01) MASS PROTESTS RENEWED IN QUEBEC
PV Montreal Bureau
Labour, student and social movements are trying to shake the earth again across Quebec, as mass protests have hit the streets rejecting the new Couillard Liberal provincial austerity agenda.
Tens of thousands of people came together on Halloween in many cities and towns. The largest demonstration was in Montreal with between 40,000 and 50,000 protesters. Dressed in colourful costumes, large numbers of students filled the streets. Students have often been in the front lines of the movement and a total of 82,000 students also walked out of classes on a one‑day strike.
The day of action was the latest in a series of mobilizations that began this summer, after the provincial election, and was the largest popular mobilization in Quebec since the student protest of 2012. Demonstrations have continued in dozens of cities into November, with a mass rally of over 10,000 workers and parents opposing rate increases for day care the following weekend in Montreal.
"The government justifies its fiscal policy by citing the interests of future generations but now it is destroying the social safety net from which these generations could benefit," said Veronique Laflamme, co‑spokesperson for the Coalition Main Rouge (the "Red Hand" coalition) which called the Halloween action.
The Coalition has been organizing broad opposition to a series of significant cutbacks, privatizations, and other attacks on workers at the provincial and municipal level. The three main trade union centrals ‑ including over 100 firefighters ‑ all participated on October 31st.
The Red Hand Coalition includes over 80 labour, student and community organizations. It together some years before the Quebec Spring of 2012, and helped link that fight for access to education with the Charest‑Liberal austerity agenda.
Public sector unions in Quebec have also agreed to form a new Common Front for the 2015 negotiations. In the past, this united tactic of labour has been at the core major social mobilizations. And, since the late summer, a coalition of municipal labour groups has formed to demand free collective bargaining about their pensions, instead of the unilateral theft of pension funds the Liberals are imposing through Bill 3.
But Bill 3 is just one of several pieces to the austerity agenda imposed by the Couillard Liberals.
Quebec's universal rate of $7.35 per day child care ‑ by far the most affordable in Canada ‑ will be replaced by an income‑based price model. While the rate increase is said to touch less than half of the province's families who are the wealthiest, critics say there is no need to create a two‑tier system. Nor do they believe the government promise that it won't quickly re‑adjust the user‑pay levels to affect everyone, now that this fee has been introduced.
Quebec's daycare programme is well‑known for increasing women's participation in the workforce (to the point that these new women workers pay sufficient increased tax revenue to fully fund the programme) as well as benefiting poor children, and helping single parents especially.
"Today the increase affects families earning $75,000 a year, but who will it effect next year?" Francoise David, spokesperson for the left party Québec Solidaire, said in a release. The cuts also will also layoff daycare workers, eliminate proposed funding and reduce access to new spaces in the future.
In many ways the cuts will particularly hit women who both predominate as workers in the service sectors, and will be especially hurt by changes in family social programmes, increasing inequality.
Adding up to $3.2 billion, the cuts have also attacked health care, the community clinics (CLSC system), as well as other public services and social programmes, and will privatize Quebec's public liquor stores. This is all being done under the Liberal's mantra of "Zero Deficit."
Behind the slogan, what is becoming clear is the Couillard Liberal's agenda: destruction of the principle of universality in the Quebec social welfare system.
Speaking to People's Voice, Pierre Fontaine, leader of the Parti Communiste du Quebec, said that the Liberal attack has serious implications not just for Quebec, but the whole of Canada. "The Red Hand coalition is calling for a different direction, at the centre of which is progressive taxation ‑ and especially increasing corporate taxes ‑ and have long made similar proposals."
More action is planned for the winter, and the students have launched the site Printemps2015.org. Labour is planning continued work‑place actions and disruptions into December. Clarté, the newspaper of the Parti Communiste du Quebec, will cover these actions in a new winter issue exposing the class danger of the attack on universality.
"A key question is how the trade union movement will respond, and in our view their initial steps are very much the right direction ‑ there needs to be much more mobilization and united action," Fontaine said. "There is no doubt that austerity, as the protesters said on Oct 31st, is truly a horror story ‑ a social emergency."
At the end of the Oct 31st rally, protesters chanted outside the private Club sélect 357c, which has been exposed as the base for an old‑boys network linking major provincial and civic politicians with big investors and the Mafia ‑ and benefiting from P3 privatization. While the protest route was published in newspapers, the demonstration was declared illegal by the police: the organizers, refusing to respect the P6 bylaw, did not report this information directly to the police. But no dispersal was ordered, the police simply followed the river of protestors in the streets and did nothing more.
(The above article is from the November 16-30, 2014, issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading socialist 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.)