November 1st, 2025 | Nathan Daniel

There is no debate, Unions Are Communist

Their leaders know it, their supporters know it.

In the crisp autumn air of 2025, as leaves turned gold across Alberta's prairies, a familiar specter reared its head once more. The Alberta Teachers' Association unleashed a province-wide strike that shuttered schools from October 6 to 29, leaving 750,000 students adrift in a sea of uncertainty. Parents scrambled for childcare, families were left strained under unexpected costs, and young minds faced the brutal interruption of their education once again—all in the name of demands for higher pay, smaller classes, and what the union called "working conditions". But, anyone with a shred of common sense knows it was just another power grab.

This wasn't some spontaneous outcry from beleaguered educators, it was the latest chapter in a long, sordid tale of labour unions in Canada, a tale woven from the red threads of communist ideology that have entangled and choked the very workers they claim to serve. From the smoke-filled barns of Guelph in 1921 to the picket lines of modern Edmonton, Canadian unions have never shaken the Bolshevik ghost that birthed them, turning what could have been tools for fair negotiation into weapons of disruption, entitlement, and outright sabotage against the public good.

Ask any modern union leader and they will smirk proudly if asked about holding Marxist views.

To understand the rot at the heart of today's union militancy, one must dig back to the soil from which it sprouted: the turbulent years following the First World War, when the world seemed on the brink of revolution and Canada's fledgling labour movement drank deeply from the poisoned well of Marxism. The war had ravaged the country, claiming over 60,000 lives and leaving behind a workforce starved for change. Factories hummed with discontent, mines echoed with the coughs of the overworked, and the prairies simmered with resentment against eastern elites. Into this brew stepped the radicals, inspired not by homegrown grievances but by the thunderous success of Lenin's Bolsheviks in Russia.

The 1919 Winnipeg General Strike wasn't just a labour dispute, it was a dress rehearsal for revolution, with strikers waving red flags and demanding not just better wages but the overthrow of the capitalist order. Organizers like J.S. Woodsworth and R.B. Russell, fresh from socialist circles, rallied tens of thousands to paralyze the city for six weeks, shutting down streetcars, factories, and even newspapers. The strikers' manifesto called for the recall of Canadian troops from anti-Bolshevik interventions in Russia, the release of political prisoners, and a planned economy where profit bowed to the collective will.

This wasn't bargaining; it was Bolshevism with a maple leaf, a direct echo of the Comintern's call to export revolution northward. The strike's violent end—federal troops firing on unarmed workers, leaving two dead and dozens wounded—did little to quell the fire.

If anything, it fanned the flames, birthing the One Big Union (OBU) in Calgary just months later. The OBU rejected the craft-based, moderate unions of the Trades and Labour Congress (TLC), which had cozied up to American Federation of Labor boss Samuel Gompers and his philosophy of "pure and simple" unionism—focusing on wages and hours without the messy business of upending society. No, the OBU dreamed bigger. They wanted a single, industrial behemoth that would unite all workers under one banner, staging general strikes to seize the means of production. Its leaders, many of whom had flirted with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)—that anarcho-syndicalist outfit infamous for its "Wobblies" who preached sabotage and the dynamite of direct action—poured scorn on the TLC as a tool of the bosses.

The OBU's platform wasn't subtle. It demanded solidarity with the Russian Revolution, the abolition of the free market, and production for use rather than profit. In Alberta's coal pits and British Columbia's lumber camps, OBU organizers whispered of a workers' paradise, drawing in the desperate and the dispossessed. Yet, for all their fiery rhetoric, the OBU delivered chaos: strikes that crippled rail lines, divided families, and invited brutal crackdowns from Mounties wielding batons and tear gas. By the mid-1920s, the OBU had fizzled, its radicals drifting into the shadows of the newly formed Communist Party of Canada, but the seed was planted.

Unions, once humble associations for mutual aid, had become incubators for class war, where negotiation gave way to confrontation and the public paid the price.

The Red Infiltration: Communism's Grip On Unions

The birth of the Communist Party in that Guelph barn in 1921 marked the point of no return. Secretive, funded by Moscow's Comintern, and led by firebrands like Tim Buck and Maurice Spector, the party wasn't content to agitate from the fringes. No, it burrowed into the heart of the labour movement, following Lenin's dictum in Left-Wing Communism to "bore from within" existing unions rather than splinter off into futile purity. The Communist Party's early manifestos read like blueprints for subversion: unite the proletariat, smash the bourgeoisie, and pave the way for Soviet-style councils. By the 1920s, communist cells infested the TLC's left wing, pushing resolutions for Canadian autonomy from American unions not out of patriotism, but to free them from Gompers' anti-red leash.

In Nova Scotia's Cape Breton, J.B. McLachlan—a miner turned Communist Party stalwart—led steelworkers and coal diggers in strikes that shut down entire towns, demanding not just union recognition but the nationalization of industry. McLachlan's Workers' Unity League (WUL), launched in 1929 amid the Great Depression's despair, became the Communist Party's crowning achievement in Canada: a network of militant locals in mines, mills, and factories, organizing the unorganized with promises of revolution.

Up to 90% of strikes in the early 1930s bore the party's stamp, from the bloody Asbestos Strike in Quebec—where 5,000 miners battled company thugs for three months—to the On-to-Ottawa Trek, where WUL-led relief camp workers hopped freights to storm Ottawa, only to be clubbed back by R.B. Bennett's Mounties in Regina.This wasn't benign activism; it was calculated infiltration.

Communist Party organizers, often immigrants from Eastern Europe schooled in dialectical materialism, flooded union halls with pamphlets extolling Stalin's five-year plans and decrying "social fascists" like the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF). In British Columbia's forests, the Lumber Workers' Industrial Union—straight out of the WUL playbook—pioneered "timber beast" organizing, blending IWW sabotage tactics with communist discipline to demand shorter weeks and higher pay. Harvey Murphy, that bombastic Communist Party leader known for his infamous "underwear speech" railing against capitalist exploitation, turned the International Woodworkers of America into a red fortress, only to see it purged in the postwar chill.

By 1937, nearly a third of the new Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) unions in Canada danced to the Communist Party's tune, from auto plants in Oshawa—where the United Auto Workers struck General Motors for recognition amid flying bricks and Pinkerton spies—to steel mills in Hamilton. The Oshawa victory was hailed as a triumph, but at what cost?

Workers endured lockouts, blacklists, and beatings, while the Communist Party used the chaos to recruit, whispering that true liberation lay not in contracts but in the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Critics might romanticize this as militant class struggle, but let's call it what it was: a foreign ideology hijacking Canadian workers for Moscow's chessboard. The Comintern's directives weren't suggestions; they were orders, flipping Communist Party support for the Second World War on a dime when Hitler invaded the USSR in 1941.

Suddenly, the party—banned and its leaders jailed under the Defence of Canada Regulations—became overnight patriots, funneling union muscle into war production while plotting postwar purges of so-called reactionaries. In Quebec, the Catholic Church fought back with its own syndicates, shielding francophone workers from "godless" reds, but even there, Communist Party agitators like Albert Saint-Martin staged blasphemous protests outside cathedrals, branding the hierarchy as capitalist puppets. The result? A labour movement fractured, violent, and forever tainted. Unions that once sought incremental gains—safer mines, fairer hours—now chased utopian fever dreams, leaving bread-and-butter issues to wither.

The public suffered, families starved during prolonged walkouts, economies buckled under general strikes, and the taxpayer paid the bill for it all. Communism didn't empower workers, it radicalized them into pawns, disposable in the grand game of global revolution.

From Cold War Purges to Simmering Resentment

The postwar era should have been unions' redemption, but the red stain proved indelible. As the Iron Curtain descended, Canada's labour landscape became a battleground in the global anti-communist crusade. The Gouzenko Affair in 1945—exposing Soviet spies in Ottawa—ignited a witch hunt, with RCMP raids on Communist Party offices and union locals.

Yet, the damage was done. Communist leaders like Beckie Buhay and Stewart Smith had embedded deep, shaping the Canadian Congress of Labour and its merger into the modern Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) in 1956. Purges swept through: entire CIO locals expelled for "red infiltration," social democrats in the CCF allying with conservatives to oust militants, echoing America's Taft-Hartley anti-communist oaths.

In Alberta, coal miners' unions—once WUL strongholds—saw leaders like McLachlan slandered as seditionists, their convictions for "seditious libel" a grim reminder of state overreach. By the 1950s, the CLC pledged fealty to the CCF (later the NDP), declaring it labour's "political arm," a velvet glove over the iron fist of reformism.

But roots run deep. The CLC, that behemoth claiming three million members today, still bears the scars and the strategies of its communist forebears. Strikes morphed from desperate bids for survival into ritualized power plays, with unions holding economies hostage for ideological wins.

The 1960s saw public-sector unions, swollen with teachers and nurses, adopt the WUL's confrontational playbook: work-to-rule campaigns, rotating strikes, and endless grievances that ground services to a halt. In the 1980s, as free trade debates raged, union bosses like those in the Canadian Auto Workers invoked the OBU's one-big-union ethos to rally against "corporate greed," but their militancy masked a deeper agenda—centralized control that stifled dissent and funneled dues into NDP coffers.

Even the 1990s Air Canada strikes, crippling holiday travel for millions, echoed the Winnipeg chaos, demands for job security laced with anti-capitalist barbs, leaving stranded families to curse the strikers' intransigence.

This legacy isn't ancient history; it's the DNA of modern Canadian unionism. The CLC's ties to the NDP—ideological heirs to the Communist Party's united-front tactics—ensure a steady drip of socialist orthodoxy, where solidarity means toeing the line against privatization or austerity.

Teachers' federations, in particular, have become hotbeds of this resentment-fueled activism, blending classroom gripes with broader anti-government screeds.

In Ontario's 1997 walkouts or British Columbia's 2002 "Day of Action," unions didn't just fight for salaries; they waged war on provincial budgets, inflating costs while delivering diminishing returns. Productivity? Forget it—union rules ossify workplaces, protecting the lazy alongside the diligent. Accountability? Laughable, as dues-funded lawyers shield incompetence. The taxpayer, that silent majority, foots the bill: billions in lost wages, disrupted services, and ballooning public debt, all while union executives jet to CLC conventions in Vegas, preaching revolution from five-star suites.

The Alberta Debacle

For 24 excruciating days, 51,000 members of the Alberta Teachers' Association walked out, citing "deteriorating conditions" in classrooms swollen to 40-plus students and underfunded supports for special needs kids. Who could argue with smaller classes or better pay? But peel back the rhetoric, and you find the same old communist playbook: demands that ignore fiscal reality, a refusal to compromise, and a willingness to sacrifice children on the altar of ideology.

The ATA rejected a tentative deal by 89.5 percent, demanding not just 12 percent raises over three years but ironclad caps on class sizes and ratios—measures that would require hiring 5,000 new teachers overnight, at a cost of hundreds of millions in a province already reeling from oil slumps and pandemic debts.

Premier Danielle Smith's government, to its credit, didn't fold. Parents, many juggling multiple jobs in Alberta's volatile economy, faced $500 weekly childcare hits; single moms in Fort McMurray bartered favours just to keep roofs overhead. Students, especially the vulnerable—Indigenous kids in under-resourced reserves, ESL learners from immigrant families—suffered most, their learning loss compounding the scars of COVID disruptions.

Alberta's per-student spending, a measly $13,494, does lag behind Ontario's $14,500, however, the ATA decried it strictly as underfunding while glossing over administrative bloat and union-mandated redundancies. Rallies outside the legislature on October 23 devolved into echo chambers of grievance, with ATA president Jason Schilling thundering against "ignored voices" as if the ballot box and negotiation tables didn't exist.

When Smith invoked the notwithstanding clause in Bill 2, fast-tracking teachers back on October 29, the union howled "cowardice" and vowed court battles. But let's be clear, this was no heroic stand against tyranny. It was entitlement run amok, a microcosm of how communist-inherited militancy poisons public service.

The ATA channels dues into political war chests that fund anti-UCP ads and NDP allies, turning educators into partisans rather than professionals. Demands for class-size caps aren't about kids, they're about leverage. Fewer students mean more hires, more dues, more power. Alberta's schools, once beacons of opportunity in a resource-rich province, now teeter under this weight, with teachers unionized since 1917 but radicalized in the 1930s by WUL agitators in prairie locals. The strike's end brought "mixed feelings," as CBC put it: relief for parents, resentment from picketers. But the real victims? Those 730,000 kids, robbed of algebra and art, their futures dimmed by adults more loyal to the red flag than report cards.

The Reckoning

So here we stand, in a Canada where labour unions—born of communist ambition, nursed on strikes and subversion—wield veto power over schools, hospitals, and transit, all while preaching equity from ivory towers of privilege. The Alberta fiasco isn't an outlier; it's the norm, a warning of what happens when ideology trumps pragmatism. Unions have morphed into monopolies, stifling innovation with featherbedding, inflating costs with endless arbitration, and alienating the very public they serve. Remember the 2012 CP Rail lockout, halting freight across the nation? Or the 2009 Canada Post strike, stranding holiday cards amid recession? Each time, the human cost mounts—small businesses bankrupt, families fractured—while union bosses pocket six-figure salaries and plot the next disruption.

It's time for reckoning.

Governments must claw back power with sunset clauses on contracts, caps on strike durations for essential services, transparency on dues spending. Parents and professionals should demand opt-outs, letting non-union teachers negotiate freely without subsidizing CLC largesse. And let's myth-bust the romance: communists didn't "build" these unions; they hijacked them, turning mutual aid societies into Marxist machines that prioritize power over people. Alberta's kids deserve better than picket-line politics; Canadian workers deserve unions that bargain, not bully. Until we excise this communist cancer—root and branch—labour in Canada will remain a relic of red revolutions, dragging us all into the dustbin of history.