The International Marxist Tendency (Quebec), an organized collective within Quebec solidaire, has recently published an open letter aimed at activists within QS and the NDP, pushing for a united front against austerity.  The NDP, QS, and the trade unions are all organizations which can serve to unite the workers' resistance against the coming attacks by the Liberals and Parti Quebecois.

The NDP's "surge" in Quebec has caught all of the so-called pundits and experts by surprise.  Poll after poll now has the NDP as the most popular political party in Quebec, even ahead of the nationalist Bloc Quebecois.  How can this be so?  After years of the stale nationalist-federalist debate, Quebec workers are looking for new answers and a defence of workers' rights.

Joel Bergman from La Riposte, the journal of the Tendance Marxiste Internationale , an official collective within Quebec solidaire, has written this article analyzing the current state of crisis that exists within Quebec society, and the need for a workers' party to emerge in Quebec.  The situation is very favourable for Quebec solidaire (QS) to become that party. The Quebec Marxists will be participating at the QS congress at the end of March and we wish them the greatest success.

In Montreal, the Marxists participated in a solidarity march on Saturday the 15th which had been called before the dictator fled the country. Called to protest the clampdown against the demonstrations, the march became a celebration of the cowardly flight of Ben Ali, and a protest to demand that his son-in-law not be allowed to take up residence in his $2.5 million mansion in a rich neighbourhood of Montreal.

“We need to elect a government that will swing the axe,” declared Mr. Duhaime, a former aide to the ADQ’s Mario Dumont and the co-founder of the Réseau Liberté-Québec (Quebec Freedom Network). The RLQ, launched in September, presents itself to be a “non-profit organization designed to network all Quebeckers who share the ideals of individual freedom and responsibility.” Delving deeper than this rosy proclamation, the RLQ is clearly just another push from the Right to create a viable capitalist alternative to the hated Liberals. This is needed in order to brutally push forward the austerity measures necessary to save the capitalist system, and to dismantle all of the gains made by the working class over the last half-century.

Quebec solidaire has issued a call for platforms in the lead-up to the party’s congress. They propose discussing these platforms in a series of citizen circles. The two following documents have been submitted by the International Marxist Tendency (Quebec) , a recognized collective within QS. Fightback works in solidarity with IMT Quebec, and wish our comrades success in promoting a revolutionary internationalist perspective in Quebec.

On 24th June, it was announced that a “historic” agreement had been reached between the Quebec government and the recently formed Common Front of public sector unions, which represents nearly half a million workers in the province. The agreement that was reached threw out the demands that were democratically ratified by the trade union movement and accepted what is, for all intents and purposes, the very same counter-proposal offered by the Charest government at the beginning of negotiations. After years of imposed contracts that enforced degrading work conditions, obligatory overtime, and stagnating wages, the hope of a united opposition by the unions in Quebec against the government's austerity measures have been lost.

The recent Quebec provincial budget represents a generalized attack against the working class and an attempt to use the crisis as an excuse to wipe out the historic social gains of the Quebec masses. The measures announced range from tuition increases to the abolition of free healthcare. What is needed is a response from the labour leaders; we cannot afford to allow these attacks against our standards of living.

This past February, Raymond Bachand, Quebec's finance minister, announced that Quebec was in need of a "cultural revolution." The ministry released a report that calculated that Quebec has one of the most indebted economies in the industrialized world. Quebec's $285.6-billion debt is equal to 94.6% of the province's GDP; only Japan, Italy, Greece, and Iceland have a larger debt-to-GDP ratio than Quebec. This proposed "cultural revolution" is an attempt to prepare Quebec workers and students to accept cuts to social spending on a level unseen in Quebec history.

One day after Quebec finance minister Raymond Bachand tabled the 2010 budget, some 12,000 people gathered at Square Phillips in Montreal to show their opposition to the budget. At least 40 buses from all over Quebec, some from as far away as Gaspé, arrived at the square. This impressive show of strength, happened just two weeks after the massive 75,000 Common Front demonstration, is a sign of the militant mood amongst Quebec workers against the bosses’ planned cuts and attacks.