March 28-29, 2024.

Comrades, I’m very pleased to be able to share some of the experiences, analysis and practice of the (New) Communist Party of Canada with you today.

I want to start by looking at some of the symptoms of the crisis in Canada:

On June 29, 2021, the town of Lytton, BC set a record for the highest recorded temperature in Canada: 49.6 degrees Celsius. The next day, the whole town burned down, displacing 250 people, most of them Indigenous, working class and rural poor. In total that same heat dome killed 619 mostly poor, elderly people. Later that year massive flooding hit the Pacific Northwest, killing 5 people and as many as 600,000 farm animals and doing billions of dollars worth of damage. And then in 2023 we had the most destructive wildfire season ever recorded with over 6,000 fires torching 16.5 million hectares of land, an area larger than Greece.

For rural communities, including Indigenous people living on reserves, the ecological crisis isn’t imminent, it’s an active reality threatening the health, stability and viability of their communities.

The housing crisis: The most glaring manifestation of the housing crisis in Canada are the 25,000 people who on any given day live on the streets in cities and towns across the country. This is the tip of the iceberg of a quarter million people who experience homelessness of some form in the course of the year. But the crisis extends far beyond those who face this worst case scenario. Especially in the big metropolitan areas, but increasingly even in smaller communities, working class families are spending 60, 70, 80% or more of their income on rent. The average price for a two bedroom rental in some metropolitan areas is now close to $4,000/month. It’s normal in the city where I live for working class families with two income earners to use the food bank, because rent is eating up basically all of their disposable income. Situations of overcrowded, unsafe or unhealthy housing, and threatened or real eviction, are the day-to-day reality for millions of working class people in the wealthy promised land of Canada.

A third crisis: Displacement and economic irrelevance, in addition to all the other pain and damage inflicted daily on the working class by imperialism, have resulted in widespread problematic drug use and addiction in our country. Combined with a ruthless, criminalized capitalist drug market, which constantly concocts stronger, more profitable and more deadly drugs, this has resulted in an unprecedented crisis of overdose deaths—over 7,000 in 2022. This crisis doesn’t only affect those who have already been chewed up and discarded by capitalism, it’s killing workers in the thousands. In one Canadian province 1 in 5 of the nearly 2,300 people who died from overdose in 2022 were working in the construction industry.

The Canadian political establishment recognizes these crises. The bourgeois media is full of voyeuristic hand-wringing and empty pontification about them. They treat them as individual areas of crisis, while we understand them to be a tangled web of symptoms all rooted in the same illness—monopoly capitalism’s crisis of overproduction.

The intensifying crisis of imperialism has engendered major spontaneous movements. In the winter of 2020 the Wet’suwet’en struggle against the Coastal GasLink pipeline spawned solidarity actions across the country, which blocked rail lines and shut down Canada’s busiest port for days, paralysing the Canadian economy, precipitating a political crisis and police repression. In 2022 the Convoy protests, mobilizing righteous working-class outrage over COVID lockdowns and vaccination mandates, but under reactionary leadership, occupied the country’s capital and generated a political crisis that required the federal government to invoke the War Measures Act for the first time since the 1970s. Then, the second half of 2023 saw a major strike wave, with strikes across the country including federal public sector workers, grocery store workers in Toronto, Longshore workers on the West Coast, school support workers in the Maritimes, and the huge Front Commun Quebec public sector mobilization.

The symptoms of crisis and discontent are widespread, and the failure of any of these spontaneous movements to effect any structural changes, or even to cohere into a longer-term mass movement, illustrates the need for the work that our party now takes on—for revolutionary ideological, political and organizational leadership.

So how is the (N)CPC approaching this work?

First of all by learning from and correcting errors from the previous revolutionary party-building efforts in our country.

One of the major errors, especially in the third party-building movement, was a tendency to see industrial or unionized workers as unorganizable on a revolutionary line—as too invested in imperialism, or too white or too privileged to embrace revolutionary politics—essentially ceding this huge swath of the proletariat to the mis-leadership of social democrats, Trotskyists, revisionists and outright reactionaries. Unfortunately some prominent Canadian Maoists continue to carry this line, looking for an imagined wellspring of revolutionary consciousness hidden away in some deep, hitherto unexplored pocket of the class, and hoping that each new spontaneous uprising of the type of proletarians that they like, will miraculously resolve into a revolutionary vanguard.

We reject this magical thinking. Our job is precisely to forge the vanguard from the advanced in all sectors and segments of our class and in doing so, to create the sinews of consciousness and organization that can pull the class together as the agent of revolution.

We uphold the principle of workers centrality: “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” (from The Political Program of the (N)CPC).

Our class is indeed divided by the imperialist division of labour, and by the ideological and political apparatus of the monopoly bourgeoisie. But rather than accepting those divisions, viewing them as immutable and searching in the cracks for answers, we view overcoming those divisions and forging a revolutionary unity as precisely the work of a vanguard party!

Our second major area of intervention is to put forward a bold, substantive vision for revolution in our country: the Multinational Socialist Confederacy.

While there is widespread discontent with the current state of things in our country, there is no commonly held vision of how things might change, even among those who call themselves revolutionaries. To the extent that such a vision does exist, it is most commonly a turning back of the clock to an imagined kinder, gentler “welfare state” Canada of the mid-20th century, or social media slogans masquerading as vision and strategy like #landback.

Our Party program grapples with the real history of colonization, national oppression and the waves of migration to Canada, and proposes a concrete vision for the way forward:

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.

-The Political Program of the (N)CPC

Within this ideological and political framework, our party is approaching mass work with tactical flexibility.

We are actively building roots in worksites with large concentrations of proletarians and engaging the really-existing workers movement to win over advanced workers in the centres of production. This includes building propaganda machinery capable of reaching and engaging with the broad mainstream of workers, activating and engaging the class consciousness that, though at a low level, exists amongst Canadian workers. We are far behind in this work because of the errors of previous revolutionary formations, but we are embracing the task, and we urge Parties in other imperialist countries to understand the necessity of organizing workers at the centres of production!

We are also building workers assemblies and councils that bring workers together, based on geographical areas or worksites, and help establish our class vision, unity and struggle across different workplaces and sectors, including non-union and unorganized workers. These assemblies and councils constitute preliminary forms of the organs of political power we need for revolution.

Finally, we are building neighbourhood assemblies and tenants organizations in working class neighbourhoods which can organize workers who are isolated and atomized due to widespread dependence on informal, short term, criminalized and gig work; and to reach other sectors like single parents, caregivers and seniors—working class people not necessarily attached to a workplace.

The crisis of imperialism has given us a fertile ground for organizing. While our work is still in its early stages, the objective conditions are ripe for revolution, even in the imperialist centres. More than ever, the correct ideological compass of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, and the hard work of organizing, are yielding rapid advances. But it takes getting our hands dirty! Investigating the economic, political and social conditions of the working class and intervening in their struggles as they are, is how we sink the deep roots that allow us to build the party and its instruments of revolution. We urgently need more parties and organizations, especially in the imperialist countries, to take up this work in order to expand our revolutionary theory based on concrete practice, and to build the revolutionary international communist movement!

-Fred Dumont, on behalf of the International Department of the (New) Communist Party of Canada