The biggest labor organization of Canada moves away from Israel

The Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) has passed a resolution to declare goods, services and trade with Israel as “Hot Cargo” and to ask its members to refuse producing or distributing them. The measure, although non-binding, opens the door for trade unions to support workers who refuse to handle Israeli products or goods destined for Israel. 

Resolution 061, approved on October 28, was tabled by Labour for Palestine (L4P) delegates at the 2026 CLC Convention in May. At this congress they had also successfully pushed the CLC to cut ties with the Histadrut, Israel’s historically Jewish-only trade union federation that has played a key role in the Zionist movement’s colonization of Palestine since its inception.

The North Star interviewed Sean McNeill, who sits on L4P’s National Steering Committee. He laid out what it took for workers to get the CLC to endorse the “Hot Cargo” resolution and officially end a bilateral relationship it has maintained since its inauguration in 1956. 

Sean lives near Picton, Ontario, and is a member of both the Quincy Labour Council and the Canada Office and Professional Employees Union (COPE), local 225. He notes that working class politics and action goes far beyond it, but he is invested in “the institutional union movement, such as it is, and figuring out what we can do within that movement to affect change.”

He introduced Labour for Palestine as a disciplined organization of volunteers with strong organizing principles and a close relationship with Palestinian trade unions: “Our political objectives in Canada are informed by what Palestinian trade unions are calling for. They’ve called for this boycott for many years, and we have been able to start to achieve goals around that in the past three years.”

McNeill says he joined L4P in November 2023 and that between then and the May 2026 Convention, L4P has passed hot cargo resolutions at labour federations in Ontario, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Nova Scotia.

It was L4P’s goal to pass Resolution 061 on the convention floor back in May, but Sean says that the resolution was suppressed and did not make it to the floor for a vote. However, a smaller decisional body of the CLC with the power to approve general resolutions upon review, the Canadian Council, adopted the proposal. 

Will unions put the “Hot Cargo” resolution into practice? 

The Canadian Labour Congress is 3.3 million members strong, but its federative nature makes it unable to engage its members in concrete action, like refusing to handle Israeli products. The resolution endorsed by the CLC, indeed, can only act as support for such tactics. It could remain an abstract gesture if no union acts on the shopfloor. 

As Sean puts it, “the CLC can call on its unions to cut ties, but ultimately it still requires those unions and the workers themselves to take those actions.” For example, the CSN, a federation of unions in Québec, has a similar position, but the workers it represents in arms factories never tried to put a stop to the fabrication of war commodities destined for Israel. 

Sean, however, thinks that the passing of the resolution has a political impact that can help build a movement that could put the “hot cargo” clause into action. “This is opening up some space for us in the Canadian labour movement to talk about political action.”

McNeill made an observation about the CLC’s tendency to avoid using one of the best weapons at workers’ disposal for aims, like international solidarity, beyond bread and butter economic issues. “In Canada the strike is essentially associated with collective bargaining, meaning your ‘meat and potatoes’ workplace issues. There is a different use of the strike tool, and that is for political objectives.”

Cutting Ties with the Histadrut 

While declaring Israeli goods hot cargo was L4P’s initial objective for the convention, Sean explained that cutting ties with the Histadrut, a Zionist union grouping Israeli workers, would have a more concrete immediate outcome from the 2026 convention.

“The CLC has direct control over the decision to maintain or not maintain a relationship with the Histadrut. And so on that basis, we prioritized and we were successful in achieving that outcome on the floor by quite a strong majority.”

Representatives from the Histadrut spoke at all but two CLC conventions between its foundation in 1956 and 1982. At which point, the Histadrut was the second-largest employer in Israel, owning a quarter of its industry.

He mentioned that this successful push came out of work done in the lead-up to the convention where L4P met with delegates and senior leaders of CLC unions to ensure their position was clear in advance and that it would be the right decision. 

L4P has a detailed informational flyer on the history of the Histadrut and the reasons to expel it from international labour organizations available to read and print on their campaign webpage. The flyer says that “the Histadrut has, since its inception, been an agent and organization of Zionism, tasked with settling and supporting exclusively Jewish workers and laying the foundation for the Zionist colonization of Palestine.”

In 1920 the Histadrut founded the Haganah, a Zionist paramilitary group, which committed atrocities as the main perpetrator of the ethnic cleansing of 700,000 Palestinians during the 1947-1949 Nakba. The Haganah then formed the core of the Israeli Defence Forces alongside the Irgun and Lehi, fascist paramilitaries that Albert Einstein described as akin to Nazis in 1948.

The Canadian Jewish Labour Committee, which lobbies for Israeli interests in the Canadian workers’ movement, has stated its opposition to L4P’s resolution. It argues that a “Hot cargo” clause “threatens union job security, as employers may react by diverting shipping contracts and manufacturing business to non-unionized ports and firms.”

L4P answered by reaffirming that “Workers in Canada do not want to be complicit in Israeli genocide, nor do they believe our taxes or economic output should sustain a state which is in open contravention of international law.”