Alexa McDonough began and ended her time as federal NDP leader presiding over the defeat of a left challenge. Her record with the Third Way was not one of resistance or subversion, but of alliance and collaboration with the steady rightward march of the party. Rather than mend ties with organized labour, she made an open turn to the business class.

Following the corporate attacks of the 1980s and 1990s, and their attending defeats, grocery workers across the country ended the century in a workplace radically different from the one that existed several decades earlier. Workers who spent years making careers at supermarkets watched as their former world unraveled in a few short years and was replaced by a new low-wage, low-benefit, part-time reality.

Look out for more Liberal failures on rail and food safety, P3 infrastructure projects, corporate theft and mass layoffs. Labour won’t get anywhere by accepting Trudeau’s sugar-coated crumbs because when push comes to shove, the big money interests that have always backed up the Liberals will get the whole pie.

The real history of the wars proves quite conclusively that what rights and democracy we do have in Canada emerged from the struggles of workers, women, farmers, and immigrants against war profiteering, government collusion with big business, and widespread abuses of state power during the wars.

Albertans don’t have to repeat the mistakes and duplicate the experiences of the NDP in Ontario and Nova Scotia where one-term governments were not pushed by movements on the ground, eventually turned rightward and introduced anti-worker legislation, and were then ousted by the some of the country’s most radical anti-labour right-wing governments.

Bringing together these strikes with the burgeoning OPS contract fight, and showing up at OPSEU’s numerous rallies and info pickets, Ontario workers can begin to build some real solidarity and power capable of taking on the Liberals.