An impending catastrophe stares us in the face.
As trade with America breaks down, the Canadian economy faces an existential crisis. In total, industries directly involved in exporting to the U.S. account for an estimated 2.4 million jobs. Already in March, the Canadian economy shed 33,000 jobs, the biggest monthly loss in over three years.
Facing what the Business Council of Canada calls “an economic reckoning,” serious measures are required to stop wholesale deindustrialization and the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs.
Private ownership fails
Private companies, who have to protect the interests of their shareholders, are by definition the least suited to weather a storm of this nature. Already, 4,500 jobs at the Stellantis plant in Windsor are threatened as well as 1,200 jobs at the GM CAMI plant in Ingersoll. It has also been leaked that Honda is considering closing their Alliston factory, placing 4,200 jobs at risk.
Are we supposed to accept that the CEOs of these companies can unilaterally make these decisions?
Lana Payne, president of Unifor which represents 84,600 manufacturing workers, has been trying to convince companies to “not give up on Canada.” In response to GM’s announcement that they will shut down their CAMI plant, Payne appealed to General Motors to “do everything in its power to mitigate job loss.”
But we shouldn’t have to prostrate ourselves before these giant companies and beg them to “mitigate job losses.” And these people only care about profit, so begging will not work anyway.
The communist solution is simple: Any manufacturer, like Stellantis or General Motors, who decides to shut down, should immediately be nationalized.
Corporate welfare bums
We already hear our objectors—but where will you get the money for that?
The fact of the matter is that governments at all levels have handed out hundreds of billions in corporate subsidies over the last couple of decades. From 2007 to 2019, $350 billion in corporate subsidies were given out—that comes to approximately $30 billion/year! Following COVID, corporate subsidies remained historically high as the state essentially put the system on life support: $88.5 billion in 2020, $47 billion in 2021 and over $50 billion in 2022.
The auto industry, which is now in the crosshairs of Trump’s tariffs, is especially massively subsidized by the state. For example, General Motors received a staggering $65 billion since 2009. Recently, $15 billion was given to Stellantis and $5 billion to Honda. The CAMI plant itself received $518 million in government support.
And Mark Carney is pledging to continue plowing tax-payer money into the corporate money pit to the tune of $225 billion over the next four years.
Therefore, the question of “where do you get the money for that?” is a moot point.
Even on a capitalist basis, the Canadian taxpayers have bought and paid for these companies. This is without even going into the enormous profits these companies have made off of the backs of the very workers they are now threatening to lay off!
We say: any company that prioritizes their profits over the interests of the working class should be nationalized without compensation.
But nationalization is only the first step in a process. We need to combine the political demand for nationalization with a labour movement that confronts these factory shutdowns with factory occupations. The workers know how to run the factories better than anyone else. If the CEOs decide to shut them down, the workers should occupy the plants, eject the managers, and run them under democratic workers’ control.
Economic planning
However, one plant run under workers’ control cannot operate in a sea of capitalism. But this crisis goes beyond just one factory.
The entire Canadian economy was built in integration with the U.S. economy, and now that is over. This places a massive question mark over how the Canadian economy will be able to develop without relying on our American neighbour.
Giles Gherson, the president and chief executive of the Toronto Region Board of Trade, argues that we need “a national project to build back the economic strength needed, not only to withstand what could be a prolonged siege, but the upheaval of the entire global trade system.”
Echoing this, Mark Carney states that we need to build “a new Canadian economy.”
But how this will be accomplished without violating private ownership will take a large dose of miracle working. If the whole economy needs to be reorganized, we will need to combine our resources and direct production centrally towards what is absolutely necessary.
The hundreds of billions earmarked for corporate subsidies should instead be directed towards restructuring the entire manufacturing sector, retooling factories as necessary with no loss of jobs.
The auto industry currently supports 128,000 auto-manufacturing jobs, and indirectly supports an additional 462,000. The only way to maintain these jobs and guarantee the viability of the industry is for the state to nationalize the entire sector and institute a rational plan of production based on need.
For example, public transportation systems are totally inadequate and are in a completely dilapidated state in many cities. The manufacturing sector, instead of being artificially kept alive to produce for an unstable market, could be retooled to produce mass transit systems for each major city.
It is impossible to produce a complete blueprint for exactly how the economy could be retooled. We first must break the shackles of private ownership so that we can develop a rational plan of production based on need, not profit.
Don’t subsidize, nationalize!
