The Socialist Equality Party (Canada) will hold an online meeting—“Canada’s pandemic election, the resurgence of working class struggle, and the fight for socialism”—on Saturday, September 18 at 1:30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. To attend, please register here.

The meeting, which will be held in English and French, will advance a fighting program for the working class to eradicate the COVID-19 pandemic, and oppose the intensified assault on workers’ social and democratic rights that Canada’s next government will mount, whichever party or combination of parties leads it.

All the parties vying for office after September 20th agree that the working class must bear the cost of the pandemic, which they view as an opportunity to reorganize Canadian capitalism to make it more “competitive” against its international rivals. All support the ruling elite’s “profits before lives” strategy, and the gutting of the remaining anti-COVID-19 social distancing measures amid a Delta variant-driven fourth wave of the pandemic that threatens to have catastrophic consequences for children and young people. While this criminal policy is advocated most aggressively by the hard-right Conservatives and the big business Liberals, the prioritization of corporate money-making over the protection of human lives is fully endorsed by the nominally “left” New Democrats and the “Quebec first” Bloc Quebecois. The NDP began the election campaign by appealing to the Governor General to use her authoritarian powers to prevent the calling of an election on the grounds that the outgoing parliament, which oversaw a $650 billion bailout of the rich and super-rich, was working well.

The election campaign has starkly laid bare the vast gulf that exists between the official capitalist parties and the broad masses of working people. The political establishment is focused on rearming Canadian imperialism for war, aligning Ottawa with US imperialism’s aggressive diplomatic, economic, and military-strategic offensive against China, and stepping up the exploitation of working people while gutting social spending to ensure corporate Canada’s profitability.

The working class, on the other hand, is entering ever more openly into direct struggle to claw back the concessions given up over the past four decades and secure decent-paying, secure jobs. While this growing militancy and opposition to the status quo finds no expression in the official election campaign, recent months have witnessed a resurgence of strikes across Canada and internationally. A key feature of these actions is that they have increasingly developed in open rebellion against the nationalist and pro-capitalist trade unions.

The Socialist Equality Party (Canada) is intervening in the election campaign to provide this developing class anger a voice and political perspective. The SEP insists that none of the burning problems confronting working people—the combatting of the deadly pandemic, the threat of war, mounting social inequality, or environmental devastation—can be answered without mobilizing the working class on a socialist-internationalist program to break the stranglehold the capitalist elite exercises over all aspects of political, social, and economic life.

We encourage all WSWS readers, workers, and young people, who want to join this fight or learn about the socialist perspective to register here to attend.