May 23, 2012
The Maple Spring
10 Things You Should Know About the Quebec Student Movement by ANDREW GAVIN MARSHALL
The student strikes in Quebec, which began in February and have lasted for three months, involving roughly 175,000 students in the mostly French-speaking Canadian province, have been subjected to a massive provincial and national media propaganda campaign to demonize and dismiss the students and their struggle. The following is a list of ten points that everyone should know about the student movement in Quebec to help place their struggle in its proper global context.
The issue is debt, not tuition
Striking students in Quebec are setting an example for youth across the continent
The student strike was organized through democratic means and with democratic aims
This is not an exclusively Quebecois phenomenon
Government officials and the media have been openly calling for violence and “fascist” tactics to be used against the students
Excessive state violence has been used against the students
The government supports organized crime and opposes organized students
Canada’s elites punish the people and oppose the students
The student strike is being subjected to a massive and highly successful propaganda campaign to discredit, dismiss, and demonize the students
The student movement is part of a much larger emerging global movement of resistance against austerity, neoliberalism, and corrupt power
1) The issue is debt, not tuition: In dismissing the students, who are striking against a 75% increase in the cost of tuition over the next five years, the most common argument used is in pointing out that Quebec students pay the lowest tuition in North America, and therefore, they should not be complaining. Even with the 75% increase, they will still be paying substantially lower than most other provinces. Quebec students pay on average $2,500 per year in tuition, while the rest of Canada’s students pay on average $5,000 per year. With the tuition increase of $1,625 spread out over five years, the total tuition cost for Quebec students would be roughly $4,000. The premise here is that since the rest of Canada has it worse, Quebec students should shut up, sit down, and accept “reality.” THIS IS FALSE. In playing the “numbers game,” commentators and their parroting public repeat the tuition costs but fail to add in the numbers which represent the core issue: DEBT. So, Quebec students pay half the average national tuition. True. But they also graduate with half the average national student debt. With the average tuition at $5,000/year, the average student debt for an undergraduate in Canada is $27,000, while the average debt for an undergraduate in Quebec is $13,000. With interest rates expected to increase, in the midst of a hopeless job situation for Canadian youth, Canada’s youth face a future of debt that “is bankrupting a generation of students.” The notion, therefore, that Quebec students should not struggle against a bankrupt future is a bankrupted argument.
2) Striking students in Quebec are setting an example for youth across the continent: Nearly 60% of Canadian students graduate with debt, on average at $27,000 for an undergraduate degree. Total student debt now stands at about $20 billion in Canada($15 billion from Federal Government loans programs, and the rest from provincial and commercial bank loans). In Quebec, the average student debt is $15,000, whereas Nova Scotia and Newfoundland have an average student debt of $35,000, British Columbia at nearly $30,000 and Ontario at nearly $27,000. Roughly 70% of new jobs in Canada require a post-secondary education. Half of students in their 20s live at home with their parents, including 73 per cent of those aged 20 to 24 and nearly a third of 25- to 29-year-olds. On average, a four-year degree for a student living at home in Canada costs $55,000, and those costs are expected to increase in coming years at a rate faster than inflation. It has been estimated that in 18 years, a four-year degree for Canadian students will cost $102,000. Defaults on government student loans are at roughly 14%. The Chairman of the Canadian Federation of Students warned in June of 2011 that, “We are on the verge of bankrupting a generation before they even enter the workplace.” This immense student debt affects every decision made in the lives of young graduates. With few jobs, enormous housing costs, the cutting of future benefits and social security, students are entering an economy which holds very little for them in opportunities. Women, minorities, and other marginalized groups are in an even more disadvantaged position. Canadian students are increasingly moving back home and relying more and more upon their parents for support. An informal Globe and Mail poll in early May of 2012 (surveying 2,200 students), “shows that students across Canada share a similar anxiety over rising tuition fees” as that felt in Quebec. Roughly 62% of post-secondary students said they would join a similar strike in their own province, while 32% said they would not, and 5.9% were undecided. In Ontario, where tuition is the highest in Canada, 69% said they would support a strike against increasing tuition. A Quebec research institution released a report in late March of 2012 indicating that increasing the cost of tuition for students is creating a “student debt bubble” akin to the housing bubble in the United States, and with interest rates set to increase, “today’s students may well find themselves in the same situation of not being able to pay off their student loans.” The authors of the report from the Institut de recherche et d’informations socio-economique explained that, “Since governments underwrite those loans, if students default it could be catastrophic for public finances,” and that, “If the bubble explodes, it could be just like the mortgage crisis.” In the United States, the situation is even worse. In March of 2012, the Federal Reserve reported that 27 percent of student borrowers whose loans have gone into repayment are now delinquent on their debt.” Student debt in the United States has reached $1 trillion, “passing total credit card debt along the way.” It has become a threat to the entire existence of the middle class in America. Bankruptcy lawyers in the US are “seeing the telltale signs of a student loan debt bubble.” A recent survey from the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys (NACBA) indicated, “more than 80 percent of bankruptcy lawyers have seen a substantial increase in the number of clients seeking relief from student loans in recent years.” The head of the NACBA stated, “This could very well be the next debt bomb for the U.S. economy.” In 1993, 45% of students who earn a bachelor’s degree had to go into debt; today, it is 94%. The average student debt in the United States in 2011 was $23,300, with 10% owning more than $54,000 and 3% owing more than $100,000. President Obama has addressed the situation by simply providing more loans to students. A recent survey of graduates revealed that 40% of them “had delayed making a major purchase, like a home or car, because of college debt, while slightly more than a quarter had put off continuing their education or had moved in with relatives to save money,” and 50% of those surveyed had full-time jobs. Between 2001 and 2011, “state and local financing per student declined by 24 percent nationally.” In the same period of time,“tuition and fees at state schools increased 72 percent.” It would appear that whether in the United States, Canada, or even beyond, the decisions made by schools, banks, and the government, are geared toward increasing the financial burden on students and families, and increasing profits for themselves. The effect will be to plunge the student and youth population into poverty over the coming years. Thus, the student movement in Quebec, instead of being portrayed as “entitled brats” elsewhere, are actually setting an example for students and youth across the continent and beyond. Since Quebec tuition is the lowest on the continent, it gives all the more reason that other students should follow Quebec’s example, instead of Quebec students being told to follow the rest of the country (and continent) into debt bondage.
3) The student strike was organized through democratic means and with democratic aims: The decision to strike was made through student associations and organizations that uniquely operate through direct-democracy. While most student associations at schools across Canada hold elections where students choose the members of the associations, the democratic accountability ends there (just like with government). Among the Francophone schools in Quebec, the leaders are not only elected by the students, but decisions are made through general assemblies, debate and discussion, and through the votes of the actual constituents, the members of the student associations, not just the leaders. This means that the student associations that voted to strike are more democratically accountable and participatory than most other student associations, and certainly the government. It represents a more profound and meaningful working definition of democracy that is lacking across the rest of the country. The Anglophone student associations that went on strike – from Concordia and McGill – did so because, for the first time ever, they began to operate through direct-democracy. This of course, has resulted in insults and derision from the media. The national media in Canada – most especially the National Post – complain that the student “tactics are anything but democratic,” and that the students aren’t acting in a democratic way, but that “it’s really mob rule.” Obviously, it is naïve to assume that the National Post has any sort of understanding of democracy.
4) This is not an exclusively Quebecois phenomenon: I am an Anglophone, I don’t even speak French, I have only lived in Montreal for under two years, but the strikers are struggling as much for me as for any other student, Francophone or Anglophone. Typically, when others across Canada see what is taking place here, they frame it along the lines of, “Oh those Quebecois, always yelling about something.” But I’m yelling too… in English. Many people here are yelling… in English. It is true that the majority of the students protesting are Francophone, and the majority of the schools on strike are Francophone, but it is not exclusionary. In fact, the participation in the strike from the Anglophone schools (while a minority within the schools) is unprecedented in Quebec history. This was undertaken because students began mobilizing at the grassroots and emulating the French student groups in how they make decisions (i.e., through direct-democracy). The participation of Anglophone students in the open-ended strike is unprecedented in Quebec history.
5) Government officials and the media have been openly calling for violence and “fascist” tactics to be used against the students: With all the focus on student violence at protests, breaking bank windows, throwing rocks at riot police, and other acts of vandalism, student leaders have never called for violence against the government or vandalism against property, and have, in fact, denounced it and spoken out for calm, stating: “The student movement wants to fight alongside the populace and not against it.” On the other hand, it has been government officials and the national media which have been openly calling for violence to be used against students. On May 11, Michael Den Tandt, writing for the National Post, stated that, “It’s time for tough treatment of Quebec student strikers,” and recommended to Quebec Premier Jean Charest that, “He must bring down the hammer.” Tandt claimed that there was “a better way” to deal with student protesters: “Dispersal with massive use of tear gas; then arrest, public humiliation, and some pain.” He even went on to suggest that, “caning is more merciful than incarceration,” or perhaps even re-imagining the medieval punishment in which “miscreants and ne’er-do-wells were placed in the stockade, in the public square, and pelted with rotten cabbages. That might not be a bad idea, either.” This, Tandt claimed, would be the only way to preserve “peace, order, and good government.” Kelly McParland, writing the for National Post on May 11, suggested that it was now time for Charest to “empower the police to use the full extent of the law against those who condone or pursue further disruption,” and that the government must make a “show of strength” against the students. If this was not bad enough, get ready for this: A member of the Quebec Liberal Party, head of the tax office in the Municipal Affairs Department, Bernard Guay, wrote an article for a French-language newspaper in Quebec in mid-April advocating a strategy to “end the student strikes.” In the article, the government official recommended using the fascist movements of the 1920s and 1930s as an example in how to deal with “leftists” in giving them “their own medicine.” He suggested organizing a political “cabal” to handle the “wasteful and anti-social” situation, which would mobilize students to not only cross picket lines, but to confront and assault students who wear the little red square (the symbol of the student strike). This, Guay suggested, would help society “overcome the tyranny of Leftist agitators,” no doubt by emulating fascist tyranny. The article was eventually pulled and an apology was issued, while a government superior supposedly reprimanded Guay, though the government refused to elaborate on what that consisted of. Just contemplate this for a moment: A Quebec Liberal government official recommended using “inspiration” from fascist movements to attack the striking students. Imagine if one of the student associations had openly called for violence, let alone for the emulation of fascism. It would be national news, and likely lead to arrests and charges. But since it was a government official, barely a peep was heard.
6) Excessive state violence has been used against the students:Throughout the three months of protests from students in Quebec, the violence has almost exclusively been blamed on the students. Images of protesters throwing rocks and breaking bank windows inundate the media and ‘inform’ the discourse, demonizing the students as violent, vandals, and destructive. Meanwhile, the reality of state violence being used against the students far exceeds any of the violent reactions from protesters, but receives far less coverage. Riot police meet students with pepper spray, tear gas, concussion grenades, smoke bombs, beating them with batons, shoot them with rubber bullets, and have even been driving police cars and trucks into groups of students. On May 4, on the 42nd anniversary of the Kent State massacre in which the U.S. National Guard murdered four protesting students, Quebec almost experienced its own Kent State, when several students were critically injured by police, shot with rubber bullets in the face. One student lost an eye, and another remains in the hospital with serious head injuries, including a skull fracture and brain contusion. The Quebec provincial police – the SQ – have not only been involved in violent repression of student protests in Quebec, but have also (along with the RCMP) been involved intraining foreign police forces how to violently repress their own populations, such as in Haiti. Roughly 12,000 people in Quebec have signed a petition against the police reaction to student protests, stipulating that the police actions have been far too violent. In late April, even before the Quebec police almost killed a couple students, Amnesty International “asked the government to call for a toning down of police measures that… are unduly aggressive and might potentially smother students’ right to free expression.” The Quebec government, of course, defends police violenceagainst students and youths. The Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) – Canada’s spy agency – has recently announced its interest in “gathering intelligence” on Quebec student protesters and related groups as “possible threats to national security.” Coincidentally, Prime Minister Stephen Harper dismantled the government agency responsible for oversight of CSIS, making the agency essentially unaccountable. In reaction to student protests, the City of Montreal is considering banning masks being worn at protests in a new bylaw which is being voted on without public consultation. Thus, apparently it is fine for police to wear gas masks as they shoot chemical agents at Quebec’s youth, but students cannot attempt to even meagerly protect themselves by covering their faces. The federal Conservative government of Stephen Harper is attempting to pass a law that bans masks at protests, which includes a ten-year sentence for “rioters who wear masks.” Quebec has even established a secretive police unit called the GAMMA squad to monitor political groups in the province, which has already targeted and arrested members of the leading student organization behind the strike. The police unit is designed to monitor “anarchists” and “marginal political groups.” Some political groups have acknowledged this as “a declaration of war” by the government against such groups. Spokesperson for the largest student group, Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, stated that, “This squad is really a new kind of political police to fight against social movements.” The situation of police repression has become so prevalent that even the U.S. State Department has warned Americans to stay away from student protests in the city, “as bystanders can quickly be caught up in unforeseen violence and in some cases, detained by the local police.”
Click here to watch a video compilation of police brutality against students.
7) The government supports organized crime and opposes organized students: The government claims that it must increase the cost of tuition in order to balance the budget and to increase the “competitiveness” of schools. The government has ignored, belittled, undermined, attempted to divide, and outright oppress the student movement. The Liberal Government of Quebec, in short, has declared organized students to be enemies of the state. Meanwhile, that same government has no problem of working with and supporting organized crime, namely, the Montreal Mafia. In 2010, Quebec, under Premier Jean Charest, was declared to be “the most corrupt province” in Canada. A former opposition leader in the Montreal city hall reported that, “the Italian mafia controls about 80 per cent of city hall.” The mafia is a “big player” in the Quebec economy, and “is deeply entrenched in city affairs” of Montreal, as “more than 600 businesses pay Mafia protection money in Montreal alone, handing organized crime leaders an unprecedented degree of control of Quebec’s economy.” The construction industry, especially, is heavily linked to the mafia. The Montreal Mafia is as influential as their Sicilian counterparts, where “all of the major infrastructure work in Sicily is under Mafia control.” In 2009, a government official stated that, “It’s Montreal’s Italian Mafia that controls what is going on in road construction. They control, from what we can tell, 80 per cent of the contracts.” In the fall of 2011, an internal report written by the former Montreal police chief for the government was leaked, stating, “We have discovered a firmly rooted, clandestine universe on an unexpected scale, harmful to our society on the level of safety and economics and of justice and democracy.” The report added, “Suspicions are persistent that an evil empire is taking form in the highway construction domain,” and that, “If there were to be an intensification of influence-peddling in the political sphere, we would no longer simply be talking about marginal, or even parallel criminal activities: we could suspect an infiltration or even a takeover of certain functions of the state.” Quebec Premier Jean Charest, for several years,rejected calls for a public inquiry into corruption in the construction industry, even as the head of Quebec’s anti-collusion squad called for such an inquiry. An opposition party in Quebec stated that Jean Charest “is protecting the (Quebec) Liberal party – and in protecting the Liberal party, Mr. Charest is protecting the Mafia, organized crime.” After the leaked report revealed “cost overruns totaling hundreds of millions of dollars, kickbacks and illegal donations to political parties,” Charest had to – after two years of refusing – open a public inquiry into corruption. The Quebec mafia have not only “run gambling and prostitution and imported stupefying amounts of illegal drugs into Canada, but they have extended their influence to elected civic and provincial governments, and to Liberal and Conservative federal governments through bribery and other ‘illustrious relations’.” The Federal Conservative Party of Canada, with Prime Minister Stephen Harper as its leader, received dozens of donations from Mafia-connected construction and engineering firm employees. The Mafia-industry has also donated to the Federal Liberal Party, but less so than the Conservatives, who hold power. In Quebec, government officials have helped the Mafia charge far more for public-works contracts than they were worth. These Mafia companies would then use a lot of that extra money to fund political parties, most notably, the Liberals, who have been in power for nine years. A former Montreal police officer who worked in the intelligence unit with access to the police’s confidential list of informants was suspected of selling information to the mafia. In January of 2012, he was found dead, reportedly of a suicide. In April of 2012, fifteen arrests were made in Montreal by the police in relation to corruption charges linked to the Mafia. Among them were one of the biggest names in the construction industry, with 14 individual facing conspiracy charges “involving municipal contracts associated with the Mascouche water-treatment plants [that] are connected to big construction, engineering and law firms that have been involved in municipal contracts and politics across the Montreal region for decades. And the individuals have been around the municipal world for years.” One Quebec mayor has even been charged. The Montreal police force has “not been very interested, and it should be,” in helping the anti-corruption investigation. Two of those who were arrested included Quebec Liberal Party fundraisers, one of whom Charest personally delivered an award to in 2010 for his “years of service as an organizer.” All three of Quebec’s main political parties were connected to individuals arrested in the raids. Canada’s federal police force,the RCMP, have refused to cooperate with the Mafia-corruption inquiry in handing over their massive amounts of information to the judge leading the inquiry. Quebec Education Minister Line Beauchamp, who has been leading the government assault against the students, attended a political fundraiser for herself which was attended by a notorious Mafia figure who personally “donated generously to the minister’s Liberal riding association.” As these revelations emerged, Beauchamp stated, “I don’t know the individual in question and even today I wouldn’t be able to recognize him.” At the time, Beauchamp was the Environment Minister, and was responsible for granting the Mafia figure’s company a favourable certificate to expand its business. Beauchamp claimed she did not know about the deal, but as head of the Ministry which handled it, either she is utterly incompetent or a liar. Either way, she is clearly not fit for “public service” if it amounts to nothing more than “service to the Mafia.” The fact that she is now responsible for increasing tuition and leading the attack on students speaks volumes. Line Beauchamp, when questioned about taking political contributions from the Mafia, stated, “Now that the information is public and the links well established, I would not put myself in that position again.” Well isn’t that reassuring? Now that it’s public, she wouldn’t do it again. That’s sort of like saying, “I wouldn’t have committed the crime if I knew I was going to be caught.” The notion that Beauchamp didn’t know whom this Mafia figure was who was giving her money is absurd. It’s even more absurd when you note that one of Beauchamp’s political attaches was a 30-year veteran of the Montreal police force. As one Quebec political figure commented about the Liberal Government’s Mafia links: “They refuse to sit down with a student leader but they have breakfast with a mafioso … where is the logic in that?” Indeed. It’s clear that the Quebec government has no problem working with, handing out contracts to, and taking money from the Mafia and organized crime. In fact, they are so integrated that the government itself is a form of organized crime. But for that government, and for the media boot-lickers who follow the government line, organized students are the true threat to Quebec. National newspapers declare Quebec students following “mob rule” when it’s actually the government that is closely connected to “mob rule.” The students are challenging and being repressed by a Mafioso-government alliance of industrialists, politicians, financiers and police… yet it is the students who are blamed for everything. The government gives the Mafia public contracts double or triple their actual value, wasting hundreds of millions of dollars (if not more), while students are being asked to pay nearly double their current tuition. There’s money for the mob, but scraps for the students.
Canada’s elites punish the people and oppose the students: It’s not simply the government of Quebec which has set itself against the students, sought to increase their tuition and repress their resistance, often with violent means, but a wide sector of elite society in Quebec and Canada propose tuition increases and blind faith to the state in managing its repression of a growing social movement. As such, the student movement should recognize that not simply are Jean Charest and his Liberal-Mafia government the antagonists of social justice, but the whole elite society itself. As early as 2007, TD Bank, one of Canada’s big five banks, outlined a “plan for prosperity” for the province of Quebec, and directly recommended Quebec to raise tuition costs for students. Naturally, the Quebec government is more likely to listen to a bank than the youth of the province. Banks of course, have an interest in increasing tuition costs for students, as they provide student loans and lines of credit which they charge interest on and make profits. The Royal Bank of Canada acknowledged that student lines of credit are “very popular products.” Elites of all sorts support the tuition increases. In February of 2010, a group of “prominent” (i.e., elitist) Quebecers signed a letter proposing to increase Quebec’s tuition costs. Among the signatories were the former Premier of Quebec for the Parti Quebecois, Lucien Bouchard. In early May, a letter was published in the Montreal Gazette which stated that students need to pay more for their education in Quebec, signed by the same elitists who proposed the tuition increase back in February of 2010. Initially, this group of elitists had proposed an increase of $1,000 every year for three years. The letter then calls for the application of state power to be employed against the student movement: “It is time that we react. We must reinstate order; the students have to return to class… This is a situation when, regardless of political allegiances, the population must support the state, which is ultimately responsible for public order, the safety of individuals and the integrity of our institutions.” The “integrity” of institutions which cooperate with the Mafia, I might add. What incredible integrity! The letter was signed by Lucien Bouchard, former Premier of Quebec; Michel Audet, an economist and former Finance Minister in the first Charest government in Quebec; Françoise Bertrand, the President and chief executive officer of the Fédération des chambres de commerce du Québec (The Quebec Federation of Chambers of Commerce), where she sits alongside the presidents and executives of major Canadian corporations, banks, and business interests. She also sits on the board of directors of Quebecor Inc., a major media conglomerate, with former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney on its board. Another signatory was Yves-Thomas Dorval, President of the Quebec Employers’ Council, who formerly worked for British American Tobacco Group, former Vice President at Edelman Canada, an international public relations firm, was a director at a pharmaceutical corporation, head of strategic planning at an insurance company, and previously worked for the Government of Quebec and Hydro-Quebec. Joseph Facal, another signatory to the letter demanding higher tuition and state repression of students, is former president of the Quebec Treasury Board, and was a cabinet minister in the Quebec government of Lucien Bouchard. Other signatories include Pierre Fortin, a professor emeritus at the Université du Québec à Montréal; Michel Gervais, the former rector of Université Laval; Monique Jérôme-Forget, former finance minister of Quebec and former president of the Quebec Treasury Board, member of the Quebec Liberal Party between 1998 and 2009, was responsible for introducing public-private partnerships in Quebec’s infrastructure development (which saw enormous cooperation with the Mafia), and is on the board of directors of Astral Media. Robert Lacroix, another co-signer, was former rector of the Université de Montréal is also a fellow at CIRANO, a Montreal-based think tank which is governed by a collection of university heads, business executives, and bankers, including representatives from Power Corporation (owned by the Desmarais family). Another signatory is Michel Leblanc, president and CEO of the Board of Trade of Metropolitan Montreal, a prominent business organization in Montreal, of which the board of directors includes a number of corporate executives, mining company representatives, university board members, bankers and Hélène Desmarais, who married into the Desmarais family. Another signatory is Claude Montmarquette, professor emeritus at the Université de Montréal, who is also a member of the elitist CIRANO think tank, which as a “research institution” (for elites) has recommended increasing Quebec’s tuition costs for several years. Another signatory was Marcel Boyer, a Bell Canada Professor of industrial economics at the Université de Montréal, Vice-president and chief economist at the Montreal Economic Institute, is the C.D. Howe Scholar in Economic Policy at the C.D. Howe Institute, Member of the Board of the Agency for Public-Private Partnerships of Québec, and Visiting Senior Research Advisor for industrial economics at Industry Canada. At the Montreal Economic Institute, Boyer sits alongside notable elitists, bankers, and corporate executives, including Hélène Desmarais, who married into the Desmarais family (the most powerful family in Canada). At the C.D. Howe Institute, Boyer works for even more elitists, as the board of directors is made up of some of Canada’s top bankers, corporate executives, and again includes Hélène Desmarais. The Desmarais family, who own Power Corporation and its many subsidiaries, as well as a number of foreign corporations in Europe and China, are Canada’s most powerful family. The patriarch, Paul Desmarais Sr., has had extremely close business and even family ties to every Canadian Prime Minister since Pierre Trudeau, and all Quebec premiers (save two) in the past several decades. The Desmarais’ have strong links to the Parti Quebecois, the Liberals, Conservatives, and even the NDP, and socialize with presidents and prime ministers around the world, as well as the Rothschilds, Rockefellers, and even Spanish royalty. Paul Desmarais Sr. has “a disproportionate influence on politics and the economy in Quebec and Canada,” and he especially “has a lot of influence on Premier Jean Charest.” When former French President Nicolas Sarkozy gave Desmarais the French Legion of Honour, Desmarais brought Jean Charest with him. Quebec author Robin Philpot commented that Desmarais “took him along like a poodle,” referring to Charest. The Desmarais family has extensive ties to Canadian and especially Quebec politicians, have extensive interests in Canadian and international corporations and banks, are closely tied to major national and international think tanks (including the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, and the Bilderberg Group), and even host an annual international think tank conference in Montreal, the Conference of Montreal. The Desmarais family have had very close ties to Prime Ministers Pierre Trudeau, Brian Mulroney, Jean Chretien, Paul Martin, and even Stephen Harper, and to Quebec premiers, including Lucien Bouchard, who co-authored the article in the Gazette advocating increased tuition. The Desmarais empire also includes ownership of seven of the ten French newspapers in Quebec, including La Presse. The Desmarais family stand atop a parasitic Canadian oligarchy, which has bankers and corporate executives controlling the entire economy, political parties, the media, think tanks which set policy, and even our educational institutions, with the chancellors of both Concordia and McGill universities serving on the boards of the Bank of Montreal and the Royal Bank of Canada, respectively, as well as both schools having extensive leadership ties to Power Corporation and the Desmarais family. It is this very oligarchy which demands the people pay more, go further into debt, suffer and descend into poverty, while they make record profits. In March of 2012, Power Corporation reported fourth quarter profits of $314 million, with yearly earnings at over $1.1 billion. Canada’s banks last yearmade record profits, and then decided to increase bank fees. At the end of April, it was reported that Canada’s banks had received a “secret bailout” back in 2008/09, from both the Bank of Canada and the U.S. Federal Reserve, amounting to roughly $114 billion, or $3,400 for every Canadian man, woman, and child (more than the cost of yearly tuition in Quebec). And yet Quebec youth are told we suffer from “entitlement.” And now banks are expected to be making even more profits, as reported in early May. As banks make more record profits, Canadians are going deeper into debt. The big Canadian banks, along with the federal government, have colluded to create a massive housing bubble in Canada, most especially in Toronto and Vancouver, and with average Canadian household debt at $103,000, most of which is held in mortgages, and with the Bank of Canada announcing its intent to raise interest rates, Canada is set for a housing crisis like that seen in the United States in 2008, forcing the people to suffer while the banks make a profit. The head of the Bank of Canada (a former Goldman Sachs executive) said that Canadian household debt is the biggest threat to the Canadian economy, but don’t worry, Canada’s Finance Minister said he is working in close cooperation with the big banks to intervene in the housing market if necessary, which would likely mean another bailout for the big banks, and of course, hand the check to you! So, Canada has its priorities: every single Canadian man, woman, and child owes $3,400 for a secret bank bailout to banks that are now making record profits and increasing their fees, while simultaneously explaining that there is no money for education, so we will have to pay more for that, too, which is something those same banks demand our governments do to us. When the students stand up, they are said to be “brats” and whining about “entitlements.” But then, what does that make the banks? This is why I argue that Canada’s elites are parasitic in their very nature, slowly draining the host (that’s us!) of its life until there is nothing left the extract.
9) The student strike is being subjected to a massive and highly successful propaganda campaign to discredit, dismiss, and demonize the students: In the vast majority of coverage on the student strike and protests in Quebec, the media and its many talking heads have undertaken a major propaganda campaign against the students. The students have been consistently ignored, dismissed, derided, insulted and attacked. One Canadian newspaper said it was “hard to feel sorry” for Quebec students, who were “whining and crying” and “kicking up a fuss,” treating Canada’s young generation like ungrateful children throwing a collective tantrum. In almost every article about the student strike, the main point brought up to dismiss the students is that Quebec has the lowest tuition costs in North America. The National Post published a column written by a third-year political science student at McGill University in Montreal stating that, “Quebec students must pay their share,” and advised people to “ignore the overheated rhetoric from student strikers,” and that, “Jean Charest must go full steam ahead.” The student author, Brendan Steven, is co-founder of McGill’s Moderate Political Action Committee (ModPAC), which is an organizing mobilizing McGill students inopposition to the strike. Steven’s organization attacked striking student associations as “illegitimate, unconstitutional shams” and attacked the democratic functioning of other student associations holding general assemblies. Steven complained that the democratic general assemblies “are being invented on a whim.” Brendan Steven not only gets to write columns for the National Post, but getsinterviewed on CBC. Steven’s anti-strike group sent a letter to the McGill administration complaining about pro-strike students on the campus, writing, “This group violates our democratic right to access an education without fear of harm,” and added: “We are demanding the McGill administration take action against this minority group before the current conflicts escalate into disasters. They have proven they will not remain peaceful.” As a lap-dog boot-licking power worshipper, Brendan Steven has a future for himself in politics, that’s for sure! Back in January, Steven wrote an article for the Huffington Post in which he explained that the reason why CEOs get paid so much is because “they’re worth it.” He referred to Milton Friedman – the father of neoliberalism – as a “great economic thinker.” Back in November of 2011, Steven wrote an article for the McGill Daily entitled, “Do not demonize authorities,” and then went on to justify police violence against protesting students engaged in an occupation of a school building, which he characterized as “an inherently hostile act.” Steven later got an opportunity to appear on CBC’s The Current. Margaret Wente, writing for the Globe and Mail, wrote that, “It’s a little hard for the rest of us to muster sympathy for Quebec’s downtrodden students, who pay the lowest tuition fees in all of North America.” She then referred to the striking students as “the baristas of tomorrow and they don’t even know it.” Wente then attempted to explain the Quebec students by writing: “Now I get it: The kids are on another planet.” Interesting how she used the word “kids” to just add a little extra condescension. But it seems clear that Wente “gets” very little. In an August 2011 column, Wente tried to explain why poor black communities in Britain and America were experiencing riots and gang activity, placing blame on “single-mothers” and “family breakdown,” and explained that, “Rootless, unmoored young men with no stake in society are a major threat to social order.” Explaining this demographic in economic terms, Wente wrote: “They are, quite simply, surplus to requirements.” In another column, Wente argued that helping deliver much-needed humanitarian supplies to Gaza would “enable terrorists.” Wente also wrote an article entitled, “The poor are doing better than you think,” suggesting that it’s not so bad for poor people because they have air conditioning, DVD players, and cable TV. Wente has been consistently critical of the Occupy movement, and suggested in another article that, “the biggest economic challenge we face today is not income inequality, greedy corporations, Wall Street corruption or the concentration of wealth among the top 1 per cent. It’s the increasing failure of young men with high-school degrees or less to latch on to the world of work.” Of course, in Wente’s world, the inability of young men to get a job has nothing to do with income inequality, greedy corporations, Wall Street corruption or the concentration of wealth. In another article criticizing the Occupy movement, Wente managed to argue that it was not Wall Street and bankers that have destroyed the economy and left people without jobs, but rather what she refers to as the “virtueocracy,” blaming unions, single mothers who gets masters degrees in social sciences, and people who want to work at NGOs and non-profits, doing “transformational, world-saving work.” So it’s Wente’s “insightful” voice which is “informing” Canadians about the student movement in Quebec. Other Canadian publications writing about the Quebec student strike have headlines like, “Reality check for the entitled,” repeating the idiotic argument that because Quebec students pay less than the rest of Canada, they shouldn’t be “complaining” about the hikes. Andrew Coyne wrote a syndicated column in which he claimed that, “Quebec students know violence works,” framing the protest at which police almost killed two students as an action “of general rage the students had promised.” With no mention of the student who lost an eye, or the other student who ended up in the hospital with critical head injuries, Coyne talked about a cop who “was beaten savagely” and “lay helpless on the ground.” No mention, of course, of the police truck that drove into a group of students moments later, or the fact that the cop who was “beaten savagely” got away with minor injuries, unlike the students who were shot in the face with rubber bullets. By simply omitting police brutality and violence, Coyne presented the student movement as itself inherently violent, instead of at times erupting in violent reactions to state violence, which is far more extreme in every case. The Toronto Sun even had an article which claimed that the students have employed tactics of “thuggery” and “violent criminal behaviour.” Publications regularly ask their readers if Quebec students have “legitimate” grievances, if they are fighting for “social justice,” or if they are just “spoiled brats.” A syndicated column from theVancouver Sun by Licia Corbella was titled, “How rioting students help make me grateful.” She discussed her latest visit to church where the pastor advised: “Parents, do not provoke your children to anger by the way you treat them,” and mentioned how parents anger their children by “belittling them, underestimating them and not treating them as individuals.” Corbella then took particular note of how parents provoke and enrage children “when we give them a sense of entitlement.” With the word “entitlement,” Corbella naturally then began thinking about Quebec students, as according to Corbella’s pastor, “entitlement leads to rage.” Corbella wrote that rioting “is, in essence, what a spoiled two-year-old would do if they had the ability.” She further wrote: “In Quebec, these entitled youth, who believe the rest of society MUST provide them with an almost free education or else, have blocked other students from accessing the educations they paid for, burned vehicles, smashed shop windows, looted property and severely beaten up a police officer who got separated from the rest of his colleagues.” Again, no mention of the two students who were almost killed by police at the same event. Corbella quoted someone interviewed on TV, endorsing the claim that the student protests are “starting to resemble terrorism,” though she took issue with the word “starting.” This is the result of creating, according to Corbell, “an entitlement society.” Apparently, the pastor’s lesson about not “belittling” the young did not sink in with Corbella. An article in the Chronicle Heraldasked, “What planet are these kids on?” The author then wrote that, “the irony is that these students now want the system to accommodate their desires and for someone else to pay the bill,” and that, “students should stop making foolish demands.” Other articles claim that students “need a lesson in economics.” After all, the fact that the majority of economists, fully armed with “lessons in economics,” were unable to predict the massive global economic crisis in 2008, should obviously not lead to any questioning of the ideology of modern economic theory. No, it would be better for students to learn about the ocean from those who couldn’t see a tsunami as it approached the beach. Another article, written by a former speechwriter to the Prime Minister of Canada, wrote that the student arguments were vacuous and that the youth were in a “state of complete denial.” Rex Murphy, a commentator with the National Post and CBC, referred to the student strike as “short-sighted” and that student actions were “crude attempts at precipitating a crisis.” Student actions, he claimed, were the “actions of a mob” and were “simply wrong,” and thus, should be “condemned.” The CBC has been particularly terrible in their coverage of the student movement. With few exceptions, the Canadian media have established a consensus in opposition to the student protests, and use techniques of omission, distortion, or outright condemnation in order to promote a distinctly anti-student stance.
10) The student movement is part of a much larger emerging global movement of resistance against austerity, neoliberalism, and corrupt power: In the coverage and discourse about the student movement, very little context is given in placing this student movement in a wider global context. The British newspaper, The Guardian, acknowledged this context, commenting on the red squares worn by striking students (a symbol of going squarely into the red, into debt), explaining that they have “become a symbol of the most powerful challenge to neoliberalism on the continent.” The article also adopted the term promoted by the student movement itself to describe the wider social context of the protests, calling it the “Maple Spring.” The author placed the fight against tuition increases in the context of a struggle against austerity measures worldwide, writing: “Forcing students to pay more for education is part of a transfer of wealth from the poor and middle-class to the rich – as with privatization and the state’s withdrawal from service-provision, tax breaks for corporations and deep cuts to social programs.” The article noted how the student movement has linked up with civic groups against a Quebec government plan to subsidize mining companies in exploiting the natural resources of Northern Quebec (Plan Nord), taking land from indigenous peoples to give to multibillion dollar corporations. As one of the student leaders stated, the protest was about more than tuition and was aimed at the elite class itself, “Those people are a single elite, a greedy elite, a corrupt elite, a vulgar elite, an elite that only sees education as an investment in human capital, that only sees a tree as a piece of paper and only sees a child as a future employee.” The student strike has thus become a social movement. The protests aim at economic disruption through civil disobedience, and have garnered the support of thousands of protesters, and 200,000 protesters on March 22, and close to 300,000 on April 22. Protests have blocked entrances to banks, disrupted a conference for the Plan Nord exploitation, linking the movement with indigenous and environmental groups. It was only when the movement began to align with other social movements and issues that the government even accepted the possibility of speaking to students. Unions have also increasingly been supporting the student strike, including with large financial contributions. Though, the large union support for the student movement was also involved in attempted co-optation and undermining of the students. At the negotiations between the government and the students, the union leaders convinced the student leaders to accept the deal, which met none of the student demands and kept the tuition increases intact. There was a risk that the major unions were essentially aiming to undermine the student movement. But the student groups, which had to submit the agreement to democratic votes, rejected the horrible government offer. Thus the Maple Spring continues. Quebec is not the only location with student protests taking place. In Chile, a massive student movement has emerged and developed over the past year, changing the politics of the country and challenging the elites and the society they have built for their own benefit. One of the leaders of the Chilean student movement is a 23-year old young woman, Camila Vallejo, who has attained celebrity status. In Quebec’s student movement, the most visible and vocal leader is 21-year old Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, who has also achieved something of celebrity status within the province. Just as in Quebec, student protests in Chile are met with state violence, though in the Latin American country, the apparatus of state violence is the remnants of a U.S.-supported military dictatorship. Still, this does not stop tens of thousands of students going out into the streets in Santiago, as recently as late April. Protests by students have also been emerging elsewhere, often in cooperation and solidarity with the Occupy movement and other anti-austerity protests. Silent protests are emerging at American universities where students are protesting their massive debts. California students have been increasingly protesting increased tuition costs. Student protests at UC Berkeley ended with 12 citations for trespassing. Some students in California have even begun a hunger strike against tuition increases. In Brooklyn, New York, students protesting against tuition increases, many of them wearing the Quebec “red square” symbol, were assaulted by police officers. Even high school students in New York have been protesting. Israeli social activists are back on the streets protesting against austerity measures. An Occupy group has resumed protests in London. The Spanish indignado movement, which began in May of 2011, saw a resurgence on the one year anniversary, with another round of anti-austerity protests in Spain, bringing tens of thousands of protesters, mostly youths, out into the streets of Madrid, and more than 100,000 across the country. Their protest was met with police repression. Increasingly, students, the Occupy movement, and other social groups are uniting in protests against the costs of higher education and the debts of students. This is indeed the context in which the ‘Maple Spring’ – the Quebec student movement – should be placed, as part of a much broader global anti-austerity movement.
So march on, students. Show Quebec, Canada, and the world what it takes to oppose parasitic elites, mafia-connected politicians, billionaire bankers, and seek to change a social, political, and economic system that benefits the few at the expense of the many.
Solidarity, brothers and sisters!
For a comprehensive analysis of the Quebec student strike, see: “The Québec Student Strike: From ‘Maple Spring’ to Summer Rebellion?”
For up to date news and information of student movements around the world, join this Facebook page: We Are the Youth Revolution.
Andrew Gavin Marshall is an independent researcher and writer based in Montreal, Canada, writing on a number of social, political, economic, and historical issues. He is also Project Manager of The People’s Book Project. He also hosts a weekly podcast show, “Empire, Power, and People,” on BoilingFrogsPost.com.
Showing posts with label victory to the Quebec students. Show all posts
Showing posts with label victory to the Quebec students. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 05, 2012
Québec's Student Strike Turning Into a Citizens' Revolt
Québec's Student Strike Turning Into a Citizens' Revolt
Friday, 25 May 2012 10:25 By Elizabeth Leier, Truthout | News Analysis
Quebec student strikes. (Photo: Robin Dumont / Flickr)The province of Québec is no stranger to large and powerful social movements (the 1949 Asbestos Strike comes to mind, as does the Summit of the Americas in Québec City, in 2001). However, the ongoing conflict between the provincial government and striking students and their supporters will go down in history as one of the province's - indeed the country's - biggest mass protests. On its 102nd day, the student movement is growing, as is the awareness of an ever more oppressive and corrupt government.
On May 22, nearly half a million people marched in the streets of Montreal in defiance of a recently adopted law denying protester's civil liberties, namely the right to protest, freedom of association and of expression. A crowd made up of students, professors, children and citizens from every walk of life marched peacefully throughout the city, ignoring provisions prohibiting any deviation from the planned itinerary and disrupting the commercial and banking district. The crowd openly defied articles of Bill 78, which make any gathering of over 50 protesters illegal, and chanted for the resignation of Premier Jean Charest, who has systematically refused to meet with the students personally. Many consider that the government's refusal to find a solution and, indeed, its increasingly repressive position have given the movement a second wind.
On Wednesday, May 23, more than 3,000 people assembled in Montreal, in Emilie-Gamelin Square for the 30th nightly protest, while throughout the city, citizens spontaneously took to the streets (in some neighborhoods, over 2,000 people) banging on pots and pans and blocking busy roads, in a situation reminiscent of the Argentinian protests of 2001. No longer just a student strike, the Maple Spring is fast becoming a widespread citizens' revolt.
The Emilie Gamelin protest was declared illegal instants after it began, even though there had been no acts of violence from protesters. In fact, the one act of violence was directed at protesters, as a car whose driver decided to drive through the people barricading the street deliberately hit two young men.
Police tolerated the protesters until 1 AM, at which point they began to kettle the marchers within strategic parts of the city. Cavalry officers and baton-wielding municipal police had planned on striking forcefully and doubled their numbers. Most who were present insist that the march had been entirely peaceful, though the police contest this and claim that some projectiles were thrown at them (rocks, mostly). However, you will be hard-pressed to find any footage or pictures of these supposed acts taking place, although scores of journalists and cameras were present.
The police then proceeded to a mass arrest of 512 people and, though they gave the order to disperse, several protesters say that the police did not allow them to leave the kettle. The protesters then spent several hours in crowded city buses, denied water and access to toilets, waiting to be taken to a local detention center and identified. Most were levied a hefty fine ($612), though 12 were charged under the criminal code. In Québec City, 176 people were arrested for staging a sit-in.
Many people are calling these arrests outrageous and unjustified. Nightly protests in Montreal now resemble a war zone with flash bombs going off every few minutes and riot police chasing people down the streets.
The climate in the province is currently one of fear and anger. It is impossible to walk around Montreal in the evening without seeing hundreds of police cars, flanked by buses carrying hundreds of riot police, armed with high-pressure water guns and rubber bullets.
Some have commented that the streets of Montreal remind them of the images coming from Syria.
Recently, there have been rumors of military intervention. This would not be a first for the province, as the War Measures Act was invoked in 1970 during what came to be known as the "October Crisis." Memories of this crisis still haunt the collective Québec consciousness and any mention of military intervention is met with expressions of angst. Ironically, Article 9 of the new law provides the minister of education with far-reaching powers to adapt (read suspend) any provincial law in order to break the strike.
However, the general mood of the protesters has not changed; they have become more determined and, with the movement growing larger as a result of Bill 78, further convinced they are closer to winning than ever. Indeed, nearly everyone now agrees that what started out as a refusal to accept an 82 percent tuition fee hike - and the possible lifetime of debt peonage associated thereto - has turned into something much greater. As Sid Ryan from the Ontario Federation of Labor has said: we could be on our way to a Canadian spring. People see what the students are fighting for - while centered on tuition - is all about inequality and accessibility.
What is certain about this movement is that the generation that is currently fighting, a generation that has grown up in a post 9/11 and austerity-riddled world, is learning firsthand how the current political system functions and they aren't happy about it.
Friday, 25 May 2012 10:25 By Elizabeth Leier, Truthout | News Analysis
Quebec student strikes. (Photo: Robin Dumont / Flickr)The province of Québec is no stranger to large and powerful social movements (the 1949 Asbestos Strike comes to mind, as does the Summit of the Americas in Québec City, in 2001). However, the ongoing conflict between the provincial government and striking students and their supporters will go down in history as one of the province's - indeed the country's - biggest mass protests. On its 102nd day, the student movement is growing, as is the awareness of an ever more oppressive and corrupt government.
On May 22, nearly half a million people marched in the streets of Montreal in defiance of a recently adopted law denying protester's civil liberties, namely the right to protest, freedom of association and of expression. A crowd made up of students, professors, children and citizens from every walk of life marched peacefully throughout the city, ignoring provisions prohibiting any deviation from the planned itinerary and disrupting the commercial and banking district. The crowd openly defied articles of Bill 78, which make any gathering of over 50 protesters illegal, and chanted for the resignation of Premier Jean Charest, who has systematically refused to meet with the students personally. Many consider that the government's refusal to find a solution and, indeed, its increasingly repressive position have given the movement a second wind.
On Wednesday, May 23, more than 3,000 people assembled in Montreal, in Emilie-Gamelin Square for the 30th nightly protest, while throughout the city, citizens spontaneously took to the streets (in some neighborhoods, over 2,000 people) banging on pots and pans and blocking busy roads, in a situation reminiscent of the Argentinian protests of 2001. No longer just a student strike, the Maple Spring is fast becoming a widespread citizens' revolt.
The Emilie Gamelin protest was declared illegal instants after it began, even though there had been no acts of violence from protesters. In fact, the one act of violence was directed at protesters, as a car whose driver decided to drive through the people barricading the street deliberately hit two young men.
Police tolerated the protesters until 1 AM, at which point they began to kettle the marchers within strategic parts of the city. Cavalry officers and baton-wielding municipal police had planned on striking forcefully and doubled their numbers. Most who were present insist that the march had been entirely peaceful, though the police contest this and claim that some projectiles were thrown at them (rocks, mostly). However, you will be hard-pressed to find any footage or pictures of these supposed acts taking place, although scores of journalists and cameras were present.
The police then proceeded to a mass arrest of 512 people and, though they gave the order to disperse, several protesters say that the police did not allow them to leave the kettle. The protesters then spent several hours in crowded city buses, denied water and access to toilets, waiting to be taken to a local detention center and identified. Most were levied a hefty fine ($612), though 12 were charged under the criminal code. In Québec City, 176 people were arrested for staging a sit-in.
Many people are calling these arrests outrageous and unjustified. Nightly protests in Montreal now resemble a war zone with flash bombs going off every few minutes and riot police chasing people down the streets.
The climate in the province is currently one of fear and anger. It is impossible to walk around Montreal in the evening without seeing hundreds of police cars, flanked by buses carrying hundreds of riot police, armed with high-pressure water guns and rubber bullets.
Some have commented that the streets of Montreal remind them of the images coming from Syria.
Recently, there have been rumors of military intervention. This would not be a first for the province, as the War Measures Act was invoked in 1970 during what came to be known as the "October Crisis." Memories of this crisis still haunt the collective Québec consciousness and any mention of military intervention is met with expressions of angst. Ironically, Article 9 of the new law provides the minister of education with far-reaching powers to adapt (read suspend) any provincial law in order to break the strike.
However, the general mood of the protesters has not changed; they have become more determined and, with the movement growing larger as a result of Bill 78, further convinced they are closer to winning than ever. Indeed, nearly everyone now agrees that what started out as a refusal to accept an 82 percent tuition fee hike - and the possible lifetime of debt peonage associated thereto - has turned into something much greater. As Sid Ryan from the Ontario Federation of Labor has said: we could be on our way to a Canadian spring. People see what the students are fighting for - while centered on tuition - is all about inequality and accessibility.
What is certain about this movement is that the generation that is currently fighting, a generation that has grown up in a post 9/11 and austerity-riddled world, is learning firsthand how the current political system functions and they aren't happy about it.
From The Quebec "War Zone"-ISO Interview with Quebec Strike Leaders-Wear Your Red Badge Of Solidarity
Markin comment:
This is a very informative interview that covers and explains many of the main points and organizations involved in the struggle in Quebec.
http://socialistworker.org/2012/06/04/a-monster-that-will-haunt-them
They created a monster that will haunt them
June 4, 2012
Students have been on strike for months in the Canadian province of Québec in an attempt to stop the government's proposed increase in the cost of tuition at public universities.
With the education system effectively shut down and faced with almost daily demonstrations of students and their supporters, Québec's government, led by Premier Jean Charest of the Liberal Party, has attempted to repress the movement with mass arrests and escalating legal restrictions. Québec's parliament passed Bill 78 to curtail the right to assemble.
However, that law has only spurred the movement to greater heights. On May 22, about 300,000 students and workers protested the tuition increases and Bill 78. Since then, there have been nightly illegal demonstrations of thousands throughout Québec--and solidarity actions have spread to the rest of Canada.
The largest student union organizing the strike is CLASSÉ, which stands for Coalition large de l'association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante , (Coalition of the Association for Student Union Solidarity). CLASSÉ is itself a coalition of different Associations for Student Union Solidarity (ASSÉ). Guillaume Legault is the general coordinator of CLASSÉ and Guillaume Vézina is the secretary of information for CLASSÉ. They spoke to Ashley Smith about the role the union has played and how activists organized.
Student demonstrators defied the recently passed repressive law known as Bill 78
WHAT ARE the key issues in the struggle?
Vézina: We are on strike against tuition hikes imposed on us by the Charest government. Our union, CLASSÉ, is founded on the idea that education should be free and a social right. When Charest proposed tuition increases, we said we wouldn't accept this. That's the main issue in the strike.
We reject the idea that the universities need more money from us. They have increased their enrollment and are meeting their budgetary needs that way. But there are deeper reasons we raise as well about what education should be about. They want it to be about research and development for Nike and the other companies. We think education should be about improving society, not making profit.
WHY IS the Charest government trying to impose the tuition increase?
Legault: Since 2007, they just started to do really intense things. Even before the 2008 economic crisis, they announced they were going to put in place a big austerity plan. They decided to dramatically bring down the level of taxes for enterprises. They even abolished the last tax on business capital starting in 2007.
Then they said, "We don't have enough money. We need to increase the cost of public services to balance our budgets." You know, the song is always the same. They put little taxes on every service. In health care, they put some fees on medicine. They did the same for many other services. But faced with that situation, resistance by unions and other organizations really began in 2010.
We knew that they would come for education next. So in 2010, when they proposed this tuition increases, we were like, "Whoa, what's going to happen? What are we going to do with this?" At this time, ASSÉ, which spearheaded the formation of CLASSÉ, just decided that we're going to try to make a big information campaign for everyone concerning the tuition hike
At that time, it was already clear for ASSÉ that nothing could stop the government except a general strike. At that time, everybody was looking at us, saying, "Ah, look at all the dreamers who all want to go on strike." They never thought that we would be able to get 150,000 people out on strike.
After the two hard first months of general strike, many protests and direct actions had already been organized, and we set up a huge rally in Montreal that united the voices of more then 200,000 people. For that event, on March 22, we had more than 320,000 people on strike for one day. This was just--I'll use a bad word--fucking amazing. We saw the local student associations coming out, one after the other. The list of student associations on strike was starting to get long!
So maybe we had big ambitions, but I think today's struggle just confirms that anything is possible. Now the masses of people have actually gone even further to our left. We don't have any more control on what's going on, and it's beautiful.
Just look at the protest on May 22. It was one of the biggest protests in Canada's history. We were really surprised by its size because this strike is getting really, really, really long.
But the government just went into attack mode. They systematically tried to bring us down with Bill 78, which basically criminalizes organizing. But that law just outraged people and expanded the struggle. Everyone turned out on May 22. So they've created a monster of determined new activists that will haunt them for at least the next decade.
WHAT IS Bill 78 and what has been the response to it?
Vézina: The law does several things. First, it suspended the semesters until August. So they basically shut down all the universities, whether they were on strike on or not, to try to paralyze the strike.
Second, the law gave the cops the right to ban a protest of 50 or more people if the organizers don't submit the hour, date, time and route of the march to authorities. The cops can even change the route if it breaks the "social peace." I mean, if we're making a protest against the prime minister being somewhere, they can just tell us "go protest in another city on another day." This is absurd.
This law affects more than just students. It affects everyone, including the traditional trade unions. They can even suspend automatic dues collection to the unions if people violate this law.
Legault: This law has given the police a blank check to go after activists. But CLASSÉ has announced that we will not respect that law. By doing that, we're exposing ourselves to massive fines.
Vézina: Despite this intimidation, I think the law has backfired. You could see this on May 22. On the 22nd, some student organizations gave the authorities one legal itinerary that almost everyone did not like. So it was put to the demonstration whether they wanted to go the legal route or the illegal one.
Everyone, the entire demonstration, opted for the illegal itinerary. So the whole march of hundreds of thousands was illegal. This was the biggest act of civil disobedience of the last 40 years in Québec.
Legault: Ever since the passage of the law and especially since the 22nd, people are marching every single night, banging pots and pans together in what we call casseroles. People gather together every night on a volunteer basis. There is no organization, no speakers, no sound system and no security. People just gather in a park, and march every night. And every night, there are anywhere from 2,000 to 100,000 people in the streets if you add up all the small protests that take place in lots of towns and cities across Québec.
Vézina: Last year's biggest demonstration was on Mach 31. It was the biggest event of last year's campaign--I was arrested there--and we had between 5,000 and 10,000 people in the street. It was a huge demonstration, and we were proud. And now that's happening every night. People are violating the law and showing their opposition to the government.
HOW STRONG is the strike across Québec?
Vézina: It depends on the campus. On some campuses, it is very strong, and others not so strong. It depends on how effectively students are organized. On the strong campuses,, they understand the meaning of the problem: they don't strike for meaningless concessions, they strike for their rights. This is what they want, after being out on strike for so long--they really want their rights.
Legault: We have over 160,000 people who are on general strike for various reasons. From them, more than 100,000 are striking for more radical demands. Some are on strike until we get a reasonable offer from the government; others until we get back the 2007 level of tuition; still others until we get free tuition; and there is even one campus that recently voted to be on strike until the social revolution, even though this is not part of CLASSÉ platform.
These 100,000 people are not coming off the strike until we get a reasonable offer at least on tuition fees.
Until now, we didn't have a single offer from the government on tuition fees. This is astonishing, because right now, they've lost way more money than they would have gotten from the tuition hike. They have not even finished counting how much this strike is going to cost them. This truly shows the political and ideological objectives behind the tuition hike.
WHY DO you think the struggle go so large this time compared to previous student struggles?
Vézina: I think the international context helps explains why the struggle is so big. After the big strike of 2005, the government came back at us in 2007. They implemented a tuition hike of $100 dollars each year over five years, and the mobilizations just went down and nothing happened. In 2011, the Arab Spring inspired us.
Legault: On top of that, the Occupy movement showed people that it's possible to make a move and to protest. But there are also specific reasons here in Québec. I think this year, one of the main differences is the size of CLASSÉ and the place that ASSÉ had in this whole struggle.
We built a huge national team of volunteers, organized the campuses, laid the groundwork and built general assemblies to prepare for the strike. Many of us went through the mistakes and setbacks of 2007. We learned a lot from that.
In all the organizing, many teased us for being so romantic, thinking that we could ever do something as big, as large, as long and as dynamic as the 2005 student strike, which was the biggest in the history of Québec. But with this strike, I mean we just completely broke all historical records of student militancy.
HOW IS CLASSÉ organized, and how does it differ from the other two student unions, FEUZ and FECQ?
Legault: I think the main difference is direct democracy. In our organization, we never wanted to tell people what to do, but we wanted people to tell us what to do. We just don't organize an entire campus in one union. We organize our local unions by academic departments, so that we can have as deep roots as possible, involving as many students as possible.
Two other major differences between the national organizations are definitely principles and actions. ASSÉ and CLASSÉ proclaim ourselves as part of combative syndicalism. This main principle of our organization defines the actions we make to get heard.
This type of unionism made us build our movement completely independent of the political parties. Another key idea for us is that we need to be a fighting union based on the complete rejection of collaboration. We also are principled feminists. These principles have structured our struggle. CLASSÉ is really a grassroots movement.
I could not say that for FEUQ or FECQ. They try to have really tight control. However, with the growth of CLASSÉ, we have been able to have a lot of influence on the other student unions, pushing them to the left and into a more combative stance. That is a real breakthrough compared to the past.
SO HOW do you coordinate this grassroots democratic unionism across the whole of Québec?
Legault: We have a strike committee of 12 to 20 people that is elected. On top of that, we have almost 55 volunteers who are part of various committees to organize things throughout Québec. These people are really committed, risking their jobs, taking time away from their families, girlfriends and boyfriends. They go throughout Québec just trying to keep the strike going on and helping people organize actions.
SO HAS CLASSÉ grown larger and more influential as a result of the strike?
Legault: ASSÉ has grown from 42,500 at the beginning of the strike to 55,000. CLASSÉ has grown to about 100,000 members. We've grown because CLASSÉ was the major leader of the strike. In fact, CLASSÉ started the strike. Lots of people just turned to us and said, "Well, they're fighting. They're leading the strike, they're leading the struggle so why not join them." I think that's pretty much what initiated that big enlargement of ASSÉ. We completely and totally took the lead.
HOW DO you collaborate with the other student unions?
Vézina: In the beginning of the struggle, you had a big tension between the different organizations. The other two unions were intimidated by Charest and were not friendly toward CLASSÉ and our combative union principle. So we didn't collaborate that much.
But then we worked together on a series of demonstrations against the tuition hike. After that, we formed a joint negotiating committee that agreed to hold firm on the things we agreed on--like stopping the tuition hike.
Legault: We have built unprecedented solidarity between the student unions. This was put to the test as well by the government. It tried to exclude CLASSÉ three times from the negotiations. But we have kept our unity strong so far.
The other unions have not been sucked into separate negotiations without us. However, our differences remain strong, and there is a history with the other national organizations. We experienced this in the 2005 strike when the other unions made separate deals from us. We have to take this into consideration in the political strategies we use.
ONE TRADITIONAL division in the student movement in Québec has been between Anglophone campuses and Francophone campuses. Have you been able to overcome this division?
Legault: We were successful in this effort, really for the first time ever. We had two people on the national team who made it a priority to go to McGill and Concordia, the main Anglophone campuses in Québec, to organize them for the strike. It worked at Concordia beautifully, but not at McGill.
There is a really big cultural gap between unions on the Francophone campuses and Anglophone campuses. They are organized in a completely different manner. They have big unions organized across the whole campus. In most cases, CLASSÉ is organized department by department. We had to work a lot to organize to get their departments on strike, to join CLASSÉ or to participate in actions.
They often have campus-wide general assemblies and mostly use Robert's Rules to run them. These assemblies are not that effective in organizing a strike because only a minority of the campus tends to turn out. The problem then is how to you keep the strike when you have a minority who are at the assembly voting for it.
That's why the smaller organizations established in the departments are more effective. For example, if you have a 2,000-student department and, let's say, 1,200 people who vote for the strike, the strikers will be able mobilize stronger and bigger picket lines.
On the other hand, if you have a campus general assembly that represents 40,000 students and 5,000 attend and vote for the strike--which is pretty impressive--there are still 35,000 people who just didn't vote on it, didn't think about it and don't know how it's going to be applied.
Another difference is probably that historically, the Anglophone campuses had way richer populations than the Francophone universities. L'Université du Québec à Montréal in Montreal has always been the poor people's university, the place where the first people in their families to go to college would go, and that makes a clear difference.
While it's been a struggle to overcome these differences, we've achieved an unprecedented solidarity between Francophone and Anglophone campuses, and we mean to go forward with this work.
WHAT HAS been the relation between the Québec strike and other campuses in Canada?
Vézina: Education is a political responsibility of the provinces in Canada. So one province's decision does not have big impact on other provinces. But solidarity is always welcome, and we have tried our best to cultivate it. But it's just starting. We are beginning to see this across Canada with calls for casseroles in many cities.
HAS THE student strike won solidarity from the trade union movement?
Legault: We have gotten overwhelming support. Most of the unions have passed resolutions in support of our strike. They have given us big donations. They bring people to every protest we have. We even have unions that pay for buses to bring people from one place to another to build the picket lines.
Vézina: Lots of teachers and other public-service workers have joined our picket lines. The whole education sector is really angry with the government, and is really against that the tuition hike and Bill 78. And they are really taking a part in the struggle.
WHAT WAS the response to CLASSÉ's call for a social strike, a general strike against government's policy?
Vézina: We didn't have much of a response to that call because the traditional unions are not legally allowed to stage a political strike. If they do, the government can go after them to try to destroy them. And they have a lot to lose--money, buildings and much more. That's why they did not respond to the call for a social strike.
Legault: Not yet, but there are dynamics that can change that situation. In 2010, because of Charest's radical attacks on public services, lots of unions took a formal position in favor of a social strike. One of the three big unions in Québec, Confédération des Syndicats Nationaux, took a position in favor of a political and social strike. But they did not act on it.
The idea of a social strike came from some of our local unions. But a social strike has to be planned in a serious way. We have work on it, inform people and concentrate on mass preparations.
We are part of the coalition called Against Tarification and Privatization of the Public Services. This coalition is going to be a major leader in discussing plans for social strike. It may be able over the coming months to build momentum for a real social strike against the Charest government.
HOW DO you see the struggle in Québec in relation to the struggle throughout the world against austerity?
Legault: I'm proud to say we're one of the major movements in North America at the moment. We never thought it could happen here. But people see what's going on throughout the world, what happened in the Middle East, and what's happened in the Occupy movement.
All of these actions opened everyone's minds about the problems with our economies, all the absurd financial speculation, and how much we live in a false world, with false things and false debates. In this system, our future is gambled on the roll of dice.
We can consider ourselves in the same global struggle, even if they are affected dramatically worse than we are here, and the fight is not on the same scale, too. In Greece, it's a social revolution. Here, we're still banging pots and pans. However, we are pleased to consider the actual mobilization the start of something that could somehow grow bigger.
WHERE DOES the struggle go from here?
Legault: After the discussions we had in the congress, we have decided not to negotiate separate agreements with the local administrations of the campuses. Everybody was pretty determined to continue the strike.
But we might have problems starting the strike again in August. The government is betting that there will be a large backlash against us in the fall. But the government has also discredited itself with its repression, with all these arrests, and with their stupid law.
In reality, they are spending far more money on suspending the semester and all this police activity than they would ever make through the tuition increases. It's completely insane.
So we have to continue organizing through the summer. In Montreal during the summer, there are 200,000 to 300,000 people in the streets every night for the festivals. That is a huge opportunity for us to distribute information, give out our newspaper and win over more and more people to our struggle. It's going to be a hot summer.
Vézina: We have to continue the strike to stop the tuition hikes. We have to win. We don't have a choice. If we win, it's going to be better for all the rest of Canada and North America. If the student movement here falls, it's going to be worse for everyone. We have no choice but to win. In the process, we are giving birth to a new left to take on the government on many other questions.
Transcription by Karen Dominguez Burke, Michael Stemle and William Crane.
--
This is a very informative interview that covers and explains many of the main points and organizations involved in the struggle in Quebec.
http://socialistworker.org/2012/06/04/a-monster-that-will-haunt-them
They created a monster that will haunt them
June 4, 2012
Students have been on strike for months in the Canadian province of Québec in an attempt to stop the government's proposed increase in the cost of tuition at public universities.
With the education system effectively shut down and faced with almost daily demonstrations of students and their supporters, Québec's government, led by Premier Jean Charest of the Liberal Party, has attempted to repress the movement with mass arrests and escalating legal restrictions. Québec's parliament passed Bill 78 to curtail the right to assemble.
However, that law has only spurred the movement to greater heights. On May 22, about 300,000 students and workers protested the tuition increases and Bill 78. Since then, there have been nightly illegal demonstrations of thousands throughout Québec--and solidarity actions have spread to the rest of Canada.
The largest student union organizing the strike is CLASSÉ, which stands for Coalition large de l'association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante , (Coalition of the Association for Student Union Solidarity). CLASSÉ is itself a coalition of different Associations for Student Union Solidarity (ASSÉ). Guillaume Legault is the general coordinator of CLASSÉ and Guillaume Vézina is the secretary of information for CLASSÉ. They spoke to Ashley Smith about the role the union has played and how activists organized.
Student demonstrators defied the recently passed repressive law known as Bill 78
WHAT ARE the key issues in the struggle?
Vézina: We are on strike against tuition hikes imposed on us by the Charest government. Our union, CLASSÉ, is founded on the idea that education should be free and a social right. When Charest proposed tuition increases, we said we wouldn't accept this. That's the main issue in the strike.
We reject the idea that the universities need more money from us. They have increased their enrollment and are meeting their budgetary needs that way. But there are deeper reasons we raise as well about what education should be about. They want it to be about research and development for Nike and the other companies. We think education should be about improving society, not making profit.
WHY IS the Charest government trying to impose the tuition increase?
Legault: Since 2007, they just started to do really intense things. Even before the 2008 economic crisis, they announced they were going to put in place a big austerity plan. They decided to dramatically bring down the level of taxes for enterprises. They even abolished the last tax on business capital starting in 2007.
Then they said, "We don't have enough money. We need to increase the cost of public services to balance our budgets." You know, the song is always the same. They put little taxes on every service. In health care, they put some fees on medicine. They did the same for many other services. But faced with that situation, resistance by unions and other organizations really began in 2010.
We knew that they would come for education next. So in 2010, when they proposed this tuition increases, we were like, "Whoa, what's going to happen? What are we going to do with this?" At this time, ASSÉ, which spearheaded the formation of CLASSÉ, just decided that we're going to try to make a big information campaign for everyone concerning the tuition hike
At that time, it was already clear for ASSÉ that nothing could stop the government except a general strike. At that time, everybody was looking at us, saying, "Ah, look at all the dreamers who all want to go on strike." They never thought that we would be able to get 150,000 people out on strike.
After the two hard first months of general strike, many protests and direct actions had already been organized, and we set up a huge rally in Montreal that united the voices of more then 200,000 people. For that event, on March 22, we had more than 320,000 people on strike for one day. This was just--I'll use a bad word--fucking amazing. We saw the local student associations coming out, one after the other. The list of student associations on strike was starting to get long!
So maybe we had big ambitions, but I think today's struggle just confirms that anything is possible. Now the masses of people have actually gone even further to our left. We don't have any more control on what's going on, and it's beautiful.
Just look at the protest on May 22. It was one of the biggest protests in Canada's history. We were really surprised by its size because this strike is getting really, really, really long.
But the government just went into attack mode. They systematically tried to bring us down with Bill 78, which basically criminalizes organizing. But that law just outraged people and expanded the struggle. Everyone turned out on May 22. So they've created a monster of determined new activists that will haunt them for at least the next decade.
WHAT IS Bill 78 and what has been the response to it?
Vézina: The law does several things. First, it suspended the semesters until August. So they basically shut down all the universities, whether they were on strike on or not, to try to paralyze the strike.
Second, the law gave the cops the right to ban a protest of 50 or more people if the organizers don't submit the hour, date, time and route of the march to authorities. The cops can even change the route if it breaks the "social peace." I mean, if we're making a protest against the prime minister being somewhere, they can just tell us "go protest in another city on another day." This is absurd.
This law affects more than just students. It affects everyone, including the traditional trade unions. They can even suspend automatic dues collection to the unions if people violate this law.
Legault: This law has given the police a blank check to go after activists. But CLASSÉ has announced that we will not respect that law. By doing that, we're exposing ourselves to massive fines.
Vézina: Despite this intimidation, I think the law has backfired. You could see this on May 22. On the 22nd, some student organizations gave the authorities one legal itinerary that almost everyone did not like. So it was put to the demonstration whether they wanted to go the legal route or the illegal one.
Everyone, the entire demonstration, opted for the illegal itinerary. So the whole march of hundreds of thousands was illegal. This was the biggest act of civil disobedience of the last 40 years in Québec.
Legault: Ever since the passage of the law and especially since the 22nd, people are marching every single night, banging pots and pans together in what we call casseroles. People gather together every night on a volunteer basis. There is no organization, no speakers, no sound system and no security. People just gather in a park, and march every night. And every night, there are anywhere from 2,000 to 100,000 people in the streets if you add up all the small protests that take place in lots of towns and cities across Québec.
Vézina: Last year's biggest demonstration was on Mach 31. It was the biggest event of last year's campaign--I was arrested there--and we had between 5,000 and 10,000 people in the street. It was a huge demonstration, and we were proud. And now that's happening every night. People are violating the law and showing their opposition to the government.
HOW STRONG is the strike across Québec?
Vézina: It depends on the campus. On some campuses, it is very strong, and others not so strong. It depends on how effectively students are organized. On the strong campuses,, they understand the meaning of the problem: they don't strike for meaningless concessions, they strike for their rights. This is what they want, after being out on strike for so long--they really want their rights.
Legault: We have over 160,000 people who are on general strike for various reasons. From them, more than 100,000 are striking for more radical demands. Some are on strike until we get a reasonable offer from the government; others until we get back the 2007 level of tuition; still others until we get free tuition; and there is even one campus that recently voted to be on strike until the social revolution, even though this is not part of CLASSÉ platform.
These 100,000 people are not coming off the strike until we get a reasonable offer at least on tuition fees.
Until now, we didn't have a single offer from the government on tuition fees. This is astonishing, because right now, they've lost way more money than they would have gotten from the tuition hike. They have not even finished counting how much this strike is going to cost them. This truly shows the political and ideological objectives behind the tuition hike.
WHY DO you think the struggle go so large this time compared to previous student struggles?
Vézina: I think the international context helps explains why the struggle is so big. After the big strike of 2005, the government came back at us in 2007. They implemented a tuition hike of $100 dollars each year over five years, and the mobilizations just went down and nothing happened. In 2011, the Arab Spring inspired us.
Legault: On top of that, the Occupy movement showed people that it's possible to make a move and to protest. But there are also specific reasons here in Québec. I think this year, one of the main differences is the size of CLASSÉ and the place that ASSÉ had in this whole struggle.
We built a huge national team of volunteers, organized the campuses, laid the groundwork and built general assemblies to prepare for the strike. Many of us went through the mistakes and setbacks of 2007. We learned a lot from that.
In all the organizing, many teased us for being so romantic, thinking that we could ever do something as big, as large, as long and as dynamic as the 2005 student strike, which was the biggest in the history of Québec. But with this strike, I mean we just completely broke all historical records of student militancy.
HOW IS CLASSÉ organized, and how does it differ from the other two student unions, FEUZ and FECQ?
Legault: I think the main difference is direct democracy. In our organization, we never wanted to tell people what to do, but we wanted people to tell us what to do. We just don't organize an entire campus in one union. We organize our local unions by academic departments, so that we can have as deep roots as possible, involving as many students as possible.
Two other major differences between the national organizations are definitely principles and actions. ASSÉ and CLASSÉ proclaim ourselves as part of combative syndicalism. This main principle of our organization defines the actions we make to get heard.
This type of unionism made us build our movement completely independent of the political parties. Another key idea for us is that we need to be a fighting union based on the complete rejection of collaboration. We also are principled feminists. These principles have structured our struggle. CLASSÉ is really a grassroots movement.
I could not say that for FEUQ or FECQ. They try to have really tight control. However, with the growth of CLASSÉ, we have been able to have a lot of influence on the other student unions, pushing them to the left and into a more combative stance. That is a real breakthrough compared to the past.
SO HOW do you coordinate this grassroots democratic unionism across the whole of Québec?
Legault: We have a strike committee of 12 to 20 people that is elected. On top of that, we have almost 55 volunteers who are part of various committees to organize things throughout Québec. These people are really committed, risking their jobs, taking time away from their families, girlfriends and boyfriends. They go throughout Québec just trying to keep the strike going on and helping people organize actions.
SO HAS CLASSÉ grown larger and more influential as a result of the strike?
Legault: ASSÉ has grown from 42,500 at the beginning of the strike to 55,000. CLASSÉ has grown to about 100,000 members. We've grown because CLASSÉ was the major leader of the strike. In fact, CLASSÉ started the strike. Lots of people just turned to us and said, "Well, they're fighting. They're leading the strike, they're leading the struggle so why not join them." I think that's pretty much what initiated that big enlargement of ASSÉ. We completely and totally took the lead.
HOW DO you collaborate with the other student unions?
Vézina: In the beginning of the struggle, you had a big tension between the different organizations. The other two unions were intimidated by Charest and were not friendly toward CLASSÉ and our combative union principle. So we didn't collaborate that much.
But then we worked together on a series of demonstrations against the tuition hike. After that, we formed a joint negotiating committee that agreed to hold firm on the things we agreed on--like stopping the tuition hike.
Legault: We have built unprecedented solidarity between the student unions. This was put to the test as well by the government. It tried to exclude CLASSÉ three times from the negotiations. But we have kept our unity strong so far.
The other unions have not been sucked into separate negotiations without us. However, our differences remain strong, and there is a history with the other national organizations. We experienced this in the 2005 strike when the other unions made separate deals from us. We have to take this into consideration in the political strategies we use.
ONE TRADITIONAL division in the student movement in Québec has been between Anglophone campuses and Francophone campuses. Have you been able to overcome this division?
Legault: We were successful in this effort, really for the first time ever. We had two people on the national team who made it a priority to go to McGill and Concordia, the main Anglophone campuses in Québec, to organize them for the strike. It worked at Concordia beautifully, but not at McGill.
There is a really big cultural gap between unions on the Francophone campuses and Anglophone campuses. They are organized in a completely different manner. They have big unions organized across the whole campus. In most cases, CLASSÉ is organized department by department. We had to work a lot to organize to get their departments on strike, to join CLASSÉ or to participate in actions.
They often have campus-wide general assemblies and mostly use Robert's Rules to run them. These assemblies are not that effective in organizing a strike because only a minority of the campus tends to turn out. The problem then is how to you keep the strike when you have a minority who are at the assembly voting for it.
That's why the smaller organizations established in the departments are more effective. For example, if you have a 2,000-student department and, let's say, 1,200 people who vote for the strike, the strikers will be able mobilize stronger and bigger picket lines.
On the other hand, if you have a campus general assembly that represents 40,000 students and 5,000 attend and vote for the strike--which is pretty impressive--there are still 35,000 people who just didn't vote on it, didn't think about it and don't know how it's going to be applied.
Another difference is probably that historically, the Anglophone campuses had way richer populations than the Francophone universities. L'Université du Québec à Montréal in Montreal has always been the poor people's university, the place where the first people in their families to go to college would go, and that makes a clear difference.
While it's been a struggle to overcome these differences, we've achieved an unprecedented solidarity between Francophone and Anglophone campuses, and we mean to go forward with this work.
WHAT HAS been the relation between the Québec strike and other campuses in Canada?
Vézina: Education is a political responsibility of the provinces in Canada. So one province's decision does not have big impact on other provinces. But solidarity is always welcome, and we have tried our best to cultivate it. But it's just starting. We are beginning to see this across Canada with calls for casseroles in many cities.
HAS THE student strike won solidarity from the trade union movement?
Legault: We have gotten overwhelming support. Most of the unions have passed resolutions in support of our strike. They have given us big donations. They bring people to every protest we have. We even have unions that pay for buses to bring people from one place to another to build the picket lines.
Vézina: Lots of teachers and other public-service workers have joined our picket lines. The whole education sector is really angry with the government, and is really against that the tuition hike and Bill 78. And they are really taking a part in the struggle.
WHAT WAS the response to CLASSÉ's call for a social strike, a general strike against government's policy?
Vézina: We didn't have much of a response to that call because the traditional unions are not legally allowed to stage a political strike. If they do, the government can go after them to try to destroy them. And they have a lot to lose--money, buildings and much more. That's why they did not respond to the call for a social strike.
Legault: Not yet, but there are dynamics that can change that situation. In 2010, because of Charest's radical attacks on public services, lots of unions took a formal position in favor of a social strike. One of the three big unions in Québec, Confédération des Syndicats Nationaux, took a position in favor of a political and social strike. But they did not act on it.
The idea of a social strike came from some of our local unions. But a social strike has to be planned in a serious way. We have work on it, inform people and concentrate on mass preparations.
We are part of the coalition called Against Tarification and Privatization of the Public Services. This coalition is going to be a major leader in discussing plans for social strike. It may be able over the coming months to build momentum for a real social strike against the Charest government.
HOW DO you see the struggle in Québec in relation to the struggle throughout the world against austerity?
Legault: I'm proud to say we're one of the major movements in North America at the moment. We never thought it could happen here. But people see what's going on throughout the world, what happened in the Middle East, and what's happened in the Occupy movement.
All of these actions opened everyone's minds about the problems with our economies, all the absurd financial speculation, and how much we live in a false world, with false things and false debates. In this system, our future is gambled on the roll of dice.
We can consider ourselves in the same global struggle, even if they are affected dramatically worse than we are here, and the fight is not on the same scale, too. In Greece, it's a social revolution. Here, we're still banging pots and pans. However, we are pleased to consider the actual mobilization the start of something that could somehow grow bigger.
WHERE DOES the struggle go from here?
Legault: After the discussions we had in the congress, we have decided not to negotiate separate agreements with the local administrations of the campuses. Everybody was pretty determined to continue the strike.
But we might have problems starting the strike again in August. The government is betting that there will be a large backlash against us in the fall. But the government has also discredited itself with its repression, with all these arrests, and with their stupid law.
In reality, they are spending far more money on suspending the semester and all this police activity than they would ever make through the tuition increases. It's completely insane.
So we have to continue organizing through the summer. In Montreal during the summer, there are 200,000 to 300,000 people in the streets every night for the festivals. That is a huge opportunity for us to distribute information, give out our newspaper and win over more and more people to our struggle. It's going to be a hot summer.
Vézina: We have to continue the strike to stop the tuition hikes. We have to win. We don't have a choice. If we win, it's going to be better for all the rest of Canada and North America. If the student movement here falls, it's going to be worse for everyone. We have no choice but to win. In the process, we are giving birth to a new left to take on the government on many other questions.
Transcription by Karen Dominguez Burke, Michael Stemle and William Crane.
--
Tuesday, May 29, 2012
Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By- "America, Where Are You Now...."-Stepphenwolf's "Monster" –For The Quebec Student Movement Struggle
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Steppenwolf performing their classic anti-war song (and plaintive plea)Monster.
In this series, presented under the headline Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here.
********
Markin comment on the lyrics here:
Steppenwolf was one of the most political of the rock groups brought forth by the new musical sensibility of the counter-cultural movement in the mid to late 1960s. The narrative here in Monster reads like a capsule history of the American experience up until the 1960s. And a powerful call, a call that should resonate today, for the older generation (now us) to come and help the young fight against the monster of American (and today Canadian) imperialistic capitalism that is driving us all to the bottom. A theme song for all the struggle movements springing up around this good, green earth.
In this series, presented under the headline Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here.
********
Markin comment on the lyrics here:
Steppenwolf was one of the most political of the rock groups brought forth by the new musical sensibility of the counter-cultural movement in the mid to late 1960s. The narrative here in Monster reads like a capsule history of the American experience up until the 1960s. And a powerful call, a call that should resonate today, for the older generation (now us) to come and help the young fight against the monster of American (and today Canadian) imperialistic capitalism that is driving us all to the bottom. A theme song for all the struggle movements springing up around this good, green earth.
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