadian economy includes other productive industries, the largest of which is manufacturing, accounting for around a tenth of its GDP and being the largest economic sector in the province of Quebec. Montreal is the country’s largest industrial city and a hub for aerospace and the computer industry. The Great Lakes region of Ontario is another centre for manufacture, notably of cars, which constitute Canada’s second largest export only after oil. However, production in Canada is strongly lopsided to act as complimentary to the US economy, with a heavy reliance on the import of manufactured and capital-intensive goods and a heavy reliance on the export of natural resources, mainly to the US.

Also accounting for a large part of the economy is health care and social assistance,¹⁵ within which we must mention Canada’s public health care system. Put in place by the federal government as a concession to the people’s struggles of the 1960s, it has been steadily undermined through divestment and privatization in recent decades due to — often intentional — bad management and unsustainable work conditions. All provinces face chronic shortages of nurses, caregivers, and other essential skilled workers. The COVID-19 pandemic has shed light on how horrible the situation was, with elderly working-class people being the first victims. The treatment of older working-class people in Canada is shocking: once they are unfit to fend for themselves, they are forced to spend up to their last pennies in rent only to be isolated in austere nursing homes with little to no gratifying work or leisure accessible to them, with only a chair to sit on while they wait to die. Just as the capitalists have no interest in putting to use the wisdom and experience of elders for the common good if it does not translate to money in their pockets, so too do they have no interest in high-quality health care beyond what is needed to reproduce and maintain a docile workforce.

For the new multinational socialist confederacy, health care and other fields such as education and culture will not be treated as regrettable necessities to keep working-class people alive, but rather as a central goal of its economic planning. The right to free, high-quality health care and education will be implemented and will be made possible thanks to the submission of production to human need rather than to the accumulation of private profit. Once we cut off the dead weight of capital accumulation there will be no lack of factories, materials, knowledge and skill in this country to build and run our hospitals and schools.

Among the first dead weights to cut away from the Canadian proletariat and the popular classes will be the astonishing 15% of GDP allocated to the unproductive, parasitic sectors of the economy: finance, insurance, and real estate. Finance capital is heavily centred on Toronto, with the Toronto Stock Exchange being one of the largest stock exchanges in the world, ranking third in North America only after the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ. Leading the powerful financial institutions in the country are the “Big Five” Canadian banks,¹⁶ as well as asset management and insurance firms such as Brookfield Asset Management, Power Corporation and Manulife. To these we can add the foreign, mainly US-based financial institutions with assets in Canada which also exert significant influence, such as BlackRock.

More and more embedded with finance are the markets of housing and real estate. Housing, one of the most fundamental human needs, has been perverted into a sector of purely parasitic accumulation from the money that banks and finance capital make from mortgages, insurance premiums, rent, and the selling of real estate. In consequence the “Canadian dream” of personal homeownership has faded quickly in recent years: house prices have gone up 42% faster than wages between 2015 and 2023. Home ownership is on a steady decline while the number of renters has steadily risen. In this exploding rental market usury of the highest degree is on the rise, with more and more rental properties owned by real estate investment trusts (REITs), while the market of personal or single-family homes banks profit from life-long mortgages. Through the housing market an ever-growing portion of workers’ paycheques are transferred back to the bourgeoisie in the form of rent or interest. Either enslaved to mortgages or rents, workers are often one step away from the streets. Homeless encampments are on the rise throughout the country and have become a permanent reality in big cities. Even the bourgeois press and bourgeois politicians have been forced to admit the existence of a persistent and worsening housing crisis, but they only ever implement policies that serve big developers and the real estate industry. Meanwhile, there is no shortage of luxury condos, homes, even office buildings — which the big capitalists increasingly buy and sell as assets, too often with no one even living in them. In the anarchy of capitalist society, condo towers sit half-empty and filled with AirBnB rental units while people die frostbitten at their doorsteps. Socialist society will free housing from the grip of capitalist greed and ensure the right to a decent home for all.

Finance, insurance and real estate are the archetypes of capitalist anarchy and the most parasitical forms taken on by capital today. Specialized economists, computer engineers and various other skilled workers waste their potential by helping the big bourgeoisie squeeze out the most possible wealth from the working class. In the past couple of years, wholly absurd and environmentally destructive forms of speculation have arisen, such as the trading of cryptocurrency, in which even the nominal link between speculation and real-life use values has been abolished. Finance is presented to us as a god, an outside force living above and beyond our control, yet this system has been put in place by the financial oligarchy and the larger ruling class. The abolition of speculation and usury and the setting up of a rational trade and monetary system will be one of the first great acts of the socialist revolution.

For a Socialist, Democratic and Scientific Economy

From its first day in power, the revolutionary government will proceed to the expropriation without compensation of the monopolist bourgeoisie, followed by the socialization of all major industries in natural resources, construction, manufacture, transportation, health care, education and housing. It will repudiate the national debt, abolish all imperialist financial institutions such as stock markets, banks, asset management firms and insurance companies and replace them with a single, centralized institution liberated from speculation and usury. The labour power currently allocated to finance and other parasitic sectors will be reallocated to boost productive endeavours. Small enterprise will be allowed to exist for some time after the proletariat takes power and will be gradually phased out by a combination of voluntary collectivization, replacement by state-run enterprises fully subsumed within a centrally planned economy and, in the case of individuals who actively oppose socialist development, appropriation of enterprises by the workers’ state. Restructuring the economy toward self-sufficiency will be another major task for the revolutionary government, as it cannot assume continued access to the globalized imperialist economy, especially in an era of ecological crisis and inter-imperialist conflict.

Work in socialist society will not be a forced deed to survive, but a right: a right to contribute, in whatever capacity a person has, to the collective edification of socialism, the living conditions of our species, and the ecological sustainability of our planet. Life will not follow the depressing cycle of surplus value producers in training–surplus value producers–waiting to die, but will rather be, from birth to death, a gratifying exchange between society and the individual. The watchword and goal of our new society will be: from each according to their capacity, to each according to their need.

In capitalist liberal democracy, one has formal rights, yet those rights do not account for much in the workplace. The average worker has no right to vote or to speak; he is befuddled as a beast. Under socialism, democracy will be installed in workplaces. Manual workers will be invited to speak and think, and intellectual workers will be invited to get on solid ground. Simultaneously, anarchy in production will be abolished. Individual factories, mines, hospitals, etc. will not be left to themselves but will have to work within the frameworks of central plans decided upon democratically by the higher organs of working-class power following the recommendations of scientists and experts. Democratization of the economy will be the order of the day.

Unprecedented environmental destruction more than ever poses the urgent necessity for a scientific, rational planning of the global economy. Without a radical reorganization of the economy, the world is heading straight towards a brick wall. As natural disasters sweep the globe and intensify, the lives of the vast majority of humanity are threatened. Famines, floods, air pollution and heat waves kill more and more every year. The expansion of capitalism-imperialism to nearly every stretch of the globe and the private accumulation by the financial oligarchy in this day and age accounts for nothing less than the greatest historical crimes against humanity and to all life on this, our one and only known habitable planet. Only the wide-scale reorganization of the economy on a socialist basis can allow for the salvation of the masses and the establishment of a balanced, durable relation between nature and our species — and only the proletariat holds the power to realize it.

The Canadian Constitution and Socialism

The socialist transformation of Canada is absolutely necessary. It can change this country from a prison-house of nations and a fortress of capitalist dispossession and exploitation into a fair and free expansive land whose original peoples are no longer warehoused in tiny Bantustans, where the various nations are no longer pitted one against another, where working people reap the fruits of their labour and where no one is cast away to die on the streets. However, the entire legal, constitutional and political framework of Canada is built to ensure this doesn’t happen in an easy, peaceful fashion.

Canada as a country is built on the right of conquest. Under direct European rule, parts of the Canadian landmass were more or less arbitrarily annexed, through disingenuous and duplicitous negotiations with their original peoples at best, or else open bloodshed and genocide at worst. The desperately poor of Europe—peasants, artisans and workers—were roped into forming the rank-and-file of the initial colonial project in Canada. The European monarchies exercised direct rule over these colonies and pitted them against one another in support of their wars at home. It is through such wars that the British colonialists ultimately prevailed and built up the core of what would go on to become Canada.

Despite attempts at anti-colonial resistance from Indigenous nations on the one hand and attempts at republican uprisings from both the colonial popular classes (1837–38) and the Métis (1869–70 and 1885), British rule prevailed and the right of conquest was maintained even after Confederation (1867) and was used to build Canada as a continental power from the Atlantic ocean to the Pacific shores.

The British North America Act of 1867, Canada’s first constitutional law, was established by a vote of the British parliament. None of the popular classes of Canada’s many nations — neither Native people, nor French Canadians, nor even Anglo-Canadians — were consulted. Only a tiny elite cross-section of Canada’s ruling class was involved in this process in any capacity whatsoever.

When the constitution was “repatriated” in 1982, it was still an act of the British parliament. Repatriation meant merely that the new constitutional act now included a highly-convoluted amending procedure that has only successfully been used once since its adoption. This constitution was never put to a mass vote, was never brought forward before the peoples of Canada, and can never be amended or repealed by the people themselves. And why wouldn’t the bourgeoisie make it this way?

The Canadian constitutional framework was built to maintain the interests of the Canadian monopoly finance bourgeoisie. This is its main role, its secondary role being to mediate between various fractions of that bourgeoisie (between Quebec and English Canada; between various provinces; between the Federal and Provincial governments, etc.). Canada is a confederation of sorts (in fact, a federation), but not a confederacy of peoples or nations. It is a confederation of provinces, which are for the most part administrative and economic divisions rather than real national or cultural divisions. It is a confederation of various ruling-class fractions and forces. What must replace it, in our view, is a multinational socialist confederacy made up of Canada’s various nations under the guidance of Canada’s working class.

Formal Rights versus Real Rights

The Canadian working class and the oppressed nations in Canada live within a framework that was built without them and against them — by their exploiters, their class enemies. They also live within a liberal legal framework. Liberalism as an ideology of the state¹⁷ represents an advance over absolutism, monarchism and other feudal or early-modern ideologies. Liberalism recognizes formal, individual rights. The problem, however, is precisely that these rights are only formal and very general.

There is a right to life, but no right to food, health care, a job or housing, much less to decent, satisfactory housing. There is a right to free expression, but no assurances against the monopolization of the media and telecommunications industries. Now, there’s even a right to medically-assisted death. The fact is that while Canada’s political elites wax lyrical about their country’s democracy, openness and fairness, real, practical rights do not exist.

Canadian law officially affords equal rights and protections to women — the full half of humanity that only started to win back its basic rights in the last century or so — and to sexual and religious minorities. It only “guarantees” these rights, however, through unenforceable bans on discrimination and insincere literary proclamations. A socialist legal framework could instead ensure these groups have positive rights. It would be impossible for a member of a sexual minority, for instance, to be refused employment if there was a right to employment for all who ask for it. It would be much easier to curtail domestic abuse directed against women if there was a universal right to housing that could enable them to leave a dangerous partner at any time without risking homelessness, poverty, or having to rely on charities. The list could go on like this forever.

There are two groups in Canadian society, however, who don’t even enjoy formal equal rights. These are Indigenous people, specifically Status Indians, and non-citizens, in particular undocumented immigrants and temporary foreign workers. The only conceivable way to resolve the separate legal status of Indigenous people without liquidating Indigenous nations as legal entities is collective rights under the banner of the full right to self-determination, up to and including secession. As citizens of truly sovereign nations, Native people would enjoy equal status under the law without putting their nationhood in jeopardy. As for immigrants, they will enjoy full citizenship if they contribute work to the betterment of society — labour which the vast majority are doing today, many of them without enjoying equal rights. With the exception of the elderly, the retired (who choose not to work any longer) and children, citizenship in the new society will be based on making a productive contribution to the whole of society and the people.

Finally, we must underline that real, practical rights are not only a concern of specific minority groups (an idea that the culture wars play into in an attempt to divide the people into “identity” groups pursuing narrow interests and preventing them from uniting on a broad class basis) but of the entire working class. For instance, opening up the floodgates that are, in practice, limiting the people’s right to free speech to the outlets controlled by the tech and media monopolies would benefit the whole people. The right to housing, the right to a job, to food on the table and to solid health care would benefit the class as a whole. The liberal conception of rights and freedoms is no longer sufficient. It had its day, but now it is time to conquer further rights and freedoms for the people.

Legal Quicksand and Political Dead Ends

Canada’s unwieldy, monarchical constitution, its illegitimate founding, its history of elite politics and repression of the people and colonized national groups, the constant rearguard action that its monopoly finance bourgeoisie is fighting to secure access and ownership over land against Indigenous peoples’ fight against ongoing dispossession, its use of the War Measures’ Act (now the Emergency Measures Act) on at least four different occasions to repress domestic dissent and its inability and outright refusal to ensure practical rights to the people all mean that the country stands on legal and moral quicksand.

The peoples of Canada must bring forward a new State and a new Constitution, which would allow the many nations melded together in this country by the violent waves and currents of history to live together on an equal footing for the first time ever. This would give the working class, which builds everything, makes everything and keeps society running day in and day out, the pre-eminent position in politics and in the economy and would do away with the parasitic class that currently runs this country. These two political acts would remake half a continent into something wholly new, beautiful and worth fighting for.

This is what must be done, and this is what we are now proposing. But our call doesn’t exist in a vacuum — it must contend with competing, opposing political ideologies and their class projects. Among these, the main ones for us to contend with are:

(a) Big-L Liberalism, which inherits the despicable baggage of the last hundred years of capitalist class rule in Canada and paints it over with a smiley face and a meaningless “diverse, multicultural” varnish that doesn’t get anyone out of poverty or out of paychque-to-paycheque living;

(b) Conservatism and Libertarianism, which, respectively and in tandem, try to convince the people that the problems of our society are reducible to the moral shortcomings of “human nature” and that our economic problems would be solved by giving capitalists even more free reign to do what they will (which is blatantly false);

(c) Fascism,¹⁸ which proposes to maintain the colonial, exploitative, anti-worker status quo through open violence rather than through the trickery and persuasion that the first two trends deploy (though we are not implying that Liberals and Conservatives are opposed to the use of state-sanctioned violent coercion from time to time, of course; they are fully in favour of that);

(d) Social-Democracy, which identifies many of the same problems we have outlined but reduces them to the moral category of “greed” and proposes to remedy them by piecemeal, limited reforms which leave the economy and politics largely in the same monopolists’ hands;

(e) Nationalism of the dominant nations, which ultimately always aligns with one of the four previous trends; as well as that of the oppressed nations, which is understandable but fails to grasp Canada as a whole and is therefore unable to transform it; and

(f) Activism or Leftism, which sometimes clothes itself in the trappings of Marxism and it also identifies many of the same problems we have outlined above, but is merely a critic of capitalism without being a real threat to it, often seeking subsidy and sponsorship from within bourgeois society. Leftism, as well as activism of the leftist variety, tends to be mostly subservient to the liberal side of the culture wars, generally opting for insincere gestures and failing to see that the key question at hand is that of political power and the class that wields it. Leftists refuse to accept or have not yet come to understand that this question of political power can only be answered by the revolutionary communist vanguard party wielding a sound and comprehensive revolutionary strategy.

None of these political ideologies serve the people’s interests broadly, and so they must be combated and expelled from influence over the proletariat and the people broadly. Some proponents of these ideologies and political trends are honest reformers who truly understand both the dead end this country is in and the plight of working people and oppressed nations. But many more are outright stooges for the ruling class, if not actual members of the ruling class. (There is a word to describe politically-active members of that class: oligarchs.) But none of these ideologies can get Canada out of the constitutional quicksand it is in, and none can solve the problems of workers, immigrants, Indigenous peoples and other national minorities and other oppressed and exploited groups today. The only problems they’re working to solve are those faced by the capitalists: too much dissent, too many people’s struggles, not enough profits to go around.

What we need is a multinational movement of the working class headed by a revolutionary vanguard party. We derive this proposal both from our scientific understanding of world history and from the history of the peoples’ struggles in Canada, which have never stopped trying to move towards a better world and a transformed country.

Liberation in Canada: A Bird’s Eye View

We can and must draw on the heritage left to us by past generations of fighters for liberation, whether they be from the working class, Indigenous peoples, minority nations or otherwise democratic and revolutionary movements. Revolution is not foreign to Canada: it is a long thread running through this country’s history, albeit never succeeding in becoming a dominant aspect of society… as of yet. We must know our past to better imagine, design, win and build a better future.

From Colonization to Republican Revolution

Class struggle existed in a limited number of Indigenous societies prior to colonization, namely the ones where some degree of class differentiation had occurred, especially in the Pacific Northwest. Certainly, Indigenous societies entered into conflict with one another, sometimes including armed conflict. However, European colonization opened up a whole new scale of class and national struggles never before seen on the lands now held by the Canadian state. The first manifestation of this new state of things was the emergence of an ongoing contradiction between the Indigenous peoples and the European colonial states. Indigenous peoples asserted their sovereignty in many ways, at many points in time. As time went by and the balance of forces shifted against them, particularly from the 19th century onward, Indigenous peoples were forced to scale back their assertions of sovereignty and make compromises with the colonial states or else face military and armed conflict. However, periodic uprisings against colonial domination never ceased to occur: they are the longest-running strand in the history of opposition to Canadian capitalism-imperialism, from its earliest origins in the struggles and conflicts with the merchant monopolies of the competing powers of Britain and France up to the present day. In addition to these national uprisings, from the beginnings of the last century onward the demand for Indigenous self-determination manifested itself through a political movement with both reformist and revolutionary tendencies running through it.

As colonization progressed, the colonial societies, both English and French, developed in an unusual way. Rather than mere garrisons of colonial power, they took the shape of full-fledged nations themselves. That is to say that class differentiation happened within them. On the one hand there were the exploitative classes, including the European aristocracies and developing bourgeoisie, as well as the burgeoning local bourgeoisie, the clergy and the semi-feudal seigneurs of French Canada. On the other hand, there were the semi-feudal land tenants, the small craftsmen and, from the 1800s on, the developing proletariat.

The first half of the 19^th century saw the internal class contradictions of Canadian society reach a boiling point for the first time: elements of the local elites opposed the control exerted over the colony by the British monarchy and the metropolitan ruling classes back in Europe and demanded either significant democratic reforms or, later on, full independence and a democratic republican form of government for the colony. They won leadership over a wide social base of the petty-bourgeoisie, craftsmen and land tenants, and, in 1837–1838, waged war on the British colonial apparatus. This was the form taken by Canada’s first attempt at a bourgeois democratic revolution.

After crushing that uprising, the British Empire embarked upon the project of reforming the running of Canada on its own terms. It co-opted certain leaders of the uprisings for its own ends and entrenched the national oppression and economic exploitation of French Canadians, first under the existing semi-feudal land-tenure system and soon afterwards under the wage-labour system of developing capitalism. In 1867, it adopted the British North America Act, which established a confederation of provinces, the Dominion of Canada, uniting most of the existing British possessions on the continent. This new state entity soon embarked on an aggressive campaign of westward expansion. This expansion sparked new waves of Indigenous resistance as the colonial state imposed its power over ever-growing swathes of land. It also faced yet another republican challenge in the form of the two Métis uprisings of 1869–70 and 1885. On both occasions, the Métis nation established provisional governments and attempted to assert its sovereignty. The Canadian government succeeded in institutionalizing the demands of the first rebellion by establishing the province of Manitoba. In 1885, it instead crushed the Métis militarily.

The Three Party-Building Movements

As the Canadian state expanded its reach westwards, Canadian capital developed at a rapid pace. Whereas in the early 19^th century productive activities in Canada were either agricultural, artisanal or, at most, small-scale industrial, modern capitalist industry emerged towards that century’s end, as did major banking institutions. The process of capitalist development in Canada was expedited and far-reaching, with Canadian finance capital and imperialism emerging hand in hand at the close of the 19^th and the beginning of the 20^th centuries.

This massive development of industry demanded and led to the development of a vast modern-day Canadian proletariat, a development driven by immigration from Europe, especially Eastern and Southern Europe, as well as from other British colonial possessions and other parts of the world, particularly India and China. It was also facilitated by the proletarianization of wide swathes of the rural poor in English and French Canada. To a lesser extent, Native people were also proletarianized, forming a significant part of the workforce in specific regions and industries. However, this development was always secondary to the ruling class’s genocidal goals, and thus this trend of proletarianization was only ever partial and many Indigenous nationals maintained non-capitalist economic activity for decades or ended up in a state of near-total dispossession rather than full integration into the industrial economy.

This rapid development of the proletariat, in addition to the importation of revolutionary theory and politics into the country through immigration, led to a significant wave of labour unrest at the close of the 1910s, which included at its apex the Winnipeg General Strike. This wave of proletarian struggle in turn led to the founding of the Communist Party of Canada, the main actor of what we have called the “first party-building movement.” The Communist Party of Canada grew to very significant proportions, mobilizing tens of thousands of members and many thousands more sympathizers,leading them in major struggles in the areas of labour, unemployment, housing, etc. It failed, however, to develop a significant and correct position on the national question (as it concerned colonialism and as it concerned other forms of national oppression).

The Communist Party of Canada was the largest revolutionary organization ever built in this country and it represented a real proletarian vanguard party. However, mismanaged internal line struggle and changing external conditions at the close of the 1930s and throughout the 1940s led to this party’s gradual abandonment of a revolutionary line, turning it into an essentially reformist, social-democratic entity. After two decades of significant working-class struggle throughout the 1920s and ’30s, the ’40s and ’50s were therefore two lost decades for the proletarian struggle.

But the 1960s saw the rebirth of the people’s movement: the growing separatist sentiment in Quebec led to major, mass-based struggles which escalated into the Front de Libération du Québec’s political-military campaign; Indigenous peoples waged a major struggle against the 1969 White Paper, an official policy of assimilation peddled by the Trudeau government; organized labour fought militantly against economic exploitation, culminating in Quebec’s 1972 Common Front general strike; and immigrant communities, women and other sectors of the popular masses developed their political struggles. International struggles (the Vietnam War, the Cultural Revolution in China, the rebellions of 1968) also pushed the political situation in Canada forward. By the early 1970s, the growing popular struggles coalesced into a second party-building movement headed by the In Struggle! Marxist-Leninist Organization, the Workers’ Communist Party (WCP) and the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist), with a myriad of smaller revolutionary organizations playing smaller roles in that movement’s history.

The second party-building movement was anti-revisionist (meaning: opposed to the erasure of class struggle from official pro-Soviet “Marxism”) and aligned with revolutionary China and the international Marxist-Leninist movement, rejecting the Soviet Union for its abandonment of world revolution after 1956. While it never reached the scale of organizing attained by the old CP of Canada in the 1920s and ’30s, it led significant mass struggles, organized working-class people on a large scale,¹⁹ grappled with the country’s political issues in a deep way (including a gradual development of a more advanced line on the national question than what the old Communist Party had ever achieved), organized people’s institutions (childcare centres, people’s clinics, political action committees, etc.) and promoted internationalist solidarity with ongoing revolutionary struggles in the rest of the world. By the early 1980s, however, the tide was turning: the worldwide M-L movement went into full retreat following the counter-revolutionary developments in China, capitalist crisis intensified and eclectic, petty-bourgeois tendencies started to occupy more and more space on the political left at the expense of the revolutionaries. By 1983, the WCP and IS! had dissolved, while the CPC(M-L) had turned to a revisionist ideological line, which led to its political and organizational decline.

The four following decades saw a sharp decline in revolutionary struggle. Eclecticism and postmodernism fully positioned themselves as “the Left”, and divorced “the Left” from the working class as never before. The prospect of socialist revolution disappeared from view. Still, these years also saw a third party-building movement develop, a movement which was initiated by the Action Socialiste Group which emerged in the late 1980s and which was later represented by the Revolutionary Communist Party, as well as Revolutionary Initiative (RI) and a few smaller groups. None of these organizations had the scope or influence of those of the first two party-building movements, but they kept the revolutionary flame alive through these dark years of defeat and despair. By the early 2020s, these organizations had run their course: they collapsed, one after the other, under the weight of their internal contradictions and following their failure to initiate a large-scale revolutionary movement.

The Fourth Party-Building Movement

The third party-building movement failed. Still, by swimming against the tide of disorganization and theoretical eclecticism, it had planted the seeds of what was to follow. Former participants of its organizations, along with newly-minted revolutionary militants, united in late 2021 to form the (New) Communist Party of Canada. Doing so, they initiated a fourth party-building movement by directly addressing the shortcomings of the previous wave of party-building. In the case of the PRC-RCP these shortcomings were mainly the consequence of dogmatism and poor application of democratic centralism, leading to stagnation and a series of splits. For RI, a foundational failure to grasp party-building as the principal task of communist revolutionaries opened room for a syndicalist deviation to take hold in the organization, leading to a process of liquidation.

This is the current stage of the fight for socialism in Canada. Its challenges are our challenges, and it is our only hope for victory in our lifetimes.

The (N)CPC has learned from the successes, failures and mistakes of the previous waves of party-building, and it is learning from them still. It recognizes that the key to victory is a politics (and its attendant analysis) grounded in the objective conditions and contradictions of Canadian society as it exists today. It rejects empty phrase-mongering and amateurish activism in favour of constant, ongoing professionalization of its political work, creative tactics and wide-ranging social analysis. It rejects the enemy’s divide-to-rule politics in favour of class and party unity. This program outlines its fundamental views and initial strategic proposals.

The (N)CPC and the Path to Political Power

The (New) Communist Party of Canada, though it shares with them the name “party,” is nothing like the Canadian parties of parliamentary cretinism. It is neither an electoral party, nor is it simply a collective of like-minded people, or a party aiming to pursue strictly national interests. Rather, the (N)CPC is the highest political expression of a particular class, the proletariat. It is the condensation of its most advanced political conceptions and interests. As the proletariat is an international class, the (N)CPC is thus a detachment of the international proletariat and a component part of the international communist movement.

The (N)CPC is the party of proletarians confined within the borders of Canada. It welcomes within its ranks all communists engaged in the direct fight against our common enemy, the Canadian monopoly bourgeoisie. In consequence, the (N)CPC is a fundamentally multinational party: it is the party of the proletarians of all nations of Canada. It concerns itself with, and intervenes within, all popular struggles around any and all aspects of the people’s lives and needs. Moreover, it seeks to be a complete communist party, in that it does not confine itself to one or another field of struggle, whether that be agitation, propaganda, field organizing or campaigning or even the use of force, but instead seeks to encompass the whole of social struggle, of social life.

The (N)CPC is a party of fully dedicated professional revolutionaries. It does not suffice to agree with its aims to become a member, though the (N)CPC warmly welcomes any form of support. The members of the Party are those who are ready to give nothing less than their lives to the struggle for socialism, who are ready to make this struggle the guiding principle of their every decision. The members of the Party must submit to the principle of democratic centralism: freedom of discussion but unity in action, submission of the minority to the majority, of the lower levels to the higher levels, of the whole Party to the central committee. Democratic centralism is the organizational principle of all communist revolutionaries: it ensures full and open discussion and the airing of all ideas that could possibly contribute to our revolution while also maintaining an unbreakable, iron unity which enables us to fight our powerful, well-organized ruling-class enemies. Under democratic centralism, democracy is the basis of centralism, and centralism allows the realization of democratic decisions.

The (N)CPC is thus the leading core, the brain and the nervous system, of the proletarian revolution. But it will not make revolution alone. Historical experience has shown us that the Party is only one of a number of instruments needed for the overthrow of capitalism-imperialism. The (N)CPC will, as it builds itself, simultaneously build the other weapons of the revolutionary people: the united front and the people’s army.

The united front is the temporary alliance of all classes necessary to accumulate the critical mass to be stronger than the enemy and render possible its overthrow. In the broadest term, it is comprised of all those whose interests are in sufficient contradiction with capitalism-imperialism so that they have something to win in a socialist revolution. The core and leading part of the united front is the revolutionary proletariat and its new institutions of political power, bringing with itself: sections of the lower petty-bourgeoisie and small farmers often living in conditions very similar to the proletariat; sections of the petty-bourgeoisie; and perhaps of the small national bourgeoisie of the Indigenous nations united on the basis of defeating colonialism and achieving national liberation; and finally, anyone who realizes the urgent needs of our epoch and is ready to sacrifice his or her own class interests to join the revolutionary camp. The component parts of the united front take organizational forms and eventually assume the character of a formal political alliance. In this way, it is the united front that progressively forms the embryo of the new state.

Beyond the organized united front, there is a broader people’s movement which includes all extant forces that are objectively opposed to monopoly finance capital’s political and economic power. It is an organic force which includes the non-Party-led organizations of workers, tenants and youth, the neighbourhood organizations, the trade unions, etc. Such organizations, when they genuinely engage in class struggle, and the popular masses as a whole, when they engage in spontaneous action, become the ocean in which the revolutionaries learn to “swim like fish” (Mao). This broad people’s movement is the wider whole within which the (N)CPC and the united front intervene and which they seek to lead towards active struggle for socialism and a decisive break with its current purely defensive, reformist character.

Finally, the history of revolutions teaches us that “without a people’s army, the people have nothing” (Mao). We know the bourgeoisie will not let the people peacefully transition into power, but that it will all come down to a showdown of brute force between the forces of revolution and the forces of reaction. To face a modern army, a professional people’s army will have to be set up as a separate organization from the Party but under its leadership. The specific form that a people’s army must take in a highly developed imperialist country such as Canada is yet to be discovered. It will most likely not look like the revolutionary armies acting in semi-feudal, semi-colonial countries. However, the need for a people’s army can never be circumvented. This point is what distinguishes the (N)CPC from all the so-called socialists and phony communists in this country. Moreover, the Party and its people’s army will have to equip and support the broad masses for the struggles to come and the building of the new power, a support which we can summarize in the phrase: general arming of the masses, so that they are never again left defenceless against their enemies.

These are the tools necessary to set in motion our great historical task. Now knowing which pieces we need on our chessboard, the next question that arises is how to build them and how they should move—the question of revolutionary strategy.

It needs to be said that the (N)CPC does not place any hope in the parliamentary system of Canada, which was precisely set up to legitimize the colonial, capitalist regime. Revolutionary proletarian political power cannot be seized merely by running in elections. The (N)CPC does not content itself with mainly open and reformist political work while waiting for far-away, hypothetical revolutionary crises to be gifted to us from Heaven above. At the same time, (N)CPC does not endorse mindless adventurism and the beginning of armed confrontation when the forces or revolution are still a fringe minority and have little to no support from the popular masses as a whole.

Therefore the broad outlines of our revolutionary strategy can be summarized as:

(1) Accumulating forces in the revolutionary movement. We conceive of the period preceding armed confrontation not as a wholly distinct period, but as a preparatory period for the next, a period of accumulation of forces. This implies that from the onset the Party remains clandestine, conceiving itself as being at war with the enemy, even long before the first bullet is fired. To be able to face open war with a force so mighty as the AAIA, tens if not hundreds of thousands of people need to be recruited to the Party and its people’s army, constituting the core of its revolutionary firepower.

(2) Building the organs of political power. The transformation of the political order cannot happen overnight, even if reaction faces military defeat. History teaches us that the proletariat needs to be thoroughly prepared to wield power, as socialism is only a new phase in the class struggle. Before political power is conquered, the institutions that will form the new power need to be built at least in their preliminary forms, and the people need to have gained political experience in wielding those institutions. These are mainly comprised of workers’ (and, more broadly, proletarians’) assemblies and councils (what were known, in the October Revolution, as “Soviets”) based on geographical areas or workplaces, as well as all the political expressions of the united front — revolutionary representative associations of Indigenous peoples, for example.

(3) Acting on the objective conditions to precipitate them towards revolutionary crisis. We will not stand idle and wait for these conditions to appear but act so as to create them ourselves. The main component of this is to lead the people to revolutionary conclusions through political work. In intervening in the broad people’s movement, communists do not mainly seek reforms — though they welcome them — but rather the sharpening of social contradictions between the people and the enemy. It is through their own experience in struggle, combined with the impulse provoked by the vanguard party, that the people will embrace socialism as the only solution to the sum of their grievances. As the saying goes, it is only when the people move that they feel the full weight of their chains.

In its day-to-day work building the instruments of revolution and fulfilling its revolutionary strategy, the mass line is the general principle guiding the actions of the Party. The mass line teaches that “the people, and only the people, are the motive force in the making of world history” (Mao). Following the mass line means relying on and trusting the masses. It means that the revolution can only be the act of the broad masses and must depend on the mobilization of the majority. It implies that communists must swim within the masses as a fish swims in the water, that they must mingle with them, listen to their concerns, consider them as equals. It means that they must unite and struggle with them, share their losses and victories, their pains and their joys.

Applying the mass line daily means to follow the principle “from the masses, to the masses.” Therefore, members of the Party root their actions in the permanent conduct of social investigation so as to learn from the conditions of the people and to get acquainted with their state of mind, their grievances and their needs. The communist way to conduct investigation is class analysis: the understanding of social classes and of contradictions between those classes and how these manifest themselves objectively and subjectively. All actions of the Party must be rooted in social investigation and class analysis (SICA), or else the Party cannot gain traction among the masses, and its watchwords will be reduced to disconnected sloganeering separated from the real world.

It is through agitation and propaganda that the (N)CPC can first put to the test of practice the conclusions of its SICA. Agitation addresses specific contradictions in society. It seeks to arouse indignation, to “draw blood” on particular issues. Through it we spread very basic revolutionary ideas among the broadest masses and lead them towards political and economic struggle. Propaganda, on the other hand, addresses complex or numerous contradictions. It seeks to heighten consciousness of a narrower section of the people. Both agitation and propaganda aim to raise the consciousness of the people and further their participation in the revolutionary movement. They can be carried through mediums (tracts, journals, websites, etc.) or carried out orally by activists.

It is through agitation and propaganda that the Party pursues the mobilization and organization of the masses. The masses are mobilized in immediate economic and political struggles, in actions against the class enemy and through extensive campaigns. Concretely, these can take the form of demonstrations, occupations, strikes, etc., the form of the actions itself being secondary to the political line and the involvement of the broadest masses of the people. Jointly, the Party seeks their organization in the organs of the united front. These can be either organizations created on the impulse of the Party or already existing organizations, such as trade unions. The most advanced and combative sections of the masses are ultimately organized within the communist Party and eventually, the people’s army.

In sum, the Party applies the mass line through the conduct of SICA, agitation and propaganda, organization and mobilization of the masses, all with the goal of building the instruments of the revolution — the Party, the united front and the people’s army — and following the revolutionary strategy of accumulating forces, building organs of political power and precipitating the revolutionary crisis.

With this in mind, the (N)CPC maintains that its fundamental aim is to forward class struggle until communism and that the central task to accomplish this in our context is proletarian revolution and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat in Canada — referred to as socialism. Therefore, the (N)CPC does not remain dogmatically attached to the strategy and tactics outlined above, but submits them to this overarching goal and to the test of practice. As the sole criterion of truth, it is practice that will be the ultimate judge of the correctness of our ideas. The following years should either see the revolutionary movement advancing, or it should see our conceptions and practice change.

The (N)CPC fights for no utopia or distant dream. It is engaged in the struggle as it exists today, with the firmest conviction we shall see victory or tremendous advance in our lifetimes. Socialism exists as a potentiality in the here and now and our task is to make it exist as a reality.

Socialist Transition

The victory of the revolution will not mean the end of class struggle but the beginning of a new phase: one where we are no longer fighting for political power but where we are fighting as the new ruling, majority class to maintain the achievements of the revolution and to pursue our class interests until the complete elimination of class society and imperialism from the globe.

History teaches us that this phase, which our tradition names socialism or the dictatorship of the proletariat, will last for an entire historical epoch. As Lenin wrote following the victory of the October Revolution in Russia: “The dictatorship of the proletariat means a most determined and most ruthless war waged by the new class against a more powerful enemy, the bourgeoisie, whose resistance is increased tenfold by their overthrow (even if only in a single country), and whose power lies, not only in the strength of international capital, the strength and durability of their international connections, but also in the force of habit, in the strength of small-scale production.”

There is no crystal ball we can look into to know what this whole epoch will look like. Yet, with ample examples from past revolutionary experiences and our own experience and knowledge of class struggle in Canada as outlined above, we can determine the general tasks of the revolutionary government from the seizure of political power to the ensuing few decades. The following does not constitute an exhaustive list, but rather a set of guidelines to follow and apply to the specific conditions that will arise.

First Revolutionary Measures

In the political sphere, the revolution will immediately dissolve all major bourgeois political institutions (the House of Commons, Senate, the Monarchy in Canada, provincial parliaments, municipalities, band councils, etc.) and hand over the affairs of State to the organs of proletarian political power: the councils of workers and oppressed peoples, as they were forged in the course of revolutionary struggle. Within this new power the (N)CPC will defend measures such as:

• the privation of the political rights of the overthrown ruling class and of the remaining elements of the middle-bourgeoisie and the reservation of the right to vote to those who work, those who have worked before and are unable to do so through no fault of their own, and to those who contribute to the building of socialism;
• the abolition of the Canadian Armed Forces and their replacement by the People’s Army, the disarmament of the police forces and the handing over of national safety to democratic people’s militias;
• the possibility to revoke all State officials at any time and the cutting down of their salaries to that of a median worker’s wage; and
• the promotion of freedom of the press and of the right to assemblies, strikes and general political expression.

Multinational Policy

To resolve the national and constitutional issues, the revolution will proclaim the immediate abrogation of the constitution and all colonial treaties and initiate a vast process of negotiations between the peoples of all nations to redefine the Constitution and internal borders. National rights guaranteed under existing treaties will, however, be upheld pending their replacement by new, fair, actual people-to-people negotiations. Throughout this process the (N)CPC will defend measures such as:

• the formal abolition of Canada as it exists and its replacement by the Multinational Socialist Confederacy of Canada, or whatever name to be chosen by the revolutionary movement at the time; the abolition of current provinces and their replacement by socialist republics broadly defined by national character;
• the upholding of the right to secede by popular referendum for all component republics of the Multinational Socialist Confederacy;
• the defence of the cultural and linguistic rights of all historically constituted national groups remaining minorities within their territories and the development of varied, self-directed national economies to ensure the continued survival and revitalization of all nations and their respective cultures; the principle according to which “no nation can meddle in the affairs of another,” with immediate repatriation of health care, law enforcement, child services and education, with their attendant budgets, to the respective nations, thereby abolishing the colonial relationship between the central state and Indigenous nations; and
• the shifting of immigration policies from economic to human needs and the abolition of the retrograde, segregationist immigration status system and the application of the principle of citizenship according to work.

Economic Policy

In the economic sphere, our objective can best be summed up in the phrase: abolition of private property. As a step towards this, the revolution will begin a vast process of socialization of the means of production (i.e., nationalization under democratic control). The economy will be taken from the hands of private individuals, firms and corporations and be given to the democratic institutions of the people. This implies measures such as:

• the immediate expropriation with no compensation of the monopolist bourgeoisie, the socialization of all major industries and the progressive, voluntary socialization of small industry;
• the expropriation of all surplus housing stock controlled by the monopolist bourgeoisie for speculative and other purposes and its conversion to inexpensive housing to be distributed to the proletariat;
• the abolition of finance and the setting up of a central institution for non-usury banking and of a rational monetary system;
• the application of the principle of submission of production and trade to human need rather than private profit, meaning the production of socially useful use values in the place of exchange values;
• the democratization of the economy through general political democratization for the adoption of country-wide unified plans of production and the democratization of local workplaces for daily functioning;
• the abolition of consumption and income taxes for common workers and the cancellation of all consumer, mortgage and student debt;
• the recognition of the access to the bare necessities of life (housing, food, medicine, clothing, school supplies for school-age children, etc.) as full-fledged, enforceable rights for all working people and their families;
• the upholding of the rights to quality health care, education and culture for all;
• the democratization of science and technology with the objective of improving life for all and reaching our full collective potential; and
• the right and obligation to work according to capacity.

International Policy

The overthrow of the imperialist State of Canada will have major repercussions not only domestically, but also for the other peoples the world presently suffering under the yoke of Canadian imperialism. The Multinational Socialist Confederacy will revolutionize Canada’s role in the world, for the first time making it truly the harbinger of peace and freedom it claims to be. This implies measures such as:

• the immediate withdrawal of Canadian participation from all AAIA-led institutions such as NATO, NORAD, Five Eyes, the IMF and the World Bank;
• the repudiation of all neo-colonial debt owed by oppressed countries to Canada and the abandonment of Canadian-owned assets in oppressed countries to the local peoples and conversely, the repudiation of Canada’s debt towards other imperialist powers and transnational institutions;
• the recognition of the right to full self-determination and political sovereignty for all nations and the active opposition to oppression inflicted on them by the remaining imperialists;
• Support to popular and revolutionary movements struggling against capitalism-imperialism; the establishment of egalitarian trade and diplomatic relations with other progressive, anti-imperialist countries; and
• the building of fraternal ties with revolutionary communist parties and organizations in other countries; the participation in rebuilding the socialist camp and, in due time, a new Communist International.

The (New) Communist Party of Canada openly and explicitly fights for the complete overthrow of the imperialist world order and the establishment of communism on a global scale. We are the party of the Communards of Paris, of the Bolsheviks of Russia, of the Chinese Revolution and of the heroic anti-imperialist resistance in Vietnam. We are the party of the Winnipeg General Strike, of the revolutionary days of the old Communist Party of Canada, of the Front de Libération du Québec and of the 1970s Marxist-Leninists. The (N)CPC is the party of the peoples of the world still holding high the banner of communism, of those who have never given up and never will.

The earth shall rise on new foundations              We have been naught; we shall be all!

ENDNOTES

1 Pre-capitalist relations of production present in the world today take two distinct forms: pre-capitalist class-based relations of production and pre-capitalist classless relations of production. The first of these forms is the most common: feudal or slavery-based relations of production exist in many countries. The production derived from these relations of production is, however, mostly channelled into the mainstream of the capitalist-imperialist economy. The second of these forms has been nearly entirely marginalized: while very small groups of people still live within classless societies, they are still under the rule of bourgeois states, and they account only for an infinitesimal portion of worldwide production.

2 Both sides in this inter-imperialist confrontation try to paint themselves as the good side: the new imperialists cynically pose as opponents of US hegemony while aiming to replace it with their own, while the AAIA and the EU paint their opponents as “totalitarian” and deploy wholly unsubtle racist clichés to attempt to whip up a patriotic frenzy in favour of their escalating offensive against the enemy camp.

3 In a very small number of cases, exemplified by such countries as Cuba and North Korea, a given state may attempt to pursue an anti-imperialist policy and strive for real independence. These cases warrant special attention and analysis, since such countries may play a special role with regards to revolutionary movements throughout the world. All of them are, however, beholden to one or more imperialist powers in some regards and none are socialist in the way we and our tradition has ever meant.

4 For instance, though Canada made quite a show of “not being in Iraq”, the Chrétien government, in place at the start of that war, worked to support it behind the scenes.

5 These are the Bank of Montreal (BMO), Bank of Nova Scotia (Scotiabank), Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC), Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) and Toronto-Dominion Bank (TD). Together, these five banks plus the National Bank of Canada represent approximately 90% of total assets in the Canadian banking industry and all have significant activities abroad, both through interpenetration with the economies of other AAIA countries and in countries exploited by AAIA imperialism.

6 Think back to the waves of Syrian refugees, escaping a NATO-stoked and -funded civil war only to end up in the very same countries which contributed to the ongoing destruction of Syria.

7 The fact that the Canadian State’s old, openly violent policy continues to co-exist with co-optation and pacification strategies is exemplified by the fact that residential schools remained in operation until the 1990s, that the ’60s saw the infamous Sixties Scoop, that militarized police forces (and, less frequently, the army itself) have many times invaded Indigenous lands to impose the State’s will, etc.

8 The selection by the British crown of an Indigenous woman as its official representative in Canada is only the most symbolic expression of this phenomenon.

9 Materially supporting genuine independence for those nations and nationalities that want it is, in fact, part of the communist movement’s internationalist duty, though multinational unity in a confederative, socialist state remains the movement’s primary goal and strategy.

10 Many formerly enslaved Africans escaped slavery or the aftermath of the American Revolution by going North, up until at least the American Civil War. They would go on to form the Black Scotian national minority and other “Black Loyalist” communities throughout Canada.

11 British Columbia in particular attracted many Chinese, Japanese and (to a lesser extent) South Asian immigrants, and many of them worked on railroad construction in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries throughout the West. However, official racist policies and their attendant ideology ensured that most of these workers couldn’t settle in Canada with their families or intermarry with White working-class people, and so their population was artificially kept low, limiting their ability to develop into larger national minorities.

12 Canadian Orangeism, which is directly descended from British Orangeism, evolved to adapt to Canada’s national fault lines. It applied British Orangeism’s traditional anti-Catholic views against the French Canadians, but it also developed a racist anti-Indigenous and anti-immigrant bent. In this way, Orangeism represented the reactionary line on all three of Canada’s major national questions.

13 This includes not only the active working-class population but also their dependents, such as children and elderly people.

14 An exact breakdown of this strata by class is difficult to obtain, since it contains both employees of execution, who are proletarians even though they produce no (or little) surplus value, and many members of the lower petty-bourgeoisie.

15 This sector accounts for 7.3% of Canada’s GDP, or $156 billion. And though this sector is largely comprised of public services, all of these are now (and have been for decades) targeted for ongoing divestment and privatization, which would allow the bourgeoisie to turn it into a new market for private accumulation.

16 See footnote 5 for further detail.

17 We mean liberalism in a broad sense: big-L liberals, conservatives, libertarians, social-democrats and all other stripes of bourgeois politics subscribe to one form or another of small-l liberalism.

18 Fascism is a term used in two very different ways. The first is fascism as policy, which we take to mean the open terroristic dictatorship of the most reactionary sectors of the ruling class. The second is fascism as ideology: a specific ideological form, whose best known historical examples are Italian Fascism and German Nazism, which in the final analysis consists in a rationalization for the use of fascism as policy. Here, we are using that second meaning, without denying that any of the above trends, when in power, can end up deploying fascism as policy.

19 At one point, it was said it was hard to find a single factory in eastern Montreal without a WCP cell in it.