The labor movement across Canada must transform the huge sympathy for the 47,500 embattled Quebec nurses into visible actions in the streets. We must call for repeal of laws 160 and 72 and the granting of the nurses' just demands.
The ruling class in Canada is squarely behind the government of the Parti Quebecois. Through their attacks on our social services, the capitalists and their governments hope to demoralize the working class by making us accept unequal access to health care and education. By deepening social inequalities, they hope to undermine solidarity among working people and have us fight among ourselves for the crumbs off their tables.
The Quebec nurses' strike is the most recent in a class battle being fought across Canada. Nurses in Alberta and Newfoundland mobilized this year. In Saskatchewan nurses, for 10 days, defied back-to-work legislation imposed by a New Democratic Party (NDP) government, a social-democratic party with links to the trade unions.
The ruling class was hoping to undermine popular support for the nurses' strike by presenting it as one for higher wages that is a threat to working peoples' health and an obstacle to lowering taxes. They have imposed stiff fines and made other threats in an effort to intimidate the nurses, to no avail.
The nurses are not backing down. Support among workers is growing. This is one more illustration of increasing workers' resistance. The Quebec nurses' battle is a rallying point not only for other nurses and public sector workers but for workers across the country who oppose the cuts in social services, for those who refuse to accept women's second-class status, and for all Quebecois who defend the social services they fought for and won as part of their struggle against national oppression.
Workers sense that what is at stake here is far more than money. They defend what they have come to see as rights for all: access to quality health care; to quality education; to a minimum lifetime guaranteed income through unemployment benefits, social welfare, and pensions. Elementary human solidarity - the refusal to sacrifice human beings at the altar of the capitalists' search for profits - is what is behind workers' sympathy for the nurses' strike.
The Quebec nurses' battle is an opening for workers in Quebec to begin discussing the need for their unions to break away from their decade-long support for the Parti Quebecois, a capitalist party, and to build their own party. Support for the PQ has been justified by the Quebec labor officialdom on the basis that the PQ has "defended" the rights of the oppressed Quebecois nation. But it is the PQ that is today dismantling some of the central gains made by hard-fought struggles against Quebec's national oppression - including the right to unionize and strike
Such a step toward acting independently in defense of the interests of all working people can only reinforce the position of the workers in the rest of the country who look for ways of fighting anti-working-class policies of the union-based NDP and joining in common action with their brothers and sisters in Quebec. This course would strengthen all our unions against the bosses' deepening attacks and the growing crisis of their worldwide capitalist system of exploitation and oppression.