01) QUEBEC'S SUMMER OF STUDENT DISCONTENT

By Johan Boyden, Montreal

     School is out of session. Young people are in summer jobs, or searching for employment, as the youth jobless rate in Québec is still one of the highest in Canada. So the English-language corporate media has a new line about what they've mislabelled the student "boycott." The spoilt brats have surrendered. The resistance is melting away.

     Anyone who believes that line was in for a rude awakening on June 22. That's when another major demonstration rocked the streets in Montreal, a rumbling, noisy human river running through the downtown. At the same time, the largest mobilization Québec City has seen during this five‑month struggle swept through the streets of the historic capital.

     Estimates placed the Montreal protest at over 30,000 people. Organizers in the la CLASSE student union strike coalition suggested the "manif" was even larger. As temperatures reached 30 degrees, street repair workers cheered the protestors, misting them in cool fresh water. The Québec City manif stretched over four kilometers from the National Assembly.

     Such numbers were no small achievement on the Friday before the St. John Baptiste Day long weekend, the national holiday of Québec. Imagine planning two mass simultaneous demonstrations on the eve of Canada Day!

Québec City struggle

     The manif in Québec City was particularly important because of a new restrictive bylaw, echoing law 78. Laval students and community groups denounced this municipal regulation and organized a protest at City Council chambers. In video broadcast by news network RDI, the Mayor's chief in staff shoves a protestor. The young man angrily storms out, bumping into a city councillor on his way. The police charged him with assault.

     Later police arrested 20 more demonstrators outside city hall.

The bylaw not only requires people to inform police of the place, time and route of any demonstration, but also forbids the presence of a crowd on public property between 11 pm and 5 am.

     La CLASSE, correctly in the view of many left and progressive groups including the Communist Party of Québec (PCQ) and the Young Communist League (LJC), is openly defying these measures and their pioneer, the repressive Law 78. The militant student union central has refused to bend under this anti‑democratic law. In August, students will return to campuses where all strike action ‑ even symbolic, like a poster ‑ is subject to fines as high as hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Labour's activists support students

     Resisting Law 78 also means refusing to submit protest routes to the police. In this sense, the June 22 demonstrations were another mass outpouring of civil disobedience. Judging from the labour flags in the Montreal protest, this view is held by more than a few trade unionists. Sadly, most of the top labour leadership refused to promote the two demos because of their brazen defiance of Law 78.

     When the Québec Federation of University Students (FEUQ) called on the government to "stop making [anti‑student] TV commercials and agree to meet with students and a mediator," the president of the Québec Federation of Labour (QFL) Michel Arsenault quickly added "it is in the interest of all students, their parents and the general population to now find common ground before the conflict resumes with even greater intensity at the end of the summer."

     In a leaked letter to Canadian Labour Congress president Ken Georgetti, Arsenault was even more direct. The "radical wings are calling for a social strike and we do not believe this is THE [sic] strategy to be promoted for the moment," he wrote in a message forwarded to affiliates by the CLC.

     These QFL/CLC letters are attempting to stop financial and political support for la CLASSE outside of Québec. The letters show how two strategies ‑ broad popular mobilization and a class struggle approach, vs. a narrow electoralist and nationalist route (ie. voting for the Parti Québécois) ‑ have come into sharp relief.

     It also shows the growing support for a general strike among labour activists. Québec's other major trade union central, the CSN, is now considering calling an Estates General ‑ a mass all‑Labour conference ‑ to debate the tactic of a general social and political strike.

Legal battle begins

     The student unions have also launched a legal challenge against Bill 78, supported by seventy labour, social, environmental and community organizations. Their first motion in the court was to "request a stay of execution" meaning until certain provisions of the law are studied in detail, it would not be enforced.

     The students' lawyer also argued that the government considers student organizations and their leaders to be like trade unions, attributing to them the same responsibilities toward their members, while denying them the same rights ‑ i.e. the right to strike.

     The law continues to be explosive politically. Even an elected member of the far‑right CAQ party quit its ranks in protest of the CAQ's aggressive support of the law. On the streets, reports are that police are only occasionally charging protestors under law 78. But the police are acting as if they are enforcing a political mandate. Just consider these reports.

     In early June, Mathieu Girard had the heart‑wrenching experience of discovering his sister's body, after she committed suicide. Girard's mother had heard rumours just a week before that the police wanted her son - a well‑known activist at his school -  for allegedly releasing a smoke "bomb" in the subway. She even phoned the station, but nothing came of it.

     Instead, Québec police swooped down on 19 year‑old Girard with his mother and brother on Highway 20, en route to his sister's funeral in Chicoutimi. Letting the others proceed to the funeral, they dragged Mathieu back to Montreal and charged him with mischief.

     This kind of "psychological warfare" is accompanied by direct violence. Online broadcasters like Concordia TV have repeatedly captured police brazenly hurting students. One You Tube with over 200,000 hits shows a Montreal cop firing a rubber bullet at a protester and shouting: "There! Right in the ass, y'little shit."

     A pacifist philosophy professor responded to this violence by joining the protests dressed in a giant panda suit. Now he has also been charged ‑ for wearing a mask, an illegal act according to a new Montreal bylaw. "The panda costume allows me to do things that I couldn't do otherwise, like hug police officers, for example," the professor told reports, saying the costume helped calm tense situations.

Preventative solidarity?

     During the Grand Prix, there were also reports of 14-year-old children arrested and held for hours without their parents being told, and young people insulted, manhandled, handcuffed and kept in the sun for hours just for wearing the red square. One young woman was photographed, detained and finally arrested for reading George Orwell's 1984 on the subway.

     This is known as "preventative arrest" when no criminal act has been committed or no breach of peace is imminent. "What we are witnessing is the replay of the same police techniques [during the 2010 G20 meeting in Toronto]," the Canadian Civil Liberties Association said in a statement. "This conduct is excessive and illegal."

     The Inter‑American Court of Human Rights and Navi Pillay, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, have also taken up the issue. At the opening of a Special Session of the Human Rights Council in Geneva in June, Pillay said she was "disappointed by the new legislation passed in Québec that restricts their rights to freedom of association and of peaceful assembly."

     Meanwhile, the NDP's continued silence keeps getting louder. On June 20, the Harper government moved that "This House recognizes the duly elected National Assembly of Québec's right to pass legislation, such as Bill 78, within its areas of jurisdiction and in conformity with both the Canadian and Québec Charter of rights and freedoms."

     To proceed, the Tories needed unanimous consent ‑ which some Bloc Québecois MPs and Elizabeth May from the Green Party denied. Did the NDP speak up? Yes, said at least one NDP back‑bencher's twitter ‑ but that was rapidly corrected or, rather, muzzled. Then CBC's Kady O'Malley quoted a high‑ranking NDP MP saying his party helped to write the motion!

     But sneakily using the national question as a pretext to trump solidarity between working people is a distortion of the principle of equality of nations and internationalism.

Red square alert

     In Québec, supporting the red square seems to continually get people in trouble. When Fred Pellerin ‑ an internationally known storyteller, poet and songwriter ‑ was awarded the Order of Québec he politely turned it down.

     While "touched, to say the least," he said in an open letter, "They were going to pin a bit of brilliance to my jacket, in the name of the Québec people. My people. But [...] I could not forgive myself if I were to celebrate and toast the honour of this people in the present context, while the very foundations of our democracy are being shaken."

     Minister of Culture Christine St‑Pierre replied that by wearing the red square Pellerin was associating himself with "intimidation [and] violence." Within days, over 2000 key players in Québec's cultural milieu demanded a public apology from the Minister.

     On the other side of the National Assembly, the opposition PQ have been emboldened after winning the Liberal stronghold of Argenteuil for the first time since the riding's creation in 1962. In the polls, they are in a tight race with the Liberals.

     But when surveys ask about Charest's ability to establish peace and order, his rating goes up to 50%. "Having lost any moral authority, Charest has fuelled the student conflict so he can step in and be the saviour of social peace," one commentator said recently.

     For student leaders this suspicion was confirmed when the Québec Liberals' electoral strategy became public.

     "In light of recent Liberal documents that have surfaced, it would appear that the Premier's strategy was to maintain tensions and encourage the spread of chaos all along" a statement by the FEUQ said. Charest "never wanted to resolve the crisis, but only to divide and conquer, at any cost."

     The accusations weren't dispelled by the revelation that the Liberals are trying to block a Québec Elections proposal to set up voting stations on campuses.

     A ticking time‑bomb also exists for the Liberals with the Charbonneau Commission on corruption. But after hearing damning testimony of government links with organized crime, the Commission has recessed for the summer.

Liberate us from the 1%

     In response to the Liberal's "Teflon" resilience, some progressive nationalist voices have proposed an alliance of the PQ with a smaller nationalist break‑away party Option Nationale, and Québec Solidaire (QS). That strategy has been turned down by QS.

     "The student and social crisis that we've now been living for several months is an eloquent example of the ambiguities and contradictions in which the Parti Québécois is enclosed", QS spokespeople Amir Khadir and Francois David wrote in reply, noting the PQ's ambiguous and inconsistent stance towards the students and neo‑liberalism in general.

     In fact, Pauline Marois, leader of the PQ, took the occasion of the June 24 Fete nationale holiday to remove her red square and call for unity and harmony of Québec society.

     "The meaning of this political awakening and of this ongoing social metamorphosis resides, in our opinion, in the massive rejection of a system controlled by a minority that does not stop getting richer on the backs of the 99%" the leaders of QS wrote, adding that their party "is also convinced that only a social project can henceforth carry the national project" [and] "political propositions must be in synch with the progressive social movements."

     The letter is a welcome sign from a party that has increasingly seemed to put the question of independence before class struggle.

     La Presse writer Patrick Lagace goes further, saying that "The tectonic plates of Québec society are shifting. Since the sixties, the dividing line was always that sovereigntist‑federalist axis [...] This spring, a new dividing line is under construction, right under our eyes. The Canada‑ Québec axis is being erased, a new one, a left‑right axis, is taking its place."

A sense of optimism

     What's shaping up is clearly "a student strike, a people's struggle". As writer Rick Salutin has noted, "any argument you can make against accessible post‑secondary schooling, would apply in exactly the same way to high schools and elementary." In other words, access to education is a class demand.

     "In fact, during the last Depression, when high school still wasn't widely available," Salutin adds, "there were the same arguments you hear now about how we couldn't afford it."

     What the government can clearly afford is fighting the students. By then end of May the Charest government had spent over $800,000 to promote its position on tuition fees. Then there are the additional police costs. Figures compiled by the FEUQ place the cost of the strike at $104,000 per hour, which includes teacher pay, the costs of demonstrations to the city of Montreal, and additional expenditures on policing. These costs far outweigh the revenue generated by the tuition increase.

     Meanwhile, the first student who won an injunction to break the strike in his department and force his fellow students back to school has quit his class, ironically saying that he needs to spend more time working and saving up... for school.

     For their part, the student federations have announced their summer mobilizations will aim to turn the "malaise of Québeckers" against the Liberals in key ridings and summer festivals. The CLASSE has called a series of conferences across Québec starting July 18 to discuss the way forward, and win students to continuing the strike in August.

     So as summer heat's up, it's not the progressive students who seem to be tiring.

     As la CLASSE spokesperson Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois wrote recently, "Against all expectations, Québec's youth ‑ hundreds of thousands of us ‑ have accepted an historic challenge: defending social justice. It's hard not to be optimistic."

(The above article is from the July 1-31, 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.)