Quebec Anti-Austerity Protests

Union Leaders' Deadly Alliance with the Cops

A wave of protests against austerity attacks by the Liberal government of Philippe Couillard is sweeping Quebec. Some 50,000 demonstrators, mainly trade unionists, rallied and marched in Montreal on September 20. Another 50,000, mainly student youth, took to the streets on October 31 in conjunction with a one-day strike by more than 80,000 university and Cégep students.

A central target of the protests is the government’s Bill 3, which would tear up union contracts and force municipal workers and retirees to pay through the nose for shortfalls in the pension system. After several hundred firefighters and other municipal unionists staged an angry protest inside the Montreal city council chambers on August 18, local councillors and the capitalist media launched a ferocious witchhunt. More than 40 workers face charges including unlawful assembly, mischief and assault, while six firefighters were fired and nearly 60 other workers suspended for up to six months. Drop all the charges—reinstate all fired and suspended workers!

Defense of pensions and other social programs is in the direct interest of all working people. However, far from bringing the power of the labour movement to bear in class struggle against Bill 3 and other austerity attacks, the municipal union leaders have made an alliance with the “unions” that represent the police in Montreal and elsewhere in Quebec.

The cops are not the workers’ allies, and their “unions” and “associations” have absolutely no place in the labour movement! Together with the courts and the army, the police are at the core of the capitalists’ violent and coercive machine of state repression. Their purpose is to uphold ruling-class “law and order” against the left, against immigrants and ethnic minorities, and especially against workers in struggle.

The Montreal cops are notorious for staging brutal attacks during the 2012 student strike, when more than 3,300 protesters were arrested. To this day, menacing gangs of riot police stage mass arrests at “unauthorized” leftist demonstrations. In mid-September, the police mobilized on two separate occasions to prevent protests by dock workers at the Port of Montreal against threats to union jobs. The dockers are organized in a local of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), yet leaders of the CUPE municipal unions have been working arm in arm with the cops in protests against Bill 3!

The union bureaucrats’ alliance with the agents of state repression testifies to their fealty to the capitalist system, which is based on the exploitation of the working class by the owners of industry and commerce. The Ligue trotskyste/Trotskyist League has intervened at anti-austerity protests in Montreal in sharp opposition to this perspective. Our comrades have motivated the need to fight for a new labour leadership dedicated to a perspective of anti-capitalist class struggle.

Scandalously, two reformist groups in Quebec, Alternative Socialiste (AS—affiliated with the Committee for a Workers’ International) and La Riposte (Fightback), defend the presence of the cop “unions” in the coalition against Bill 3. Writing in Réflexions Socialistes (Fall 2014), AS leader Julien Daigneault calls for “critical support” to this obscene alliance. La Riposte goes further, claiming that “The presence of the police in the movement has an undeniable strategic advantage, because it weakens the capacity of the government to use them to suppress movements of workers and youth.” “Under the pressure of events,” they assert, the cops can “cease for the moment to be a useful weapon of the capitalist state” (marxiste.qc.ca, 29 August).

This is false at every level. Far from being an “advantage” to the workers, the alliance with the cops is a noose around their necks. La Riposte tries to buttress its case by noting that at the August 18 City Hall protest the police “let the firefighters enter and shut their eyes to the events.” Nowhere do these reformists mention that the cops laid charges against dozens of the protesters less than two weeks later! When workers engage in militant struggle, the police inevitably serve as a repressive weapon of the ruling class. In acting as lawyers for the bosses’ armed thugs, AS and La Riposte put forward a suicidal perspective for the working class, one that contradicts the ABCs of Marxism.

As our comrades wrote in a French-language supplement to SC which has been distributed at anti-austerity protests:

“We oppose the austerity attacks against municipal workers, but we denounce the union leaders’ collaboration with the ‘gangsters in blue.’ The police are the first line of attack against workers when they wage militant struggles against the employers and the bourgeois government. One need only recall the brutally repressive role played by the police during the student protests of 2012 to show that the police are in no way allies of the working class or the left. They are also a reservoir of racism and violence directed against ethnic minorities, as was bitterly shown in the killing of Fredy Villaneuva, shot dead by the cops in 2008.

“Contrary to the illusions spread by pseudo-Marxist groups like La Riposte or Alternative Socialiste, the police, like prison guards, are not ‘workers in uniform.’ They are part of the apparatus of the capitalist state, which exists to uphold, through organized violence, the bourgeoisie’s system of exploiting the workers. The working class must struggle independently of the bourgeois state, and that is why we say: police, security guards and prison guards out of the unions!

—“Workers: The Police are Not Your Allies,” SC Supplement (August 2014)