2. 11. 2025

We Need Workers’ Solidarity, Not “National Unity,” in Response to Trump’s Tariffs

Todd Gordon

A sure sign we’re not “all in this together” is when the ruling class insists, loudly and repeatedly, that we’re all in this together. War, pandemics, and now trade disputes in a fragmenting geopolitical order – these moments inspire the call by political and business leaders for us to rally around the nation and trust they have our best interests at heart. Donald Trump’s threat to torch the free trade status quo with Canadian business has sent the latter, along with politicians of all stripes, into paroxysms of anxiety and patriotism. Counter-tariffs, even cutting off energy exports, have been mooted in response. Those measures are primarily defences of Canadian capitalists’ property rights and access to the world’s largest market, but such crass class interests are harder to sell to workers and Indigenous people suffering the effects of four decades of corporate property rights expansion and neoliberal austerity. Those class interests thus disguise themselves as protection of the nation against the Trump-led American bully. But the nation is a concrete reality inhabited by people with contradictory, often opposing interests: owners, workers, the colonized, and the oppressed. 

Of course, so long as our lives are shaped by capitalist market relations, with all their exploitativeness, ecological destructiveness, and volatility, our well-being is determined in part by those relations – presented to us more neutrally as the “economy” in the speeches of our leaders and the newspaper columns of their apologists. And insofar as global capitalism remains organized through nations, our well-being is likewise affected by the well-being of the nation. As the economy and nation go, it seems, we go. Losing access to the American market, or at least having that access weakened, will impact the Canadian economy, and thus all Canadians as Canadians. 

Certainly there is a real risk of job loss, demands to increase productivity for workers that keep their job, and inflationary pressures, after two earlier years of an inflationary spike that hit most Canadians very hard. But this is the ruling class’s vision of the world – nations, market relations – and we can’t let it frame how the left responds to a fraternal struggle between the United States’ and Canada’s rulers, squabbling over the spoils of the continent’s exploited labour and ecology.

A political dead end

The public discussion of these matters in Canada – including, sadly, on much of the left – evades what we must insist is an essential point: capitalist investment and trade are not conducted for the benefit of Canadian, American, or Mexican workers or the dispossessed peoples of these colonized territories. This is true whether that trade is “free” or protected by tariffs, and regardless of whether the investment is subsidized by government; this is true even if capitalist trade and investment are means of producing the employment and commodities that we currently need to survive. Capitalists invest and sell their commodities, whether domestically or internationally, to make profit and accumulate more capital in their fight with each other for market share. Those commodities might meet a human need, the investment might lead to jobs, but those aren’t the end goals of capitalist investment and production. Should those commodities be too expensive for many people, for example, the latter won’t be able to access them no matter how desperately they are needed; or if that investment becomes unprofitable to the capitalist, the investment stops and jobs disappear. Focusing on the nationality of ownership, or those owners’ degree of access to the American market, or the need to protect Canadian industry, misses the point of what invariably drives capitalist investment and the consequences for workers and the oppressed.

Nationalism is a political dead end for the left in Canada, no less today than in previous periods when it ensnared progressives. A poisoned chalice, it offers a dangerous narrowing of workers’ and oppressed peoples’ horizons of possibility, a serious misunderstanding of who controls capital (and thus holds power) in the country and what animates their actions, and a misaligned solidarity. For the left in Canada, nationalism is a kind of defeatism: an acceptance of class rule, and a lack of vision for building a struggle that challenges the dominance of capital and capitalists’ interests, which aren’t reducible to our own interests. While the ruling class risks losing privileged access to the American market and facing a lower rate of profit, workers and the oppressed face a different set of risks altogether: not being able to afford food or shelter, further austerity, and an intensified agenda of dispossession from land by a colonial state seeking to expand fossil fuel exports to the rest of the world beyond the US. Accepting that somehow we’re all in this together simply because we’re Canadian – a position taken by not only political and business leaders but also the NDP and some unions, artists, and left commentators – misrepresents workers’ and oppressed peoples’ interests and causes political disorientation, making it that much harder to mobilize people to struggle against the powerful interests who oppress them at home, and who they’re now being told are their allies.   

The federal and British Columbia NDP have called for a “buy Canadian” strategy. The union Unifor has done the same. Unifor’s national president, alongside her counterpart from the United Steelworkers, has joined the business-led Canada-US Trade Council to strategize with corporate Canada. Nationalism here expresses the sad retreat of unions: from seeking to build working-class power, to seeing no path forward but to subordinate themselves to the bosses simply because the latter are based in Canada. The same tendency appears, more subtly, in a recent column in the Toronto Star, where economist and former Canadian Auto Workers researcher Jim Stanford invokes the 19th century National Policy in his strategic prescription for how to respond to Trump’s tariffs: a policy that was designed to build the Canadian nation and deployed tariffs to protect its nascent industry from foreign competition, especially American. Even where these strategies propose temporary relief for workers, they stop short of imagining a significant rebuilding of the welfare state, and they fail to root themselves in the potential strength of workers and the oppressed.

Against nationalism as a tool of capital

Such strategies not only leave power in the hands of Canadian capitalists – the same capitalist class that has spent the last four decades of neoliberal austerity ruthlessly attacking workers’ rights, promoting brutal cuts to social spending, recklessly expanding fossil fuel extraction backed by the violent dispossession of Indigenous peoples, and evading taxes. They also boost capitalists’ power, while doing little to nothing to improve the position of workers. If nationalist policies increase Canadian capitalists’ sales, those capitalists will reinvest a portion of their increased profits in labour-displacing, productivity-increasing technology and expanded infrastructure, as all capitalists do in the face of competitive market pressures. Capitalists thereby become wealthier and possibly larger, with more capital to deploy, while workers are made more vulnerable to work intensification and wage squeezes. Those are the same workers who’ve just been encouraged to identify with these bosses because they’re Canadian, instead of organizing themselves as a class with distinct interests.

In his challenge to the free-trade status quo in the The Breach, political commentator Christo Aivalis calls for the nationalization of industry, claiming the Canadian economy is controlled in large part by American and other foreign businesses. Such claims risk misrepresenting free trade as leading to the economic takeover of Canada by foreigners (usually Americans); as has often been the case historically with left nationalists, these arguments can lead to playing down the class divisions within the nation, instead emphasizing a supposed national struggle between Canada and the US. Thus left nationalism can mutate into plain nationalism. In any case, it’s simply not true that Canadian capitalism is dominated by foreign owners. While US entities constitute half of all foreign owners of Canadian business assets, foreign ownership in general accounts for less than 15% of all business assets in Canada, a figure that has been declining for decades in many sectors and in the aggregate. Both foreign ownership in general, and American ownership in particular, of total operating profits in Canada has also declined for nearly a decade at least, with American ownership constituting roughly 8% of those profits in 2022. The threat to Canadians is not foreign ownership undermining Canadian sovereignty, but capital – most of which is Canadian – exploiting land and labour. Not only has Canadian ownership of capital in Canada grown, but Canadian capital has itself increasingly expanded into foreign territories, at a tremendous cost to ecologies and human rights around the world. This is a reality that nationalists, left or otherwise, frequently downplay: while Canada is nowhere near as powerful as the US, it is nevertheless one of the largest economies in the world, with the ninth-largest GDP in 2023, and with the fourth-largest outward foreign direct investment stock.

Canada is controlled by Canadian capital, and it is dangerous to think that Canadian capital acts differently from American just because it flies a different flag. It doesn’t. It can’t. Individual capitalists are, after all, “merely capital personified,” as Marx put it. The decisions of individual capitalists are inevitably marked by the survival-of-the-fittest world of market imperatives they inhabit – and that they in turn reproduce with their decisions – in which profit, not human need, rules. Individual capitalists, as a part of capital, are bound by the same structural logic of the capitalist market regardless of their nationality. No program of social justice can or should reconcile itself to this arrangement whereby capital and capitalists control society’s wealth.

To be sure, a sudden loss of access to the American market would harm Canadian workers, particularly if it precipitates a recession. Yet that recession has been building for years as a result of the “normal” internal contradictions of capitalist accumulation, even if the various government bailout programs during the pandemic kicked it down the road. If tariffs are implemented, the left should support a new round of significant federal spending that centres the needs of workers and the oppressed. But workers and the oppressed won’t be saved by cleaving to a national project rooted in their exploitation and oppression, led by those who benefit most from it.

Building an alternative political and economic vision

Whatever limited and always precarious social gains workers and the oppressed have managed to carve out for themselves under capitalist rule in Canada have been won not because they are part of a nation, and not because they fought to defend that nation against the United States. It’s collective struggle as a class and as oppressed people, including by the union, women’s, LGBTQ, immigrant rights, and international solidarity movements among others, that has forced concessions from the state and placed limits on the arbitrary power, authority, and privilege of bosses, including Canadians. Such struggles, sometimes implicitly and sometimes explicitly, have challenged rather than accepted capital’s right to own and accumulate society’s productive wealth. They’ve contested the role of the state in facilitating the privileges of capital, insisting that the collective power of workers and oppressed people, not the nation, will be our salvation. Particularly in English Canada, those struggles haven’t been part of a nation-building project, whatever bourgeois historians and political scientists may myopically claim. They have been instead an expression of class power, whose ideological and political development could only ever sit in tension with the persistence of the national project – a ruling-class, colonial project – potentially exposing the insurmountable contradictions at the heart of what Canada is. 

That the Canadian nation persists isn’t a political blessing for these challenging times, but a reminder that past struggles remain unfinished. The nation can’t save us, even from Trump, and even if we nationalize key industries. As Canada’s ruling class is thrown into disarray by Trump’s detonating the last four decades of economic orthodoxy, and as that class doubles down on a nationalist-inflected reassertion of capitalist power that comes at the expense of workers and the oppressed, the left must develop and fight for an alternative political and economic vision. Working through the labour, environmental, and anti-colonial movements, we should struggle to rebuild a robust welfare state, including but not limited to much better supports for unemployed workers; a national affordable housing program, involving expedited construction of non-market housing; expanded affordable and efficient public transit infrastructure; an end to the capitalist property rights established during the free trade period; a green transition towards renewable energies, involving a program of public ownership of energy production and financing; worker retraining initiatives, to ensure the green transition is a just transition; the creation of more socially useful employment in the public sector, such as caregiving work and roles supporting a national housing strategy; higher taxes on wealthy individuals and corporations, accompanied by policies that limit their ability to move money to tax havens; a regularization program for migrants and an end to border militarization; and real reconciliation with Indigenous nations, premised on a nation-to-nation relationship. 

But such an agenda – as well as our ultimate lodestar: replacing capitalism with a radically democratic order based on human need not profit – can be realized only if we develop a strategy centred on mass struggle, and only if we refuse to limit our collective vista to the defence of Canada. It’s telling that in the discussion of Trump’s tariffs in Canada, including on much of the left, the necessity of building solidarity with American or Mexican workers is seldom mentioned – a sharp reminder of how nationalism flattens our analyses and limits the scope of our political vision. American and Mexican workers on integrated North American supply chains also sweat, struggle, and hope for a different future. They too have been pummelled by four decades of austerity and free trade, just as Canadian workers have, while American and Mexican capitalists have become wealthier, just as Canadian capitalists have. Do we really suppose that Canadian workers have more in common with Canadian plutocrats such as Galen Weston than with an American or Mexican worker? Whatever the outcome of this moment’s trade dispute, wealth in North America will still be controlled by capital, be it American, Canadian, or Mexican, driven by the imperative to squeeze as much profit as possible out of workers and the environment. Unless we fight against the current order and win, that wealth won’t be used for the benefit of Canadian, American, or Mexican workers. 

At their best, movements of workers and the oppressed have drawn strength and inspiration from the struggles of their counterparts around the world. They have been internationalist in orientation, understanding the importance of solidarity with workers and the oppressed everywhere: an injury to one is an injury to all. Even if a trade war ensues and countries move towards greater protectionism, the US, Mexico, and Canada won’t suddenly and completely be transformed into three completely unintegrated countries, and workers in all these countries will still struggle against their bosses (whatever country those bosses are from) and their states. Though the collective power of workers and oppressed peoples across these countries is still largely untapped three decades after the start of NAFTA, it remains nevertheless a powerful, potentially transformative weapon.

It may seem utopian to suggest that the best hope for workers and the oppressed in Canada is a movement against capital – whatever its national origin – built by workers and the oppressed from across the continent, at a time when the level of collective struggle remains relatively low. But that prospect is no less fantastical than pretending our salvation lies in tethering ourselves to the nation, or to the same class that has been destroying our planet and attacking working and living conditions for decades.