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Workers in several industries across Québec are getting ready for what’s beginning to look like one of the highest points of struggle in recent memory. Just like everywhere else, the COVID-19 pandemic has shaken up the economy, with governments and capital straining to contain progressive resistance to their corporate-friendly management of the crisis.

But Québec’s labour movement is fighting back.

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Welcome to the People's Voice Podcast. Visit us online at www.peoplesvoice.ca

The Communist Party’s Central Committee met on June 14, amid a massive struggle against police killings and systemic racism that began in the US and led to mass protests on six continents and sixty countries, including Canada. Led by Black Lives Matter in the US and Canada, the demonstrations quickly expanded to include Indigenous peoples and secured the support of large sections of the labour and democratic movements. Labour solidarity included the June 19 shut down of 29 ports along the west coast, by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU).

George Floyd’s murder on May 25 was the latest in an escalating number of police murders of Black and Indigenous people across the US and Canada. Since then, six men have been found hanging from trees and more have been shot by police in the US. In Canada, six Indigenous people have been killed by police or in police custody in the last two months.

The Central Committee received Party Executive’s previously issued statement supporting the protests and demanding an end to police killings and the systemic racism and violence against Black, Indigenous and racialized peoples. The statement noted that this oppression is a built-in feature of capitalism, which helps generate vast super-profits for the biggest exploiters, the large national and transnational corporations.

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Quantifying each and every one of the effects of the war that imperialism has declared on the Venezuelan people is impossible. The attacks that Venezuelans have experienced since 1999 have not only been economic, they have also been psychological. There is no way to measure the consequences of the hatred that the undemocratic opposition has sown with its anti-socialist propaganda, to the point of burning people alive if they are suspected chavistas. The resentment that the Venezuelan people have towards those who claim to be Venezuelans, but who have sold out their homeland, is also unmeasurable.

That said, focusing on the economic dimension we have updated the calculations that we made in March 2019. At that point, losses caused by this war amounted to $125 billion; we have now calculated those for all of 2019, which total $68 billion (all amounts in US dollars).

Therefore, the total economic losses between 2016 and 2019 are $194 billion.

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July 15 marked the 150th anniversary of Manitoba’s entry into Confederation as the fifth province of Canada, part of a sordid exercise in white supremacist control and violent ethnic cleansing. Manitoba is not unique in this regard – the provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta, where I lived for nearly 40 years, have similar stories. But in a very real way, this prairie tragedy began at Red River, and still continues 150 years later.

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On two days, seventy-five years ago, the United States used nuclear weapons in combat for the first and, so far, only time in history. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on August 6 and 9, 1945, killed a quarter of a million people and ushered in an era of imperialist aggression through the threat of global annihilation.

Then, as now, the United States and its imperialist allies argued that the use of nuclear weapons against a civilian population was necessary to force Japan’s surrender and end World War II. This claim has been repeatedly proven to be false.

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Welcome to the People's Voice Podcast. Visit us online at www.peoplesvoice.ca

With no early end in sight to the COVID-19 pandemic, two crucial questions are on the agenda: how can we protect lives in this emergency, and what fundamental economic changes can prevent big corporate interests from imposing the burden of this crisis on working people?

The second question is a subject for another commentary, but it’s closely related to the immediate problem. Looking around the world, we can see that some countries have made tremendous progress in containing the pandemic, especially those with economies and social systems which prioritize people’s welfare over private profits.

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