On “Canada” Day

On this July 1st we send revolutionary greetings to Indigenous Peoples of Turtle Island and the working class of Canada.

For over 150 years, July 1st has marked the anniversary of Canadian Confederation. It has served as a celebration of the Canadian state while obscuring the forces that brought it into existence. The settler colonial project of Canada was founded on land theft and genocide, conceived by an exploitative ruling class whose interests lie only in territorial expansion, resource extraction, and capitalist accumulation.

Long before Confederation, chartered monopolies claimed vast Indigenous territories as corporate possessions and extracted wealth from them for colonial markets. The Hudson’s Bay Company alone laid claim to millions of square kilometres of already inhabited land across what is now Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Nunavut, Ontario, and Quebec, calling the region Rupert’s Land.¹ Though the fur trade that made this company an imperial powerhouse relied entirely on the labour and knowledge of Indigenous hunters, it offered nothing in return but a forced economic dependency on European manufactured goods, the near-extinction of beavers, food shortages and disease.² The Canada Company acquired over a million acres in Upper Canada for settlement and speculation, converting Indigenous land into a source of private profit. These institutions represented the interests of colonial merchant capital, land speculators, and financiers, whose fortunes depended upon expansion across Indigenous territories.³

The architects of Confederation, including John A. Macdonald, George-Étienne Cartier, Alexander Galt, and their allies, sought to create a centralized state capable of securing territory, enforcing property relations, attracting investment, constructing railways, and integrating British North America into the wider circuits of colonial capital. Confederation provided the political framework through which an emerging Canadian bourgeoisie could consolidate its power. The transfer of Rupert’s Land from the Hudson’s Bay Company to the Dominion of Canada revealed the class character of colonial rule. A territory larger than much of Europe was transferred between a chartered monopoly and a settler colonial state without the consent of the Indigenous nations who governed and inhabited those lands.⁴ Under Section 91(24) of Canada’s founding legislation, the federal government asserted exclusive authority over Indigenous Peoples and their lands, reducing entire peoples, nations, complex systems of governance, kinship, and land stewardship to a single bureaucratic category designated for management, assimilation, and erasure. ⁵

The settler colonial ruling class that devised the project of Canada has since evolved. Merchant capital and land speculation have given way to monopoly capital, finance capital, and corporate conglomerates, while the concentration of economic power has only deepened. A tiny minority of billionaires, real estate oligarchs, and corporate monopolies hold absolute power over our lives. From the Thomson media empire and Weston retail empire, to Irving resource holdings, Desmarais financial capital, and to the vast corporate networks controlled by the Rogers, Saputo, McCain, and Richardson families, economic power in Canada is concentrated in the hands of a small number of capitalist dynasties. Their interests shape everything from grocery prices and telecommunications costs to energy policy, resource development, banking, media ownership, and the terms upon which we access housing, transportation, and other necessities of life. The Canadian state remains the enforcement arm of this ruling class. 

While grocery prices in Canada sit at historically high levels⁶, companies like Loblaw, owned by the wealth-hoarding Weston family, consistently report billions in revenue and record profits.⁷ Canada’s supposedly democratic government does not challenge the prices imposed by oligopolies because it does not stand apart from the corporate ruling class. Instead, it offers meagre compensatory payments to manage discontent without altering the underlying relations of power.⁸ Workers continue paying the same oligopoly prices, while the state subsidizes a fraction of the cost. ‘Public funds’ pass through the pockets of working people and into the coffers of the corporations that gouge them, without requiring those corporations to surrender a cent of their profits.

Canadian capitalism does not derive its wealth from exploitation within its own borders alone. For example, Canada is home to roughly 75 percent of the world’s mining companies and serves as one of the principal centres of global extractive capital.⁹ From mines in the Caribbean and Latin America to Africa, the Canadian state acts as a steadfast defender of these interests on the world stage, using diplomatic, financial, and political pressure, including threats to prevent debt-relief, to continue extracting resources and exploiting workers in the Third World.¹⁰

The Canadian ruling class works tirelessly to convince us that our interests are bound up with the success of Canadian capitalism. We reject this lie. The profits extracted from workers and oppressed nations abroad do not make us free. They strengthen the power of the same ruling class that oppresses workers at home. True liberation requires an uncompromising commitment to Land Back, returning jurisdiction and stewardship of the land to Indigenous nations. This is not a threat to the working class; it is an indispensable step toward weakening the power of our common oppressor, by breaking the colonial property relations that drive land speculation, housing unaffordability, wage suppression, and austerity. As the great Métis Marxist organizer James P. Brady taught us, the struggle for Indigenous self-determination and the emancipation of the working class are two fronts of the very same war against capitalism.

We stand in the proud tradition of Dr. Norman Bethune and the workers of the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion. Our solidarity belongs to Indigenous nations defending their sovereignty on Turtle Island, to workers resisting exploitation in every corner of the world, and to peoples fighting for national liberation and self-determination. 

The path forward is clear. We do not seek to beg the billionaires for concessions. We must organize to overthrow their rule. We fight for a future where political power is seized from the exploiters and where the working class organizes society in accordance with collective need. 

Let us build a truly free Canada, a voluntary union of sovereign nations where the economy serves human flourishing, not private profit.

Workers and Oppressed Peoples of the World, Unite!