Danielle Smith and her cabinet were exultant after the federal Liberals caved to corporate pressure and ordered striking rail workers back to work last weekend. 

“Going forward, we encourage the federal government to continue to respond quickly to labour disputes that have the potential to create widespread damage to Canadians, our country’s economy and our reputation as a reliable trading partner,” said Smith and a coterie of cabinet ministers in a victory lap of a written statement. 

When liberals and the far right are in agreement about something as fundamental as the right to strike, you know we’re in a bad place. What’s damaging to this country isn’t a temporary disruption to the rail network, it's the continued use of legal and regulatory backdoors to stop workers from exercising their right to collective bargaining and the right to strike.

Now it’s rail workers but postal workers and dock workers have both seen their right to strike taken away by a federal Liberal government—to conservative applause.. 

When every strike is illegal then we must get more comfortable with “illegal” strikes. 

Sabo-tabby is the patron saint of all strikes, illegal or not. 

After all, how were the first industrial unions established? They went on strike “illegally.” The consequences for doing so were severe, employers made these workers destitute, had them beaten to a pulp, sent to jail and often killed and all of this was cheered on by business friendly politicians and media.  

But the strikes continued and the workers won. The unions had won the right to exist because if they didn’t get to exist there would be no business. They had won this right with their blood, they had won it after being shot at and watching their children starve. 

Whether or not a strike is “legal” by the definition of whatever labour relations regime those workers are operating under is irrelevant. If the workers don’t work, the businesses don’t bring in any money. When a strike is declared “illegal” it’s just another tactic, like mowing workers down with machine guns or cutting them off from food or having the local newspaper columnist call them communists that’s used by employers to break the strike.

As the famous labour aphorism goes, there is no such thing as an illegal strike, just an unsuccessful one.

As unions have become institutionalized and have gotten bank accounts and staff and laws have sprung up specifically to make strikes as difficult as possible to do “legally,” we must remember the history of how we got a right to strike in the first place. And I’m not saying this to disparage established unions, there are very real consequences for going on an “illegal strike.” Union leaders can go to jail, bank accounts can become seized. Those would be terrible. 

But the working class has two choices – get comfortable with losing power until it withers away or get comfortable with “illegal” strikes.

It’s members who are going to have to take the lead here. The teachers strike wave that swept the US in 2018 were grassroots, bottom-up efforts led by teachers who brought their unions along with them. And all of those strikes were illegal. And they won!

Those teachers realized what their power truly was, used, and in the end the law didn’t matter. Doing this requires immense bravery and solidarity but it can and should be done. And everyone who is not a union member needs to support these kinds of strikes as much as humanly possible.

If we don’t get comfortable with “illegal” strikes then you’re going to have to get comfortable with things getting a lot worse in Alberta. Danielle Smith is planning on selling off hospitals to improve competition and to increase fear.

Sometimes the choice will be to strike “illegally,” or to lose. It’s important to realize this and not deceive yourself into thinking there’s a secret third option, most times there isn’t. 

The strike is an essential linchpin of worker power, never let anyone take it away from you.

Sundries

Another UCP cabinet minister has admitted to accepting free Oilers playoff box seats from the CEO of the company that was behind the $80 million Turkish Tylenol fiasco.

Chief Dale McFee seems to feel guilty about the massive increase in frostbite injuries and amputations that accompanied his ineffective and cruel war on the homeless over the winter. It’s been a full court press on the media to counterspin Lauren Boothby’s reporting that shows both the cruelty and the failure of McFee’s policing first strategy to dealing with homelessness. First he sent a deputy chief on the radio to discredit Boothy’s reporting, which was ably debunked by Boothby on Twitter. Then, in first ever op-ed in the Edmonton Journal, McFee engages in a purely vibes and anecdote based defense of his ruinous policies.

Independent journalist Euan Thompson continues to rack up scoop after scoop. His latest details how a private recovery app targeting shelters, prisons and supervised consumption sites has massaged their own data to make it seem more effective. The truth is the government can’t show the effectiveness of the “Alberta model” so it has to resort to tactics like these.  

In case you missed it, one of the people responsible for the moral panic behind supervised consumption sites and safe supply, Adam Zivo, admitted to being an intelligence asset. He did this unprompted, on Twitter. 

The protesters who crashed the stage during a UCP campaign event in May of 2023 warning the public that "hospitals are not for sale," were right. It’s just over a year later and Danielle Smith is revealing plans to “transfer” hospitals away from Alberta Health Services. The protesters were right.

And just a personal note from. I’m back from vacation and ready to get back into the swing of things. Please reach out if you have any story ideas or things I need to know about. 

Cheers!

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