01) MONTREAL'S REVOLT OF THE CASSEROLES

By Johan Boyden

Over the past two months the picture of Quebec is of a people in motion, a river of struggle and resistance. That river burst its banks in May with the passing of the repressive Law 78. While June has seen (as everyone expected) a slow‑down in the intensity of protests, the resistance has not gone away.

     Nor has the police repression abated, evidenced by the arrest of Amir Khadir, member of the National Assembly for Quebec Solidaire, for peacefully marching in a casserole protest. Almost the next morning, around 6:00 am, police raided his house, snatched his student activist daughter and her boyfriend out of bed and paraded them in front of TV cameras, down to the station in handcuffs.

     If you wear the red square, like I do, the past few days of the Grand Prix has meant having your bags searched each time you enter the subway and sometimes on the street. (Le Devoir did an investigation and found that, not only were unidentified journalists with red squares searched, but if they asked questions they would be detained at the police station.)

     But the spirit of the people has not been dampened. And that resilience is best described through stories about the casserole.

Never seen before

     As I unlocked my bike I could just hear it. Bang-bang, clang‑clang, bang, clang, clang. It was exactly 8:01. The casserole had started right on time.

     Already I could see a few people, mainly students, wearing the red square, walking out of their front door. In their hands ‑ a big spoon, a soup pot, or a cooking pan.

     This is what the word casserole means in French. Any pot used to cook, with a lid. "It is a Quebec tradition," a reporter had confidently claimed the night before on CBC's The National.

     "I've never seen anything like this is in my life in thirty years," my next door neighbour who immigrated from North Africa said the same evening, a sense of amazement in his voice.

A cross‑section of society

     I was heading home. It was the fourth or fifth night of the casseroles, shortly after the draconian Law 78 outlawed spontaneous mass protest. "It's gone viral" an older activist had told me earlier that morning.

     He lived on the opposite side of the downtown. So tonight I was testing that claim by drawing a line, dissecting part of Montreal by bicycle, listening and watching and weaving a route through the side‑streets to get a read on the size of these protests.

     The route I chose started in the community of Mile‑End, cut through the fashionable Plateau neighbourhood, then crossed the railway tracks and headed down into the east side and the working class communities of Maisonneuve and Hochelaga.

     For people less familiar with a map of Montreal, imagine going from the edge of Burnaby Central Park and down Kingsway into Vancouver, then turning onto Commercial, down to East Hastings. Or, in Toronto, going from Eglinton East down Liard and Pape, through the Danforth and ending on Eastern Avenue. Picture that urban social geography, and imagine people banging pots and pans all along the way.

Two solitudes?

     But Montreal has another twist, born of generations of social and national inequality. Half‑way through the town there is an invisible dividing line. On one side the communities speak French, and that's what you hear in the street. On the other side the language is English.

     The student movement, numerically and politically, is much stronger among the Québécois(e). But the students have triumphed over this barrier, to everyone's credit. Perhaps it is the strongest social movement to ever do that in Quebec. 

     The CLASSE student union now releases statements and publications in English. The English‑language universities join the CLASSE in their (weekly!) all‑Quebec national conventions. They have found creative ways to participate in the strike. Before the school session was lost, many departments at McGill and all the undergrads at Concordia had joined the strike for at least some time.

The night demos

     The casseroles are perhaps the most dynamic and colourful expression of this solidarity. To understand the casseroles, you have to place them in the context of the whole campaign of the students, the evolution of the struggle from access to education, to a fight against austerity budgets and now, after Law 78, a battle for democracy.

     You also have to consider the night demos.

     Portrayed as riots on the news outside Quebec, the night demos were born after the first round of negotiations between the students and the Charest Liberals failed. Public anger poured into the streets with spontaneous after‑work protests.

     From 8:00 pm onwards, hundreds and then thousands of people snake around in the downtown streets until early in the morning. Some night demos have been reported by the TV station RDI (Radio Canada's Newsworld) as over 10,000. Their size has dissipated greatly as May rolled into hot June, but they continue. Tonight, June 13th, will mark the 50th action.

Cats and mice

     To frustrate and shut down these demos, literally hundreds if not thousands of police have taken over Montreal's streets in the night. Traffic police, riot police, undercover cops. Sirens scream. A cavalcade of twenty police cars rushing down the streets is a common sight. They commandeer the public transit, despite the protest of drivers and their union. Looking up at a city bus, you might see it filled with storm‑trooper riot cops clad in paramilitary gear.

     Every few nights, around two o'clock in the morning, the riot police will start to charge the demonstration. Pounding their shields, with a helicopter above, they try to split the demo. Then they swoop down. Smashing heads, "kettling," making mass arrests.

     But the public is angry, and they have been coming back. Night after night. When Law 78 was passed, the sustained anger grew. Even progressive jurists marched through the streets in their official gowns.

Hands up!

     The law itself was a provocation. A few nights after it passed, a bonfire was lit on a street corner. Sitting on a patio not far away, we witnessed the police kettle our entire street block. The police were not content with just putting out the fire.

As a punk band played in the background, the riot cops (some in gas masks) stormed our patio and smashed directly into two bars next door. They scooped people for arrest and deployed sound bombs, while pepper spraying us.

     To exit without arrest, we had to leave the chaos of the bar, many people with eyes burning, cross the road and cut through the ground floor of a strip club into a back lane ‑ in single file, our hands up in the air.

The hammer law

     In this context of sustained police riots and violence, and literally thousands of arrests across Quebec, the casseroles began. The corporate media has made much of the fact that the casseroles are a non‑violent action, as if the public was criticising the student tactics. In fact they are a direct act of defiance against Bill 78.

     Bill 78 not only forces students to return to class. This, in itself, is an attack on basic rights: any act of student strike, even symbolic, can be punished with a year's student fees withheld from a student union for just blocking a day of classes, student associations dissolved, teachers and school administrations punished if they do not enforce the rules, with the minister able to increase her power without consulting the Quebec National Assembly. An open door exists in the legislation to expand these rules to the labour movement.

     But Bill 78 also imposes fines in the range of tens of thousands of dollars to forbid the right to assembly and spontaneous protest. Clearly reaching into criminal code and beyond provincial jurisdiction, the law marks perhaps the biggest legal attack on civil liberties in Quebec since the Padlock law and the War Measures Act.

Silence of the lambs?

     This is why the approach of the New Democratic Party has been a kind of betrayal through silence.

     NDP leader Thomas Mulcair, a Minister of the Environment under the Charest Liberals during the 2005 student protests, and almost all of the Quebec NDP MPs, have refused to wear the red square.

     On the edge of Mulcair's riding of Outremont, in Mile End, I start my bike ride. The sky is still sunny, but patches of blue are blocked out by giant storm clouds above the Mont Royal mountain.

     Bang, clang, bang!

     Mile End is not just home to many McGill and Concordia students but also Greek and Portuguese immigrants and the Hasidic Jewish community.

     Sure enough, one of my first sights is a young man in a traditional Hasidic black robe and black cap, banging a pan. This will go down in my memories, along with the image of a nun, standing in her light grey habit just outside the grand doors of a convent, giving a clenched fist salute to a long demo as it paraded past.

     By the time I leave the tree‑lined avenues that skirt Park Mont Royal, the pot-bangers have left their door steps. Little groups of five to ten are clustering on the side of the road. They are young and old, women and men. Their clanging draws you in. I turn onto a bike lane, joined by five other cyclists; one starts to ring her bell. Cheers go up. We zip through an intersection and I see a casserole on each corner. It is almost 8:10.

     We cross St. Denis at Rachel into the French side of town. The plan of the casserole is to bang and clang by your house and then join an assembly of clangers in your neighbourhood after about twenty minutes. Already a large crowd of almost a hundred people is banging away and spilling into the road.

The pots and pans orchestra

     Now skirting Parc la Fontaine, a pots and pans orchestra has erupted. Parents with toddlers in strollers, little boys and girls dancing with wooden spoons. A middle‑aged woman across the street is so enthusiastic that she breaks her spoon and laughs.

     People are on balconies, open windows, even rooftops. If they don't have a pot they bang something else. A drum. A watering can. A mail box. Banging and clanging, and clanging and banging.

     The orchestra has never disappeared once since I kicked‑off. But now it drifts away as I cross the railway tracks and head through a light industrial area. As I turn down into Maisonneuve the casserole returns on the street corners and out of windows. The Olympic stadium tower looms in front of me. Heavy rain clouds are building.

The Greek disease?

     It is not cynical to say that Bill 78 is an election strategy of the Charest Liberal "law and order" government. Smash the summer student demonstrations in the street. Smash their student unions and centers of resistance in September. And call an election for the same month.

     Writing in the Globe and Mail, leader Reform Party leader Preston Manning accused Quebec of having "the Greek disease." His formula? High debt, "necessary" austerity, riots in the street.

     But Quebec's debt was not caused by its social programmes. It was caused by steadily reduced federal funding. It was caused by tax cuts to corporations and the rich, implemented by both Parti Québécois and Liberal provincial governments. It was caused by structural and systemic problems with the capitalist system.

     If you doubt that this is an ideological question, read the report from the bargaining table by the militant student union CLASSE translated on the Rebel Youth blog:

     Mia [a government economist] tries to explain the calculation of cost to the government [associated with tuition increases]. The FEUQ demolishes the arguments of Mia and her numbers ‑ it's nice to watch. It becomes clearer than ever that the government's objective is only to increase the students' fees, because it has been demonstrated that the freeze for at least two years was possible. People become enraged. Michelle [Courchesne, Minister of Education] is so angry that she loses her shoe! She tells us that whatever it would take for a year‑long freeze [of tuition], politically the government cannot, [even though] our argument is logical and it stands.

An ideological struggle

     The bargaining table report details the compromise agreement that the students are willing to put forward: a tuition freeze of two years, increased bursaries, and a major broad public discussion and debate (Estates General) about the future of public education in Quebec.

     The Charest government, however, refused to accept even a one‑year freeze and offered a "poison‑pill" arrangement, where the students and their families pay for their own freeze through the elimination of education tax credits. Ultimately, after over 100 days on strike, the tuition increase would be $1 less. Then the government broke the negotiations.

     The social crisis created by this intransigence has polarized the people. In Quebec City and some of the regions, people are denounced in the street for wearing the red square. But in Montreal the mood is of solidarity and support, as I saw when my bike rolled down Pie IX avenue into Hochelaga.

     Hochelaga is a poorer neighbourhood, working class for generations. There, in the main intersection of Pie IX and Ontario, a pots and pans demonstration of several hundred was marching along the road. It was the end of my trip, but I joined them as we headed up the street, steadily swelling in size.

     Everywhere were children. And I noticed the familiar chants from the night demos had changed ‑ from "La loi matraque! On s'en Tabarnack!" (fuck the hammer law!) and "La loi speciale! On s'en Calice!" (The special law is shit) to "La loi speciale! On s`en Casserole!"

     We weaved through a side road. People were leaning out of their windows in every building to cheer us on. We jammed traffic and the drivers beeped their horns in solidarity while the passengers gave us high fives. The sky darkened. It started to rain. Then it began to pour.

A river in the streets

     We lost the "baby‑block" but the march continued into the black night, back onto the main road. It was a torrential rain, a pounding rain. Young men took off their shirts and little girls danced in the puddles. Then water couldn't drain into the sewers fast enough. We were marching through a river.

     The water poured down so hard I could only just see forward. Suddenly the flashing lights of police cars were up ahead. A black mass appeared before for us ‑ is it the riot cops, come miles out of downtown for us? No, it was another demonstration, joining arms with us from the opposite direction. Almost a thousand people were in the road, in the rain, banging away.

Solidarity is the way

     This kind of unity shows the way forward not just for Quebec, but the rest of Canada too. Increasingly, the progressive movements of Quebec and the rest of Canada are paying attention to each other and talking. For the first time, a CLASSE spokesperson addressed the congress of the Canadian Federation of Students.

     The question of a united pan‑Canadian strategy is coming forward.

     In Quebec, the question is ‑ how do we continue the mobilization? Can we count only on the coming election? The idea of a social and political general strike by labour (and advanced by the Communist Party of Quebec and the Young Communist League) has taken hold in many progressive circles. The strategy is a difficult one for labour, but the experience of Europe shows that the people have no other route than mass struggle. And in this path, we will need to deepen and develop our solidarity across the country.

(The above article is from the June 16-30, 2012, issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $30/year, or $15 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $45 US per year; other overseas readers - $45 US or $50 CDN per year. Send to People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 706 Clark Drive, Vancouver, BC, V5L 3J1.)