Tony Clarke, a key activist in the movement against the 1988 Canada-US Free Trade Agreement, passed away last month, on 4 December 2024. Heading up the social action department of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops (CCCB) and representing the CCCB on the Working Group for Social Solidarity, he played a key role in moving the churches in Canada towards a social justice-oriented agenda in the early 1980s. Then, after the Free Trade Agreement was announced, he took a leave of absence from the CCCB and co-founded the Action Canada Network to mobilize against the Canada-Us Free Trade Agreement. While we were unable to interview him, due to his declining health, we were able to speak with numerous people who attested to Tony’s powerful contributions to this struggle. Here we share a speech of his to the Action Canada Network from 28 April 1991, which demonstrates his capacity to read the political moment, posing the question: “What is the calling that we have at this particular moment in history?,” and, in response, offering a far-reaching vision for social justice.
As we move to another round of free trade negotiations, and Trump entertains the prospect of annexing Canada as the 51st state, the speech, in many ways, remains quite timely. Notably, it demonstrates Tony’s capacity to advance an uncompromising program for social justice in the midst of political defeat, after the Free Trade Agreement was adopted in 1988, and Canada moved decisively towards a neoliberal model of government. In this context, Tony devoted himself to “build[ing] a social movement of a more permanent nature in this country,” in many ways presaging the emergence of the so-called anti-globalization movement of the 1990s, one that identified as a ‘movement of movements,’ advancing long-term coalitions that set out to foster transnational networks of solidarity. Such a movement did not view Mexican workers as adversaries but as “affected by the same agenda and the same system.” It called attention to how activists in Canada, inspired, in part, by feminist intersectionality and Indigenous ways of knowing, were at the forefront in developing fundamentally new forms of coalitions – “a new form and new approach to democracy”. This was understood as not just an organizational or a political process, but also as a pedagogical process, one of learning from each other in developing a “people’s agenda.”