The surprise resignation Monday of Line Beauchamp, Premier Jean Charest’s lead minister on the file, fits that haphazard pattern.
Over the course of three rancorous months, Charest and his ex-education minister have proven unable to talk the province’s way out of a messy confrontation with the students over a planned increase in tuition fees.
Every move of the government has either misfired or backfired. From one resolution attempt to the next, it has become harder to follow the thread of its thinking.
When the government has not been coddling the students leaders, it has been demonizing them.
At times, it has seemed as if the left hand of the government was undoing the work of the right hand. In this spirit, the ink was barely dry on a negotiated settlement attempt two weeks ago before the premier and his minister set out to belittle its content.
Some of the concessions made by the government already defeat its initial purpose.
Under its latest offer, more funds would go into university coffers through higher tuition bills as intended but only to be taken out again — at least in part — through the reduction or the elimination of fees for a host of education-related services.
Every penny of spending would be scrutinized by a committee made up — in significant part — of student and union representatives.
That barely disguised capitulation failed to resolve the impasse and on Monday Beauchamp suggested that her government was faced with intractable student leaders who would accept nothing short of running the university system themselves.
Meanwhile, the social climate continues to deteriorate.
In a Radio-Canada interview last week, Beauchamp said part of her predicament stemmed from a failure to anticipate the impact of the social media on the dynamics of the stand-off.
That’s a bit of a bogus argument.
There is no doubt that throughout this episode, the former minister and her colleagues have been missing in action in the social media. By comparison, the Montreal police force is decades ahead of the Quebec government.
But in the end, the government vacuum on Twitter and Facebook and other social media forums has only been a reflection of a larger communications black hole.
When it has not been sending mixed and often faceless messages about the standoff, the Charest government has largely been content to present Quebecers with an empty frame. That was never more true than on Monday.
The government has even relinquished the basic task of providing the public with a clear picture of the disruption to its student opponents.
To look up the website of the Quebec ministry of education these days is to go on a virtual visit to a different political galaxy, where business as usual in the institutions of higher learning is the rule, not the exception.
To find an updated list of the colleges and universities at play in the conflict, one is best advised to look up the website of the student associations. And that is only one of the many ways in which the student leaders have ended looking like they and not the government are in charge of the process.
One has to go back to 22 years to find a Quebec crisis as mismanaged as this one. The 1990 Oka standoff that saw a major Montreal bridge blockaded by armed Mohawk activists started off as a local dispute over land use. It festered for the better part of a summer before the army was called in to restore some order to the community.
That crisis accelerated the demise of the then-Liberal government, not because it was on the wrong side of public opinion but because its clumsy handling exposed a fatigued regime suffering from a beyond-repair case of wear and tear. History is repeating itself.
Original Article
Source: Star
Author: Chantal Hébert
No comments:
Post a Comment