Ontario Premier Doug Ford is preparing a sweeping attack on environmental regulations, Indigenous rights, and labour laws, cynically using the U.S.-Canada trade war to remove any obstacles to capitalist profits.
Bill 5, known in typically Orwellian fashion as the Protect Ontario by Unleashing Our Economy Act, gives the Ontario government sweeping powers to exempt companies from provincial laws or regulations and to fast-track approval for mining projects and landfills. The bill was just successfully passed, after Ford pushed MPPs to pass the bill before they break for the summer on June 5.
In perhaps its most significant section, Bill 5 would give the premier’s cabinet unlimited authority to declare any part of Ontario a “special economic zone” where companies and projects do not have to comply with provincial laws or regulations.
The bill would eliminate Ontario’s Endangered Species Act in favour of a “Species Conservation Act”, changing the definition of a habitat to include only the immediate vicinity around an animal’s den or nest. It would enable the government to overrule the province’s independent scientific committee that determines if species are threatened.
First Nations have been among the most scathing in their opposition to the bill. They fear this bill will be used to steamroll over their rights and impose big development projects on their territories without consultation.
Already, Ford announced that the Ring of Fire, a mineral-rich region capitalists have long coveted as a source of raw materials for electric-vehicle batteries, would be the first to be designated a special economic zone. Many Indigenous communities are located in the region.
Linda Debassige, grand council chief of Anishinabek Nation in Ontario, warned the government that “should this bill proceed in its current form, we will be idle no more”—a reference to the mass Indigenous movement that swept Canada in 2012.
This bill is a clear gift from Ford to his rich friends—a way to further increase their profits. Under the guise of fighting Trump’s tariffs, the Canadian capitalist class is ramping up its attacks on workers and the oppressed, laying bare the fiction of “Team Canada”.
That being said, there is an implacable logic to this bill. As Ontario Minister of Energy and Mines Stephen Lecce explained: “If Australia, and the United Kingdom, and France, and Germany, and the U.S., and South Korea can open a mine faster than Ontario… how can we be left behind?” As capitalism sinks ever deeper into crisis, competition between capitalists of different nations on the world market becomes ever fiercer. This is at the root of the trade war.
In this context, all obstacles to profit-making, whether they are environmental, labour, or other regulations, put the national capitalists at a disadvantage. The result is a race to the bottom, where they will put everything that makes life bearable for working class people on the chopping block.
