An appeal to organizations and individuals to build solidarity, stop the scapegoating and unite for a liveable future
The billionaire class understands the Conservative Party under Pierre Poilievre is a tool to accelerate its agenda. He uses Trump-style scapegoating tactics to cover for a corporate power grab that will slash social services, trash our hope for a liveable climate, and make the few absurdly rich at everyone else’s expense.
As community organizers, activists and working class organizations, we are calling for street actions and alliance-building to confront this threat.
Join us on February 27th at 17h30, Metro Mont Royal for a demonstration to END scapegoating and STOP the corporate power grab.
(Coming soon to a city near you? Sign up to help make it happen.)
The looming threat of Poilievre’s Conservative Party
Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives blame migrants for the housing crisis. The party validates, supports and emboldens anti-trans bigotry that puts vulnerable people at risk of violence. Poilievre silences people who oppose the mass slaughter of Palestinians by labelling them anti-semites and terrorists, while unconditionally backing Israel’s bombing and starvation campaign.
At the same time, Poilievre has been on a streak of non-stop hobnobbing with corporate lobbyists. In gaudy mansions, he sucks up to billionaires like Elon Musk and cultivates cozy ties to home-grown Canadian tech billionaires with their own right-wing agendas.
Poilievre’s approach is to scapegoat marginalized and vulnerable communities while unconditionally backing the ultra-rich. We are already feeling the effects.
Poilievre has emboldened the far right, already on the rise in Canada. The Conservative leader frequently echoes their language and legitimizes positions that would have been shunned a few years ago. He visited and cheered on the “Freedom convoy” in Ottawa. He has had a series of encounters with an armed far-right group, even taking a photo with the founder at one point. This group, like the dozens of other far right groups that grow at the edges of Conservative support, use threats of violence to intimidate racialized people, elected representatives and activists.
That said, things could get much worse if Poilievre gains control of a G7 nation state.
A strong believer in privatization, Poilievre could sell-off the health care system to for-profit providers. He has openly vowed to scrap the new pharmacare plan.
A member of the self-described “Khmer Bleu,” a group of austerity hawks within Harper’s Conservative government, Poilievre has declared that he will cut spending while “restoring” the military. Many other social programs, like child care and dental care, would likely face the axe.
Even as he successfully channels legitimate outrage about housing costs, Poilievre claims that private developers will solve the crisis. Conservatives, many of whom are landlords (including the leader), have warned that new federal spending on housing would be slashed.
Poilievre has declared that he will defund the CBC and gut supports for nascent non-profit journalism outlets.
His approach to environmental and climate issues echoes Trump’s “drill baby drill” approach: the massive expansion of offshore drilling and a repeal of climate regulations. Poilievre has voted against environmental and climate regulations over 400 times, a trend likely to continue.
Building a real alternative to Poilievre’s corporate power grab
While other parties are less visibly aggressive than Poilievre’s Conservatives, they are not offering viable solutions. Mark Carney has been courting support among economic elites. At a time when inequality is at a record high, he is already saying “we can’t redistribute what we don’t have.” The NDP’s current policies represent a slowing of the crisis at best, and their corporate ties are cause for concern.
None of the existing parties are meeting the needs of the moment, or of the people who have to live in it. We don’t have the luxury of a wait-and-see approach.
The moment requires independent social movements that can oppose austerity and fight for expanded social programs and badly needed redistributions of wealth.
Against Poilievre’s politics of hate, austerity and exclusion, we must offer visions of a genuine alternative: a politics of life, repair, liberation, decolonization, and genuine democratization. Wealth inequality spirals upward, and corporations capture governments. It is time to tax speculative finance, capital gains, corporate windfall profits, and the assets of the absurdly wealthy. The resulting revenues can restore and extend investment in public services and infrastructures – transportation, medical, child and elder care, non-market housing, higher education, arts and media, and climate change adaptation, among others.
As fires, floods and droughts increase in frequency and severity, it is a time to accelerate, not stall, the transition off of fossil fuels. The recognition of Indigenous rights and Title are the core of meaningful decolonization—and help keep fossil fuels in the ground. With popular power, we can shift economies away from extractive activities and towards socially just and ecologically regenerative alternatives. And as more and more people are displaced by economic, geopolitical and environmental crises around the planet, we need a federal government that takes migrant justice seriously.
To mobilize against the billionaire agenda that Poilievre represents, our movements must create space to build solidarity and unity. Through concrete collective action and trusting relationships, we will make a transformative alternative visible, compelling, and impossible to ignore.
We call on everyone who shares our fundamental concerns to join the mobilization. Individuals, community groups, organizations and unions all have something to offer to the process; together, everything is possible. Join us!