Mark Carney’s austerity and fossil-fuel agenda may please the powerful, but it’s already stirring major resistance from workers and Indigenous communities. Photo courtesy Mark Carney/X.

In my June CD column on Mark Carney’s class war I suggested, “We can see an effective consensus emerging in Canada’s political establishment on the need to respond to the threat of Trump’s trade war with a concerted drive to remove barriers to profitability and boost ‘competitiveness.’ This is already taking on the dimensions of a major assault on workers, communities and the environment.”

With a federal budget drawing near, there is no doubt that the Carney government in Ottawa will be playing the leading role in pursuing an agenda of unprecedented austerity, along with a transfer of resources to fuel rampant military spending and a highly interventionist state regime that will grease the wheels of exploitation and profit-making. In this, there will be a particular emphasis on facilitating the most destructive fossil fuel projects.

In that same article, I also argued for the need for a Canada-wide common front of social resistance to the Carney-led attack and I concluded that “the attempt to put the burden of the trade crisis on the backs of workers and communities is producing the deep injustices and the simmering anger that can unleash such a movement.”

I’m very far from wanting to promote overconfidence, especially given the scale of the attack that we face and the general lack of preparedness to fight back in a united and powerful manner. That being said, it is also clear that Carney and his cohorts are not going to be able to impose their regressive agenda on workers and communities without some serious fights. Evidence of this is all around us.

First of all, we should never underestimate the explosive potential of Indigenous resistance in Canada. The Carney government and its provincial and territorial counterparts will find that their drive to unleash harmful and dangerous oil and gas projects—steamrolling over Indigenous rights in the process—is a risky proposition.

When assessing the prospects for Indigenous resistance in a particular situation, it is always important to take stock of the reactions coming not only from the leadership bodies recognized under the Indian Act but also those that emerge from within Indigenous communities. The latter are likely to be less patient, restrained and respectable; as such, they are of prime importance.

The officially approved Indigenous leaderships have themselves expressed simmering indignation, bordering on expressions of open defiance, in response to Carney’s intended course of action. Very clearly, the Indigenous compliance that he hopes for is likely to prove a very challenging proposition.

According to The Walrus, the First Nations Major Projects Summit that the........

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