United in Struggle

Statement at the G7 Counter Summit – June 14, 2025

So I think it’s clear to pretty much all of us here that the architects at this conference of the Genocidal 7 don’t give a fuck about the working people in Canada, or everyday people across the world. The agenda has been set and talks will be held about how the G7 states and their invited guests can further facilitate their economic and geopolitical interests, furthering the plunder of oppressed countries across the world, and leaving working people in the imperialist centres to deal with ever worsening economic crisis and repression when we stand up and fight back.

And when war becomes the inevitable consequence of the economic crisis they’ve created and the competition between them and other imperialist powers, we’re the ones who will pay the price and inevitably become cannon fodder in the struggle over which bloc of monopoly capitalists gets to dominate the world.

The questions that should then come from this realization are: How do we fight back and struggle for the interests of the working people of the world? How do we uproot this rotten, dead-end, system that has nothing to offer the vast majority?

Well one of our immediate and pressing tasks is to rebuild and rekindle a fighting political movement of the working class across this country. At the East Van Workers Assembly we bring together workers across industries, union and non-union, on the basis of expanding and democratizing the workers movement, and connecting struggles for immediate demands of the working class to our long term political interests. What I’m going to focus on now is two aspects to our work: 1 is waging a struggle within our unions to raise their level of militancy, and reorient them toward a class struggle perspective, 2 is waging fighting political and economic campaigns that can bridge the gap and bring together union and non-union workers to fight in a common front against the monopoly capitalists.

Within the unions our task is clear and our march is long. Generally speaking, for 50 years our unions and their leadership have sat on their laurels, failing to protect the gains made by the workers movement of the past. We can’t accept this status quo any longer. We need to organise within our unions and struggle to put forward a militant class struggle perspective. We need to understand that we can’t keep playing by the rules of the bosses when the whole fucking system is rigged against us. 

Just look at what happened last year to the Canadian Union of Postal Workers, the Teamsters, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, and the Canadian Union of Public Employees. The  Liberal regime discovered a new anti-democratic tool, section 107 of the Canadian Labour Code, to break their strikes and send them back to work. When our strikes pose any serious threat to the bottom line of the rich, we know what side the government will stand on. And when the time comes for the movement to present a front and fight back, there’s no front to be found!

We’re at a point where we’re starting from the basics, doing the painstaking work to organise within and outside our unions and build a base of working class militants, because if we do, we can lead the movement and we can escalate the level of struggle.

For example: Last year, when CUPW was legislated back to work by the Liberal government’s fourth use of Section 107 in a single year, EVWA mobilized along with other militant unionists to create a solidarity picket line that blocked entry to Canada Post’s Pacific Processing Center. This action carried forward the assembly’s political message that, in order to prevent further erosion of our right to strike, unions would have to collaborate with each other and with non-unionized workers in our communities. That we would have to relearn the methods of struggle we knew how to use 100 years ago. In other words, winning required uniting the class as a whole. 

Outside of the unions we need to wage fighting political and economic campaigns. This past year we’ve led a campaign to highlight the rampant and increasing trend of workplace injury and death and put forward a call to get Bosses Behind Bars. Our campaign exposed the ruling class as the culprits for the systematic increase in the maiming and killing of workers on the job. The bosses are willing to sacrifice working people in their quest to squeeze ever more profit, by increasing the pace of work, increasing workloads, and cutting corners beyond all reasonable expectations of safety. They need to be afraid of facing actual consequences for killing workers, instead of slap-on-the-wrist fines worth less than the profits they made by enacting the policies that kill us in the first place. 

Our year-long campaign culminated in an independent rally and march for the Day of Mourning for Workers Injured and Killed on the Job on April 28th. We organized separately and in opposition to the pageantry of the supposedly pro-worker provincial NDP, BC’s two-faced workplace safety agency, and the very bosses who created the conditions for the deaths and injuries in the first place – the fucking Business Council of BC who play a prominent role in the commemoration each year. 

Militant union locals and workers who couldn’t stomach this collaboration for another year joined the East Van Workers Assembly in mourning our lost brothers and sisters and pledged to fight back against the capitalists who put them in the ground. This campaign, although limited, showed an appetite for real class struggle politics and a segment of the workers movement that is ready to push the boundaries and escalate the struggle, not just sit back and defend the gains we made when we built the labour movement.

Through our painstaking work, educating, organising, and mobilising the masses, waging struggles within our unions, and fighting political campaigns, we’ve raised the consciousness of our members, and the broader workers movement, and one aspect of that has been to bring an internationalist perspective to our organisers and our membership. 

As an exercise in putting forward an internationalist line, we’ve mobilized our membership on numerous occasions to participate in national days of action against one of the “Big Five” Banks, Scotiabank, for its disgusting investment in Israel’s primary weapons manufacturer: Elbit Systems. The EVWA recognizes that as a form of class struggle itself in its context of imperialist-zionist colonization, the national liberation struggle of the Palestinian people is deeply connected to the struggle of workers around the world and should be supported both in principle and in practice as part of our strategy to weaken our shared enemies, the monopoly capitalists managing, financing, and profiteering off the ongoing genocide. 

In these actions, the EVWA works to identify Scotiabank not only as a complicit institution profiting off mass murder, but as a principal enemy in the working class struggle in Canada, as it is an expression of the massive concentration of wealth by the few who oppress and exploit the peoples on these lands and all over the world. By uniting the class struggles of labouring and toiling peoples across nations, by building concrete alliances against our common enemies we can fight the disgusting pseudo-scientific racist ideology of the ruling class that drives us apart. We can build our power to combat these monsters together wherever we live and work and expand our lines to move them forward step-by-step until victory.

By agitating, organizing, and mobilizing workers as a class across the country we can build a movement that’s both broad AND deep enough to seriously challenge the power and interests of the ruling class. When the working class is conscious of its exploitation and the common enemy it shares with the toiling peoples of the world, it can actually uproot this genocidal system altogether and build something new in its place that: A) is actually democratic in its character and; B) represents the collective interests of the vast majority rather than a small clique of profit-hungry, bloodthirsty parasites.

By systematically sharpening the class struggle in our context as the central pillar of its strategy, the East Van Workers Assembly enables the working class movement to not just uphold anti-imperialism on principle, but to actually put the politics into practice by making gains and exercising real power in the fight against the parasitic and imperialist Canadian ruling class. By taking the fight to the bosses and advancing the class struggle on their home soil the working class can strike heavy blows against imperialism. In the immortal words of the martyr Ghassan Kanafani, “wherever you strike [imperialism], you damage it, and you serve the world revolution.”