Quebec’s chauvinist, avowedly pro-big business Coalition Avenir Quebec (CAQ) government is pushing through a new law targeting worker rights, Bill 3.

Introduced in the National Assembly by Labour Minister Jean Boulet last fall, Bill 3 will impose stricter state oversight over the province’s trade unions with the aim of smothering working class opposition to the CAQ’s right-wing, class-war agenda.

Under the pretext of promoting “transparency,” the proposed legislation would strengthen state control over union finances and reduce the ability of unions to conduct political protest campaigns or legal challenges to government policies. Bill 3 would also give the state increased powers to monitor strike votes and collective-bargaining ratification votes.

Labor Minister Boulet has linked the measure to the recently adopted Law 14 (Bill 89), which places sweeping new restrictions on workers’ right to strike. He told an October 2025 press conference:

We began last spring with legislation to give greater consideration to the needs of the population in the event of a strike (Law 14). Bill 3 is the necessary complement. On the one hand, we are protecting services to citizens, and on the other, we are ensuring that union members have full control over how their money is used to influence public debate.

It is neither “the population” nor “union members” that the CAQ government is seeking to defend with its two anti-worker laws. Rather, it is acting on behalf of big business and the financial elite, who are demanding the removal of any and all obstacles to their frontal assault on workers’ jobs, rights and living standards.

Premier Legault and the ultra-right-wing program of the “Lucides”

At the instigation of former Parti Québécois Premier Lucien Bouchard, a group of prominent Quebecers published a right-wing manifesto in October 2025, Pour un Québec lucide (For a clear-eyed Quebec).

As premier, Bouchard had presided over a massive assault on public services and social supports between 1996 and 1999 in the name of achieving a “zero deficit” and “creating winning conditions” for a third referendum on Quebec independence. However, in 2005 Bouchard fronted a call from prominent leaders of both the federalist and pro-Quebec sovereignty camps for the so-called “constitutional question” to be set aside in favour of an intensified assault on the working class.

The main target of the Lucide manifesto was what its authors called the “Quebec model.” This term referred to what had constituted the class strategy of Quebec’s ruling elite since the so-called Quiet Revolution of the early 1960s: the provision of a minimal (and ever-declining) level of public services and social programs, and the integration of the union bureaucracy into a network of corporatist, tripartite ties so as to better use it to suppress the class struggle and subordinate workers to big business and the capitalist state.

But the most rapacious sections of the ruling class, represented by the “Lucides,” were impatient with the incremental attacks on workers’ social gains. They demanded a brutal and rapid anti-worker offensive—wholesale privatization and contracting out, the dismantling of what remained of the welfare state, and the gutting of workers’ democratic and social rights.

At the same time, the Lucides doubted the ability of the union apparatuses—despite their decades of loyal service as big business’s police force in the workplace—to maintain control over rank-and-file members under condition of an all-out ruling-class offensive. They urged that workers’ rights under the labour code (and those of the unions that serves as their legal bargaining agent) be sharply curtailed, and state power deployed to break working class resistance.

The Lucides’ program has been largely implemented by successive governments of the Quebec Liberal Party, the Parti Québécois, and most recently the CAQ. Quebec Premier François Legault, who founded the CAQ in 2011 to unite “federalists” and “sovereignists” in the common pursuit of brutal austerity, was deeply influenced by the Lucides.  

In 2025, under conditions where the entire Canadian ruling class responded to the second Trump administration by moving sharply right, his CAQ government intensified its implementation of austerity measures, agitation against immigrants, and attack on worker rights in the name of “shock therapy.”

Law 14 and Bill 3

Adopted by the National Assembly last spring with only token opposition from the trade unions, Law 14 (Bill 89) came into force on November 30. It severely limits the right to strike by extending the definition of “essential services” to the private sector (and to new branches of the public sector) and gives the Quebec Labor Minister the power to unilaterally illegalize any strike and impose collective agreements through binding arbitration.

In drafting their Law 14, Legault and Boulet drew inspiration from the federal Liberal government, which criminalized a series of strikes—by longshore workers, Canada Post employees, Air Canada flight attendants, etc.—by invoking a fraudulent “reinterpretation” of Section 107 of the Canada Labor Code without even the fig leaf of a parliamentary vote.

The assault on the right to strike is the response of the Quebec and Canadian ruling elite to the increase in worker unrest and walkouts across the country against the backdrop of an intensification of the class struggle internationally. The recent wave of strikes in Canada has seen rank-and-file workers routinely repudiate sell-out agreements reached by their union leaders. In the case of the Air Canada strike, flight attendants went so far as to defy a Carney Liberal government order to return to work.

The authoritarian turn of the ruling class, which includes the promotion of the far right, is part of an international trend linked to the systemic crisis of global capitalism. Democratic rights are incompatible with growing social inequality, the domination of society by the financial oligarchy, and the pursuit of imperialist war.

Bill 3, for its part, imposes financial audits on unions based on their size, and gives the government increased oversight of their bylaws, rules and procedures, including strike votes. Unions will also have to provide their members with full details of their expenses (salaries and other costs) at annual general meetings.

The bill’s central measure is the creation of an “optional” union dues requirement that will apply to the financing of any campaign or action not “directly” related to workplace grievances or collective bargaining. A majority of members must vote to approve the dues’ use for a specific “political campaign” before the money can be collected and spent.

With this provision the CAQ aims to neutralize opposition to the chauvinistic and anti-immigrant policies at the heart of its right-wing nationalist propaganda. Bill 3 is a direct response to the legal challenge launched by the FAE (Fédération autonome de l’enseignement) teacher union against Law 21. This discriminatory law, passed in 2019, bans certain state employees, including teachers, from wearing religious symbols, including the Muslim hijab, Jewish kippah, and Sikh turban, and mandates their dismissal in the case of non-compliance.

In defending Bill 3, the Legault government has put forward the reactionary notion that the only legitimate role of unions is to represent their members in the workplace and that they should refrain from all “political activity”—including court challenges to an anti-strike law or an abusive, anti-democratic measure targeting their members such as Bill 21. Generally, only under military dictatorships or fascist regimes have we seen such efforts to legally muzzle trade unions.

By interfering in the internal affairs of unions and threatening their main source of funding, the most right-wing elements of the ruling class represented by Legault intend to discipline the union bureaucracy so as to ensure its complete submission to an increasingly authoritarian state acting on behalf of big business to intensify worker-exploitation.

The dishonest response of the unions

There is a striking contrast between the unions’ inaction in the face of Legault’s Law 14 and the federal government’s deployment of Section 107 to routinely illegalize strikes, and their vocal opposition to Bill 3.

While the ruling elite is waging a frontal assault on the right to strike, a fundamental right won through mass struggles and at great sacrifice by generations of workers to assert their class interests, the unions have not lifted a finger to oppose it.

Pan-Canadian unions—including the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) and the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW)—have kowtowed to the federal Liberal government. Postal workers and flight attendants who sought to defy back-to-work orders under Section 107 confronted a union bureaucracy that was determined to bring them to heel.

In Quebec, the unions prevented the mobilization of the working class against Law 14, organizing a grand total of two poorly advertised demonstrations with minimal participation prior to its adoption. The Canadian Labour Congress failed to even issue a press release condemning Law 14, let alone mobilize any of its 3 million members to oppose it. The unions are bitterly hostile to uniting workers in Quebec with their class brothers and sisters in English Canadas in a common struggle against the attacks being mounted by the federal and provincial governments. Rather, they work at every turn to uphold and deepen the regional and ethnic divisions cultivated by the ruling class to keep workers divided.

The unions’ reaction to Bill 3 was markedly different. Top union officials issued thunderous denunciations and on November 29, the unions organized a major protest demonstration, at which they accused Legault and Boulet of threatening “social peace.”

The reason for this very different response is that unlike Law 14, Bill 3 threatens the union bureaucracy’s material interests—that is their control over and access to worker dues revenue. They also fear that the new legal requirements to reveal their lavish salaries and expense accounts to the workers they purport to represent will undermine what little credibility they have left, and thus their ability to control the rank-and-file and enforce “social peace” on behalf of the ruling class.

Quebec Federation of Labour (FTQ) President Magali Picard denounced the CAQ’s “authoritarianism” and raised the possibility of paralyzing the province with a “social strike” to prevent Bill 3’s adoption. After criticism from within the FTQ apparatus, Picard quickly softened her tone and reiterated the need for “social dialogue” with the CAQ government.

At the unions’ November 29 “anti-Legault” demonstration in Montreal, neither Law 14 nor Ottawa’s arrogation of the power to unilaterally criminalize strikes under Section 107 merited a single mention in the official speeches that top union bureaucrats gave to the approximately 50,000 workers in attendance.

The aim of the demonstration was not to mobilize the working class in struggle, but rather to channel workers’ anger toward other establishment parties in the run-up to the provincial elections scheduled for the fall of 2026. The union bureaucracy enjoys close political ties with the Parti Québécois, a chauvinist party increasingly oriented toward the far-right that spearheads the campaign for Quebec’s separation from Canada.

Build rank-and-file committees

The Socialist Equality Party’s (SEP) socialist critique of the union bureaucracy is well-known: the unions have integrated themselves ever more completely with corporate management and the state over the past four decades and served as the enforcers of austerity, wage and job cuts and increased worker-exploitation.

But settling accounts with the union bureaucracy, is the task of the working class, not the capitalist state.

Coming from the ruling class and the political representatives who serve at their beck and call, the campaign around union corruption is utterly fraudulent and serves as a pretext to attack the working class, its real target.

The corruption that plagues these organizations and the corporatist ties that their leaders maintain with the bosses and the state—through tripartite committees and the management of wealthy investment funds such as the FTQ’s Solidarity Fund—are the result of their nationalist and pro-capitalist character, and grow out of the social interests of the privileged layer of the middle class for which the bureaucracy speaks.

The unions systematically isolate the various contingents of the working class on a trade and regional basis and betray their struggles. This is producing an upsurge of rank-and-file militancy and growing anger with the bureaucracy. Fearing that the bureaucracy could lose control of the workers it has policed for decades on behalf of the capitalists, Legault and the CAQ are resorting to ever more open forms of state repression.

Workers must break with the moribund apparatuses known as unions by building new organizations of struggle—rank-and-file committees, created and controlled by the workers themselves, the only ones capable of mobilizing the social power of the working class to defend public services and the jobs, wages, and working conditions of all.

For its part, Québec Solidaire (QS) has sided with the union bureaucracy and acted as an advisor to the Legault government, suggesting that it remove the “controversial” issue of optional dues from its bill. As a representative of the privileged middle classes concerned with preserving the established order, QS does not want the working class to be propelled into action and the CAQ government overthrown through class struggle. Rather, its aim is to provide a “left” cover for the PQ’s explicitly right-wing project of Quebec secession, which would paralyze the working class by reinforcing nationalist divisions.

Workers must oppose Bill 3 on the basis of a fierce defense of their right to strike and organization. This includes vigorous opposition to Law 14 as well as Ottawa’s anti-democratic actions to criminalize strikes.

The fight to defend the right to strike must be part of a broader opposition to the entire austerity program of the ruling elite, the attack on public services, privatization, militarization and the shift toward dictatorship.

Quebec workers must repudiate the nationalism promoted by the union bureaucracy and unite with their class brothers and sisters in the rest of Canada and across North America in an industrial and political offensive aimed at establishing workers’ power and reorganizing socio-economic life along socialist lines so as to meet social needs rather than further enrich a tiny capitalist oligarchy.