In 2023, Canada exported nearly 20% of its GDP in goods to the US, not counting service exports, which altogether represents nearly a quarter of its GDP, nothing less. For the four major Canadian provinces, their product exports, excluding services, to the US relative to their GDP accounted respectively for 35% for Alberta, essentially oil which will be tariffed at “only” 10%, 18% for Ontario primarily the highly integrated manufacturing with the US of road vehicles, steel, and minerals, 15% for Quebec including aluminium (or crystallised electricity), construction wood, raw electricity but also aircraft, and only 7% for British Columbia which exports heavily to Asia.

This shock hits Canada amidst a political crisis that will lead to an election this spring between the Liberals under the leadership of banker Mark Carney, who is steering sharply to the right, and the Conservatives of Pierre Poilievre who are bending over backwards to distance themselves from Trump whom they idolised not so long ago. After moments of hesitation and division, under pressure from a surge of Canadian nationalism that will last the duration of spring, the ruling class seems to have reunified on the basis of a counterattack promising to respond tit-for-tat and even to ban certain energy and metal exports. Will the just re-elected, but not landslide-victorious as expected, Premier of Ontario, champion of this hard line, bring in his wake the reluctant Alberta, which would be the big loser in this confrontation of braggarts?

Even the Premier of Quebec, belatedly and with reservations, has followed suit. How can one not notice that the CAQ has resolved to do so by offloading onto the backs of working people as never before? With Bill 89, the right to strike becomes conditional on the Labour Minister’s mood. The wetlands of Montreal’s suburbs, much to the displeasure of local elected officials, become the hostage of an American waste multinational. Obviously, the CAQ cannot help but once again, through Bill 84, strike out at scapegoated cultural minorities by subjecting the Quebec Charter of Rights and Freedoms to its so-called integration policy, when it should be vice versa. The tariff war is above all the working people who will pay for it.

As for the outgoing Canadian Prime Minister who seeks to leave the stage of history as a great Canadian, like his father before him, what does he have to lose by raising his voice? One thing is certain, his former Finance Minister, who tried to become Prime Minister, advocates accommodation instead by proposing that Canada align its Chinese tariff policy with that of the US. As for the former Governor of the Bank of Canada and then of the Bank of England, he struggles like a devil in holy water to demonstrate that as president of Canada’s largest asset management fund—Brookfield manages more than half a trillion dollars—he has clean hands regarding the relocation of the company’s headquarters from Toronto to New York.

Neoliberal parties forced to be interventionist, which opens doors

The Mexican-Canadian-US free trade agreement against which the left and progressives had mobilised in vain at the time, but not the PQ, and which has had more than thirty years to carve its path, now structures the Canadian economy. Liberals, Conservatives, CAQ are dismayed by it. Today’s PQ even finds Trump reasonable on immigration and fentanyl issues. The NDP and Québec Solidaire find no response but the hard line. Trump’s attack comes as Québec Solidaire advocates for an independent Quebec freed from Canadian oil and gas and equipped with its own constitution to be developed by a constituent assembly in consultation with indigenous peoples. But the societal project remains undefined except to affirm that it will be based on solidarity and inspired by independentist (and PQ) personalities “who have, throughout Quebec’s history, embodied a progressive and inclusive discourse.”

Judged by the yardstick of the key issue of the 21^st century—the climate crisis—this societal project announces an “ecological transition” whose backbone will be to “invest in renewable energies” whilst Quebec already “produces almost all of its electricity from renewable resources.” Thus, without explicitly saying so, on the homepage of its website trumpeting its “New Quebec,” Québec Solidaire de facto admits that the heart of its societal project will be Hydro-Québec’s “2035 Action Plan” plus a BAPE to swallow the pill and a smidgen more redistribution. The CAQ’s anti-Trump policy is exactly that... minus the BAPE and plus austerity but also “accelerating [the construction of] infrastructure,” including hospitals, schools and public transport facilities" as well as supporting business investments to diversify their clientele and increase their productivity. Does Québec Solidaire say it better or differently?

As during the 2008 crisis and the pandemic crisis, the tariff offensive of the US presidency forces neoliberal parties, at least the centrist ones, to resort to state interventionism well beyond their ideology. For it is a matter of saving the system, so a truce in the intoxication of the masses by systemic “fake news” about the efficient free market and the superior efficiency of private governance over public governance. This is a political opening not to be missed for the left as long as it does not boil down to supporting, with minor nuances, the interventionism of the governing party as Québec Solidaire did during the pandemic crisis... and as announced by its “New Quebec” perfectly achievable economically without independence, apart from the refusal of pipelines.

A breach to invade between two types of extractivism appearing as rivals

The Trumpian chaos slices up, by withdrawing from it, the failed and hopeless process of climate COPs. (The US has never participated in biodiversity COPs.) Trump sabotages the gargantuan subsidies for solar and wind energy mega-investments and for the purchase of electric vehicles of which the Biden presidency was so proud, and which Canada and Quebec had to competitively imitate. This right-wing rejection of all-electric-electronic extractivism seems necessary for the success of hydrocarbon extractivism. Not at all or so little.

Fossil fuels, regardless of Trump’s tips of the hat to them, come out winning anyway. Why? Capturing the diffuse force of solar/wind energy just like replacing the plethoric fleet of solo cars/SUVs and its urban sprawl requires an orgy of material. Yet only an orgy of fossil energy—in the current state of the world, nearly 80% of global energy remains fossil—can extract and transform it. Add to this the proliferation of plastics and synthetic textiles. Green capitalism cannot escape the vicious circle of growth feeding at all troughs.

This political-economic void creates a call for an authentically left-wing policy that is not just following a so-called progressive green capitalism. While the urgency of the situation requires an immediate reform of the employment insurance system, it is above all about charging into this breach between the two types of extractivism, apparently competitive but in reality complementary, that are disputing the world’s path towards the hothouse earth. We must especially not stumble into the bear trap of recycling all these batteries and materials, which recycling, insofar as it is feasible, is energy-intensive and polluting. Circular production must not serve as an alibi for growth-oriented mass consumption. The issue of transition is precisely not the transition, a tautology, but the break with material growth inherent in capitalist accumulation driven by the law of competition between capitals.

Material growth must give way to ecofeminist services

In a spirit of material degrowth, the goal of any society should be the well-being of its entire population without leaving anyone behind. The French CGT speaks of a society of “care and connection” well grounded in the revaluation of female occupations and which combined with material degrowth is ecofeminist. On the occasion of March 8^th, gatherings convened by Mothers at the Front in twenty Quebec cities including several thousand in Montreal denounced the Trump administration which wants to destroy to the core the gains of the welfare state that neoliberal capitalism has already considerably truncated. It is on the basis of such mobilisation, for the moment defensive, and the fight against Amazon, for the moment economistic, and many other struggles that light can appear at the end of the tunnel... if and only if Québec Solidaire shakes off its electoral torpor to dare promote an independence of ecosocialist rupture.

This society of care and connection is founded on the improvement of public services and the establishment of new ones such as eco-energy social housing and free childcare for everyone, not just for the poor, and frequent and free public transport everywhere. All these public services and other possible ones, such as domestic electricity and basic vegetarian food, will of course require material infrastructure. But these will be greatly reduced compared to current mass consumption based on the bungalow and solo car, these pillars of popular indebtedness confronting the end of the month and the end of the world. What a deliverance for working-class households, what “growth” of well-being in this society of care and connection where the anxiety of illness, poverty and unemployment will give way to solidarity. But to begin building this society, we will have to break with capitalism fuelled by material growth without which it collapses.

The affordability of care and connection instead of false good pharaonic ideas

It’s not about building just any infrastructure. With the rejection of bungalows, and the rapid eco-energy renovation of existing recoverable buildings, like the disappearance of vehicles, including electric ones, there is no need to increase hydraulic and wind electricity production by 50% at the expense of nature and indigenous peoples whose elites Hydro-Québec is trying to bribe. High-speed trains (HSTs) whether between Windsor and Quebec or between Vancouver and Halifax are a false good idea, another pharaonic project not only very costly and taking ages to build but also not very ecological, on the word of French environmentalists who have been experiencing it for decades. HSTs are for long-distance transport what aerial trains and metros are for urban public transport. They abandon the already existing road network to the reign of the solo car instead of substituting the domination of public transport for it.

This society of care and connection in addition to being ecological and solidarity-based is also inexpensive compared to the exorbitant green capitalism that condemns working people to permanent austerity. It is this economic imperative that hides behind the far-right transformation of neoliberal capitalism that can no longer accommodate traditional representative democracy. This ecofeminist society of care and connection commands democratic planning that must “be done at the Quebec scale, it cannot be realised from cities and villages.” In fact, it must be global. Its affordability will free up time not only for creativity but also for participatory democracy.

It is less about seizing control of national (and global) savings for mega-investment needs than doing so to prevent global Finance from causing harm by squandering the fruit of collective labour in “great useless works”.

These only serve to enrich the plutocracy that carves out positions of rent-seeking. This plutocracy knows very well that there is no profit to be made either in responding to the material needs of the poorest 50% globally or in meeting the public service needs—they are not called “public” for nothing—of the next 40%.

If after the Holocaust there was still a capitalist way out...

If the crisis of the 1930s, between two world wars heralding unprecedented barbarism, could lead to “human-faced” capitalism of the thirty glorious years, provided one disregards the anti-colonial struggles for national liberation, it is hard to see such an outcome today. Global warming, far from plateauing, is accelerating. The sixth great extinction is doing the same. The combined crisis of climate and biodiversity, generated by the mass consumption of the thirty glorious years, as a fundamental axis of the poly-crisis backs humanity against the wall. If in Palestine the choice is between the application of international law and genocidal war, if in Ukraine it is between “defending the country or the oligarchs,” in the countries of old imperialism and those “emerging,” it is between a solidarity society of care and connection and the oligarchic neo-fascism of the end of humanoid times.

Marc Bonhomme
www.marcbonhomme.com; bonmarc videotron.ca