The twin unionbusters are bowing out of the Liberal leadership. Good.
Those who stab labour in the back will find themselves betrayed in turn.
I won’t be writing about any of the candidates to replace Justin Trudeau as Liberal leader and Prime Minister before the deadline to join the race passes on January 23rd. I have zero interest in speculating on which teams will make the playoffs when we will know that in only ten days’ time.
What I will be writing about is two of the major names who have decided they won’t run for the Liberal leadership. They have pulled out either because they do not believe they can win a general election as leader, or because they don’t even believe they can win the leadership.
And considering the way in which these two cabinet ministers wielded their power to abuse Canadian workers, I have zero sympathy for the collapse of their political ambitions. Indeed, I am thankful that they will never rise to a higher station than they currently hold, and knowing the psychology of political climbers, that will haunt them.
Our two unionbusting villains of the day, who have both bowed out of the Liberal leadership race? Our current Labour Minister, Steven MacKinnon, and our former President of the Treasury Board, Anita Anand.
MacKinnon and Anand served as twin strikebreakers in the Trudeau cabinet; where MacKinnon would obey his corporate masters and crack down on private sector unions, Anand would wage war against the public service workers who do the real work of government that politicians take credit for.
On repeated occasion in just the past year alone, Steven MacKinnon has repeatedly used variations of back-to-work legislation, despite the Supreme Court ruling that such laws are incompatible with the Charter right to collectively bargain.
This is the reoccurring pattern:
The employer refuses any bargaining or negotiating with the union, locking them out after the expiration of their previous contract.
Minister of Labour Steven MacKinnon lies, and says he will not use binding arbitration to violate the rights of workers.
Minister MacKinnon reveals that he was lying, and legally forces workers to be bound by a terrible contract which is worse than the contract they had before.
Corporate executives celebrate on their yacht, knowing that Steven MacKinnon has made strikes effectively illegal in Canada, and that MacKinnon will always protect their right to exploit and abuse the Canadian people.
It is not a shock to me that MacKinnon, a former corporate executive who boasted of his ability to make his fellow corporate executives richer and more powerful, has time and time again helped them gut the working class like a fish.
He did it with CN Rail and CPKC Rail. He did it with the Ports of Vancouver and Montréal. And he did it with Canada Post, all just in the year 2024 alone. Every single time he has the chance, MacKinnon cracks the whip on working Canadians, and then gets on his knees for his corporate masters in the hope that they’ll pet him like a dog.
And is Anita Anand any better? Nope! Just as MacKinnon brutalized the unions of the private sector, Anand was ready and willing to slash away at public sector unions CAPE and PSAC, repeatedly lying through her teeth and gaslighting the public.
Despite the Federal government making an explicit agreement with the public sector unions to preserve work-from-home, President of the Treasury Board Anita Anand unilaterally imposed a three-day in-office mandate.
The federal government’s explicit agreement to not do that was part of the deal in 2023 which ended PSAC’s strike action. And clearly, the promise to not unilaterally change remote work was a complete and utter lie.
Then, in early November 2024, President Anand sent a letter to every single Federal department, telling them that by November 20th they were required to submit a plan for “savings”, a euphemism for firing workers from their jobs and forcing the few who remain to do twice the work for the same amount of pay.
Indeed, beyond euphemism, Anand outright says that the savings are to be done through “natural attrition to the greatest extent possible”, a frank admission that workers who are fired without cause should have their positions entirely dissolved, putting triple the work on the few remaining people.
But finally? It is not enough for Anand to make the conditions of their jobs worse, and it is still not enough for Anand to fire them from their jobs entirely. Anita Anand also wants to steal the pensions that workers funded through decades of public service.
The public service pension plan has a surplus, and rather than use that surplus for the pension itself, which is the entire point of workers contributing to the pension, Anita Anand has instead decided to steal two billion dollars from that pension fund to pay down government debt.
Again, that money came in large part from the workers themselves, but Anand is ludicrously claiming that the workers are not “permitted” to have a well-funded pension, making slanderous claims that public service workers are spreading “misinformation”.
Both Anita Anand and Steven MacKinnon have done repeatedly awful things to union workers through their time in public office; I have no doubt that in their minds, they would rather workers not have the right to unionize…or any rights at all.
Some will challenge me on this, and raise whether they did these things of their own volition, or because Prime Minister Trudeau told them to do those things. And I would tell those people that it doesn’t fucking matter.
If they had moral disagreements with the terrible things that Trudeau asked them to do, they could have resigned from cabinet at any time. The choice to remain in cabinet, and to continue to bludgeon and beat the working class, makes them fully complicit.
Trudeau, MacKinnon, Anand, all of them are willing participants in Bay Street’s savage and brutal campaign to destroy the Charter and strip Canadians of our civil rights.
As a result, it does amuse me that both MacKinnon and Anand wanted to run for leader, but have been forced to step aside due to their inability to win. MacKinnon explicitly says as much, publicly citing the short timeframe of the race as the reason he won’t run.
But for Minister Anand, it is even worse than it appears in the media. On the surface, deciding that she won’t even run for re-election as an MP seems like enough wounded pride, and yet there is far more to upset her that hasn’t been publicly reported.
Anita Anand was, in fact, planning her leadership run for a very long time. I know this because people who were working on her bid have reached out to me privately over the past year.
Many months prior to the writing of this piece, several of those staff on her secret leadership bid had sent me photographic evidence of campaign materials that they had designed and prototyped. What a bitter irony, that she put such a great deal of effort into a race where she won’t even be able to run.
Such a sadness for these two cabinet ministers, that their political ambitions have completely dissolved before their eyes; such a hit to their bloated egos, that the public won’t even remember their names within a year’s time.
But when I consider what these two have done to unionized labour? I don’t feel an ounce of pity for them. I have just one final message for our unionbusting friends MacKinnon and Anand:
Thank you for serving up Canadian workers on a platter for greedy billionaires, and for calling yourselves “liberals” while repeatedly urinating on every civil right you can find.
I am truly ecstatic that neither of you will ever become Prime Minister, and that for the rest of your lives you will stew in your own indignation, knowing you will never accomplish what you truly dreamed of.
I hope that pain stays with you until the end of your days. I wish you both the absolute worst in your future endeavours. It will be my pleasure to watch both of you leave Parliament Hill, and it will be an even greater pleasure knowing you’ll never return.
Well said!