May Day 2026: Build working-class power to stop war and austerity

May Day greetings to the working class in Canada and to all those around the world fighting for peace, working class advance and socialism.

This International Workers’ Day arrives at a moment of escalating imperialist aggression and profound capitalist crisis. The relative decline of US imperialism’s global hegemony has produced a desperate and violent response. The return of Donald Trump and his far-right movement is not the cause of this unbridled aggression, but it is a dangerous expression of US imperialism resorting to unilateral coercion and direct military force to maintain its grip.

This drive to war threatens all humanity with the spectre of a third world war and nuclear annihilation. It is also a massive accelerator of the climate crisis, as war spending and fossil fuel extraction are prioritized over the survival of a habitable planet. The rot of imperialism is laid bare in its support for the expansionist Israel’s genocide in Gaza, NATO’s cynical proxy war against Russia which continues to use the Ukrainian people as cannon fodder, the US invasion of sovereign Venezuela, the ongoing illegal war of aggression on Iran, and the attempted strangulation of the Cuban people which seeks to extinguish the heroic example of Cuba’s socialist revolution.

The global trajectory of the drive to war is reflected here in Canada. The Carney government, a direct representative of Bay Street monopoly capital, is exploiting US threats to impose a sweeping agenda of war and austerity. While cynically draping himself in the rhetoric of patriotism and sovereignty, Prime Minister Carney is reorienting the entire economy toward subsidizing the US-NATO war machine. His plan to triple military spending to $150 billion annually represents one of the greatest transfers of public wealth to arms manufacturers in Canadian history and will mean the highest military spending since WWII.

Carney claims this militarization will protect jobs and sovereignty. These are lies.

The government’s own “Defence Industrial Strategy” is exposed as a fraud by the research on job creation policies, which shows that for every $1 million spent on the military, only 5 jobs are created. That same $1 million invested in healthcare creates 9 jobs: in education, it creates 13 jobs.

War spending is the least effective way to put food on working families’ tables. It is, however, the most effective way to funnel public money to Lockheed Martin while tens of thousands of public sector workers receive layoff notices.

It’s not about sovereignty either. Canada is raising its military spending at the behest of Trump’s arbitrary 5 percent of GDP target for NATO. Carney’s own “Buy Canadian” guidelines in his Defence Industrial Strategy cynically count purchasing from US-owned weapons manufacturers with production facilities in Canada as meeting the definition of Canadian content, ensuring that the torrent of public money continues to flow south.

Real sovereignty cannot be purchased from arms dealers – it requires an independent foreign policy and public control over our economy and resources.

The Carney agenda is austerity disguised as patriotism. The $150 billion war budget will be loaded onto the shoulders of the working class through slashed wages, gutted public services and the accelerated privatization of vital programs like Medicare. Already, Carney’s war budget represents the deepest austerity drive since at least the 1990s. Federal departments have already been ordered to find massive cuts and more will come as military spending skyrockets. The universal public healthcare system that militant labour struggles fought to build is now squarely in the crosshairs.

The Communist Party of Canada advances a clear alternative to create jobs, raise wages and expand the sovereignty of Canada.

To raise wages and living standards, we need a livable minimum wage, a massive build-out of social housing to end the housing crisis and create good jobs, an expanded Employment Insurance system that covers all unemployed workers at 90 percent of previous earnings for the duration of unemployment, and price controls on food, fuel and rent to stop corporate gouging and profiteering.

To create real and lasting jobs, we must nationalize auto, steel, aerospace and shipbuilding under democratic public ownership to secure manufacturing jobs for generations. We also need to bring energy and natural resources under public ownership to ensure a just green transition that serves communities rather than shareholders, and massively increase funding for public education, childcare and healthcare.

To fight for genuine sovereignty and peace, we must immediately withdraw from NATO and NORAD to end US command over Canada’s foreign policy. Canada needs to quit the USMCA in favour of multilateral and mutually beneficial trade with all nations, and pursue a foreign policy based on peace, disarmament and international solidarity.

To achieve this program, the working class must build its own independent political power and take immediate militant and united escalating action. We cannot rely on the parties of big business or the NDP. What unites the main parliamentary parties is their commitment to capitalism and their refusal to fundamentally challenge the drive to war and austerity. Parliament supports the Carney agenda.

It’s the working people – organized and determined – who can defeat this agenda with mass action in the streets, led by organized labour and its demands for full employment, strong social programs and public services, expanded manufacturing and secondary industry with value-added jobs, and economic growth based on rising wages and living standards – not war, militarization and austerity. It’s mass action led by labour that’s urgently called for now to turn the tide against reaction and the right.

However, we see inspiring examples of struggle globally. We salute the 300 million workers in India who built the largest general strike in history on February 12, and the Mediterranean dockworkers who coordinated industrial action to stop the flow of weapons to Israel early this year. We salute the workers of Cuba and their party, the Communist Party of Cuba, who heroically defend their revolution as a beacon of socialism and sovereignty in our hemisphere. These examples of working-class unity and militancy show the path forward.

This International Workers’ Day is a day of remembrance born from the blood of the Haymarket Martyrs. We reiterate our demand that May Day be a statutory holiday in Canada to honour workers’ struggles, as it is in most countries of the world. The period ahead will be marked by danger from war and reaction, but the emergence of new struggles presents great opportunity.

The necessity for socialist revolution, a system that organizes production for human need rather than private profit, has never been greater. Unity and struggle can win.

Long live the international solidarity of the working class!

Long live International Workers’ Day!

Central Executive Committee, Communist Party of Canada