Canada Bars Entry to Catalan Leader

Let Carles Puigdemont into Quebec!

Independence for Catalonia and Quebec!

The following article was written in French by our comrades of the Trotskyist League in Quebec and Canada, binational section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist).

On April 29, the bourgeois press announced that Justin Trudeau’s anti-Québécois government had just barred Carles Puigdemont, the former president of the Generalitat [Catalan parliament] and leader of the Catalan independence movement, from entering Quebec. Puigdemont, who has lived in exile since 2017 due to the neo-Francoist repression meted out by the chauvinist Spanish state, had been invited by the Québécois nationalists of the Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste de Montréal and was scheduled to tour Quebec, speak about Catalonia’s independence struggle and visit the National Assembly.

Puigdemont is a leader of an oppressed nation struggling to liberate itself from its oppressor nation, and he therefore finds sympathy in Quebec. Trudeau’s actions not only are a slap in the face to the Catalan people but also are aimed against Quebec’s right to self-determination. In the eyes of the imperialist Canadian government, every fight for independence is an indirect threat to its own existence; thus, any expression of solidarity between Quebec and other independence movements must be quashed.

Carles Puigdemont’s lawyer in Montreal has taken legal action to lift the travel ban, and the Trudeau government may well cave in to political pressure in this election year. Whatever happens, one thing is clear: so-called “multicultural” and “liberal” Canada (which, like Spain, is in fact a reactionary monarchy) is 100 percent behind the Castilian capitalist state of Spain, which is a prison house of peoples including the Catalans, Basques and Galicians.

Having used repression to attempt to crush the legitimate 2017 referendum on Catalonia’s independence—in which the “yes” vote won an overwhelming 90 percent—Madrid is going after Catalan leaders. A dozen independentistes are currently languishing in the jail cells of the capitalist government presided over by the social-democratic PSOE (Spanish Socialist Workers Party) of Pedro Sánchez since 2018. They face show trials that could lead to decades-long prison sentences. Puigdemont and other Catalan members of parliament fled the country to avoid a similar fate. We call for the independence of Catalonia and the Basque Country on both sides of the French-Spanish border. We say: Down with the repression against the independentistes! Drop all charges and free them now!

Like Quebec, Catalonia is a nation with a distinct language and culture and we are for its independence without conditions. Furthermore, independence for these nations would strike a blow against the reactionary Spanish and Canadian states, thereby serving the interests of all workers. Marxists are staunch champions of national liberation struggles. We view such struggles as a potential motor force for socialist revolutions that would establish the rule of the working class—the only force capable of realizing the true national and social liberation of all peoples of the world.

This perspective is starkly counterposed to that of the Parti québécois (PQ), the Bloc québécois and Québec solidaire (QS), which, like Puigdemont’s Partit Demòcrata Europeu Català (PDeCAT), have a bourgeois-nationalist program, i.e., a false conception that the bourgeoisie and the working class of a given nation share common interests. Today’s nationalist leaders make every effort to keep the struggle for national liberation within the confines of “democratic” capitalism, while the nationalist capitalists seek an independent state in order to better exploit their “own” workers.

The PQ and its allies (backed by the union bureaucracies in Quebec) support NAFTA, NATO and all the imperialists’ machinations. During every referendum, their actions amount to nothing more than crawling before the Wall Street bankers and “assuring” them that an independent Quebec would be pliable and submissive to their diktats—not that this would stop U.S. imperialism from crushing Quebec. Catalan nationalists likewise preach deadly illusions in the European Union (EU). We categorically oppose the EU, which is a consortium of capitalist states today dominated by German imperialism, and secondarily by France, both of which fiercely oppose independence for Catalonia.

The events of the past two years in Catalonia have demonstrated that independence will not be won through parliamentary maneuvers by bourgeois independentistes, who plead with Madrid for an agreement. And contrary to what Puigdemont claims, Canada is certainly not more democratic than Spain just because it tolerated two referendums on independence for Quebec. As demonstrated by the military occupation of Quebec in October 1970, by the military and economic threats around the 1980 and 1995 referendums and by the Clarity Act, which effectively bans the separation of Quebec, it is clear that even in the case of a majority “yes” vote in a hypothetical third referendum, independence is by no means guaranteed.

Ultimately, only the working class has the social power to achieve genuine national liberation and create a socialist society free of oppression, misery and exploitation worldwide. To unleash this social power, what is necessary is to build Leninist parties as tribunes of the oppressed, which will fight against all manifestations of oppression and for the political independence of the workers movement.

In the oppressor nations, this means winning Castilian and Anglo-Canadian workers to the struggle for national liberation in opposition to their chauvinist, reformist leaderships, be they supporters of the Liberal Party or the NDP [New Democratic Party] in Canada, or the PSOE or other social democrats or petty-bourgeois chauvinists (like Podemos) in Spain. In the oppressed nations, it is necessary to fight against workers’ illusions in their bourgeois-nationalist leaderships (the PQ, the Bloc and QS in Quebec; the PDeCAT, Esquerra Republicana and Candidatura d’Unitat Popular in Catalonia). What the Trotskyist League strives to build here in Quebec and Canada is a binational Leninist party, as part of spreading our revolutionary, proletarian and internationalist program along with our comrades of the International Communist League. Pour une république ouvrière du Québec! For a workers republic of Quebec! Per una república obrera catalana! For a workers republic of Catalonia!