Democracy Gone Astray

Democracy, being a human construct, needs to be thought of as directionality rather than an object. As such, to understand it requires not so much a description of existing structures and/or other related phenomena but a declaration of intentionality.
This blog aims at creating labeled lists of published infringements of such intentionality, of points in time where democracy strays from its intended directionality. In addition to outright infringements, this blog also collects important contemporary information and/or discussions that impact our socio-political landscape.

All the posts here were published in the electronic media – main-stream as well as fringe, and maintain links to the original texts.

[NOTE: Due to changes I haven't caught on time in the blogging software, all of the 'Original Article' links were nullified between September 11, 2012 and December 11, 2012. My apologies.]

Saturday, May 26, 2012

Protest, politics and democracy alive and well in Quebec

MONTREAL—Two young girls stroll along the sidewalk as the clock strikes eight. They each have a pot in one hand, a wooden spoon in the other and they beat them together as if it were the most normal thing in the world.

The sharp clanging noise of their protest takes to the air and spreads down the street. Others answer the call with their own kitchen tools. A man passes on his bicycle, his pot of defiance fastened to the handlebars. At a nearby street corner, another adds to the cacophony with a drum.

Before long, old women are hanging off their balconies and out their windows in support of an uprising that began in February with students against higher tuition fees. Three months on, tens of thousands take to the streets for marathon marches, all the while calling for an end to Quebec Premier Jean Charest’s Liberal government.

“It’s time for Charest to disappear,” says 73-year-old Marc Belanger, a father of four who says he has transformed from observer to activist. “He’s the source of the problem. He has no more moral authority to govern Quebec.”

The list of grievances grows daily. An emergency law passed May 18 to postpone the school year and restrict the student demonstrations has enraged some who were initially unmoved by the students’ plight. There are corruption allegations that threaten to scorch Charest’s Liberals when a public inquiry begins next month. Others object to a government plan to exploit natural resources in northern Quebec, known as Plan Nord.

Taken together it is a political and social unravelling not seen since Ottawa imposed the War Measures Act in October 1970. Fitting then, that as demonstrators this week celebrated their 100th consecutive protest, police swooped in to handcuff 518 people, pushing the total number arrested past the number jailed when the militant Front de libération du Québec waged their campaign of terror 42 years ago.

This revolt is led by an eclectic trio.

Martine Desjardins’ mother insists she avoided confrontation as a child, but the 30-year-old head of Quebec’s university student group is now synonymous with standoff.

Baby-faced Léo Bureau-Blouin, a whip-smart 20-year-old, leads the college student group. As the story goes, he dropped in on a student debate last fall about the tuition fee hikes, was assigned to argue with the pro-hike group and ended up convincing judges that costs should increase.

So used to seeing them, Quebecers were seized Thursday afternoon with critiques of Bureau-Blouin’s spiffy haircut as he appeared on television to talk about a new round of negotiations planned with Quebec Education Minister Michelle Courchesne.

Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, who was raised by activist parents, is the superstar face of a group known universally now by its acronym, CLASSE. As the double entendre suggests, it represents a large swath of students and it veers toward the left flank of the political spectrum.

More militant, it is also officially leaderless, making CLASSE the unwieldy wildcard in the showdown. When a tentative deal was struck earlier this month to spread tuition increases over seven years rather than five, it was quickly rejected in a vote. And when the emergency law passed through the National Assembly a week ago, Nadeau-Dubois urged civil disobedience rather than submission to an unjust law.

Lawyers for student federations and other groups appeared in a Montreal courtroom on Friday to file legal motions against Bill 78, which lays out strict regulations governing demonstrations. The student groups, labour federations and a wide range of other organizations claim the law is unconstitutional and a violation of basic rights.

The new law has put the police in a difficult spot (which is not to say that the cops are attracting sympathy). Because student organizers are refusing to provide the legally required eight-hour notice of their nightly marches, they are declared “illegal” almost from the outset.

The farce is that while there could be stiff fines and other consequences for this under the new law, they haven’t materialized. If the police apply the law, they risk being seen as provocateurs and a legitimate target of the protesters’ wrath.

“The police are starting to lose their title as protector of the people,” says Diane Bouchard, 59, from the steps of her apartment as protesters file past.

It is unfortunate, she says, acknowledging that the cops are simply a tool of the government, which in her opinion has made a “grave error.”

“Hard lines in Quebec don’t work. We’re not in Alberta.”

In Outremont, a panel of former Quebec politicians has convened for a public discussion on the future of politics in the province. It is a meandering but perfectly timed talk at an old art deco theatre amid a strip of trendy restaurants and boutiques. The clear consensus is that Quebecers are living through a time of turmoil. The student uprising is just one example.

People are disgusted by repeated scandals and abuses. They are disheartened by politicians who can’t read the mood of the people they represent. But people are also more engaged by specific issues of policy. They are at once cynical, yet they care deeply.

The old debate about Quebec remaining in Canada or separating has slipped off the radar, says Joseph Facal, a former Parti Québécois minister, but the province’s politics have not kept pace. Politicians find themselves ill-prepared for the other simmering issues like boosting a foundering economy and sustaining a social system made up of cheap daycares, cheap schooling and cheap health care.

In the standoff with students, the government tried to ignore the protests, hoping that time would calm the furies, former Action démocratique du Québec MNA Marie Grégoire tells the audience. It obviously has not worked.

Next the government tried a hard-line position in the name of a majority of students who wanted to attend classes and the adults, entrepreneurs, motorists and tourists. The result was Bill 78, a law to pause and resume the school year in August and control the actions of protesters.

Now, the young are joined in the streets by the old, workers flank the students, and parents bring their children to the demonstrations.

“When we don’t use our democracy, we lose it,” says protester Regis Guyonnet, 40. “Now we’re using it.”

Charest, a crafty politician, must now decide how to solve a crisis that has eaten away at his already low approval numbers while trying to hang on to government, all without being seen as having been routed by the popular uprising.

“Part of the crisis will be decided at the negotiating table,” Grégoire says. “The other part won’t be decided until there is an election.”

Among the first signs of a fresh government approach is the appointment of a new chief of staff to the premier this week, reportedly with the double mandate of solving the tuition fee impasse and plotting strategy for the next election. The two agendas are now intimately linked, as all of Quebec’s political parties already know.

Parti Québécois Leader Pauline Marois wears the protesters’ ubiquitous red felt square on her suit jackets in the legislature. She wants both a moratorium on tuition fee hikes and Charest’s resignation.

François Legault, leader of the newly formed Coalition Avenir Québec, supports raising tuition fees, objects to aspects of the emergency law that his party voted for just last week. He is also demanding an election for the fall.

Amir Khadir, the only elected member of the left-wing sovereigntist party Québec Solidaire, advocates free post-secondary education and nothing less than Charest’s complete capitulation.

No surprise, then, to see Khadir mobbed as two reporters questioned him amid the clanging and cheering and chanting of Thursday night’s march.

“The government has to accept that it has been defeated,” he says. “They have to accept that there is a defeat. They have to accept the will of the people.”

Determining exactly what the people of Quebec want is a complicated thing to do. Many of those in the streets don’t have an easy answer themselves.

Jean-Philippe Perras, a 25-year-old student at Montreal’s National Theatre School, a private institution, says that while the tuition fee debate does not affect him, the student protesters “illuminated something” inside of him, which he described as a desire to be part of a movement.

“It has become some kind of happening,” Gilbert Rozon, founder of the Just for Laughs summer festival, says dismissively.

Among Quebec’s most well-known and valued entrepreneurs, Rozon fell afoul of what he calls the vocal minority that have taken over the streets when he pronounced himself in favour of both the tuition fee increases and the emergency law placing restrictions on the rights of the protesters. There have been insults and calls for a boycott of the comedy festival, which runs from late June through the summer.

It has also made for uncomfortable conversations around the family dinner table. One of his three sons is on the side of the students.

Rozon says the students were raised in an era of privilege and plenty, but that era has now passed.

“Telling them that they have to pay their fair share — that’s quite a wake up call for them,” he says. “I supposed for 60,000, 70,000 people who gathered in the streets this week, probably it’s a huge wake up call.”

Whether the students are right, or whether they are spoiled does not really matter when calculating how to end the crisis. For an ultimate solution, the government must arrive at a resolution that everyone — most importantly, the students — supports.

“You need to have, more or less, the consent of everyone so that, practically speaking, my students come back to class. That’s what makes it difficult,” says Pierre Martin, a political science professor at Université de Montréal.

“Because of the time that it took and the accumulation of new issues that have been part of that debate, it’s increasingly difficult to get to that final point without the key here: an election.”

Original Article
Source: the star
Author: Allan Woods

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