This is the best article I have read not only on the issues in Quebec – but also their profund relationship to what is occurring now around the globe. In my opinion, it is a MUST READ. ~J
by Anthony Hall
Veterans Todayrevised
Le Printemps érable in Quebec has become the most recent extension of the movement that started with the Arab Spring and then moved to Spain where the Indignados helped prepare the way for Occupy Wall Street. The long history of French-speaking resistance to to the English-speaking domination of North America has infused verve into the genesis of this spirited and well organized protest. The Maple Spring in Quebec is peopled by activists who refuse to accept the stale orthodoxies of a failed system of political economy that has run contrary to the public interest for more than a generation.
Guillaume Nadeau-Dubois is emerging as the activist rock star of le Printemps érable. The term translates roughly as the Maple Spring or the Maple Syrup Spring. This play on words helps to invoke some of the same regenerative energy that was called forth when the sweet sap of self-empowerment began to flow in the early stirrings of the Arab Spring.
Guillaume Nadeau-Dubois: CLASSE Leader. “We must go beyond the general strike if we want to disprove those who say that our movement will falter. We will have to collectively go beyond our streets. We will have to disrupt. We will have to occupy. We will have to shake Québec. Today, hundreds of people bravely blocked the access to the Port of Montreal, because… Why did they do that? Because this government has only one language: money. And if we want to win, THAT is the language we must speak to them.
Nadeau-Dubois heads up CLASSE, the Coalition large de l’association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante. CLASSE is concurrently the most militant and outward-looking of the three student unions who began a strike last winter in opposition to the proposed 75 % tuition hike to be imposed on Quebec students by the government of Premier Jean James Charest.
Many in English-speaking Canada were quick to point out that Quebec has the lowest tuition fees of any Canadian province. In Quebec, however, the inclination has been to look at the forty or so countries including Egypt, Poland, China, Turkey and Brazil where students pay no tuition at all in state-run institutions. The prospect of raising new financial hurdles to entry into post-secondary education arguably cuts against the spirit and intent of Article 26(1) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. That provision stipulates that “higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.”
From Occupy to Student Strike to Leadership in the Global Confederacy of Resistance to Corporatism, Kleptocracy, and War Mongering
What started as a student strike is fast evolving into something far greater than the sum of its instigating parts. Debates about the purpose and funding of higher education lead almost inevitably to the posing of larger questions. Ultimately it is the very direction and purpose of public government that is at issue. The activists of le Printemps érable are challenging the Reaganesque policies of hyper privatization, business deregulation and anti-union outsourcing that have been government orthodoxy for over a generation. The transformation by many governments of higher education from a subsidized public good into a commercial product to be marketed to consumers is part of a larger complex of neoliberal ideas and actions that is generating massive resistance throughout the world.
In the final analysis the surge of indigenous support for the Quebec students’ strike is yet one more push back against the exploitation of the 99% by the 1%. Le Printemps érable adds to the momentum of a growing global movement to turn the ship of corporation, state, and citizenship away from the course steered by Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Milton Friedman when they popularized and applied Friedrich Hayak’s attack on Keynesian conceptions of political economy.
At its best the economic strategy mapped out by John Maynard Keynes pictured health, education, culture, and social security as common goods to be nurtured and subsidized by engaged governments responding in the public interest to engaged citizens. The continuing reverence of government operatives for the anti-Keynesian thrust of Reaganesque policies has become an absurdity in light of the socialism for rich people formalized with the great bailout giveaway of 2008-2009. Where’s our bailout? the dispossessed have been asking with growing insistence. The sudden deep freeze of inert credit and debt markets in 2008 because of the speculative excesses of the deregulated financial services industry triggered the biggest upward transfer of capital to the rich in all of recorded history.
Hence the push to institute government austerity in Quebec and throughout the world flows from the transfer of trillions from present and future taxpayers to the small kleptocractic elite that presently dominate the world’s political economy through the marshalling of mushrooming public debt, unbridled militarism, unrestrained psychological warfare, and the top-down manipulation of captive puppet governments. As CLASSE outlined in a call to action, “While the gifts to the banks and the giant corporations multiply, the poorest members of society and the middle class are given the bill for an economic crisis for which the responsible parties are given a free pass.”[i]
From the Arab Spring, to the emergence of the Indignados in Spain, to the defense of trade unionism in Madison Wisconsin, to the massive Occupy Wall Street phenomenon, and now to le Printemps érable in Quebec, the injustices being addressed are alternatively specific and general, concurrently local, regional, and worldwide. Throughout the planet oppressed groups and individuals are reaching out to one another with the realization that the incursions of the 1% who have benefited most from corporatist globalization must be met with transnational confederacies of resistance. The inroads of imperial globalization must continue to engender tactics of anti-imperial globalization that began in 1492 with resistance of Indigenous peoples to imperial assaults starting with those of Spain and extending to those of France, the Netherlands, Great Britain, the United States and, most recently, Israel.
Resisting Debt Enslavement in the 21st Century
Our emancipation proclamations have not been applied in ways that are consistent, durable and capable of being maintained as corporatist globalization accelerates the rush to the bottom in terms of wages, benefits, and protections for organized labour. The debt slavery of indentured servants is being refurbished, including through the subordination of young people to the banking regimes that lend them money in order to advance through the increasingly privatized systems of education all around the world.
It is becoming increasingly clear that a primary aim of many of those who have inherited the largest concentrations of capital from human bondage and from colonialism is to continue to push, but by altered means, for the virtual enslavement of the largest part of the human family. The repressions of an increasingly globalized police state are becoming the modus operandi of an empire of private property that treats humans as chattels to be controlled through the systematic deployment of compounding debt, state terror, and unrelenting propaganda.
Premier Jean James Charest, who at age 28 was Brian Mulroney’s Minister of Youth, has renewed a painful history of legacy emergency measures enactments in Quebec with Bill 78
The Corrupt Government of Jean Charest Resorts to a Police State Bludgeon Law
On March 19 Premier Charest pushed Bill 78, sometimes known as the Bludgeon Law, through Quebec’s National Assembly to formalize his government’s growing police-state personality. The legislation was designed effectively to render the strike illegal while placing draconian prohibitions on freedom of assembly. Charest’s attempt to outlaw the wearing of masks presented a signal to make masks even more central to the protest’s iconography.
All and all this legislative push is to preempt the political nature of the struggle by pushing the acrimony into the courts where the state maintains the upper hand. Part of the strategy is to impose massive financial penalties for those who fail to adhere to laws that advance the state’s attack on basic civil liberties. The battle lines have been clearly drawn and the fate of the Maple Spring in Quebec is being made a test case with important international ramifications.
Negotiation, Litigation, or Confrontation?
While the pressure of the massive street protests forced the government back into negotiations with the leaders of the three students unions, Guillaume Nadeau-Dubois has been adamant that the contents of Bill 78 itself belong on the negotiating table. Opposition to Bill 78 has widened the domestic base and the international opposition to the police state machinations of the Charest government.
Bill 78 outlaws picketing in front of institutions of higher education. It suspends the normal operations of some educational institutions until August. The statute empowers the police to give or withhold permission to assemble and demonstrate. The latitude allowed for permissible demonstrations is very tightly defined. The enactment’s blanket prohibition on the wearing of masks has rightfully been treated as a particularly offensive violation of free expression.
Taking it to the Streets
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Related articles
- Quebec Liberals on the spot as students submit proposal to end strike (news.nationalpost.com)
- Talks over Quebec student demonstrations collapse (heraldonline.com)
- Talks drag on in bid to end Quebec tuition dispute (theglobeandmail.com)
6/01/2012
Quebecers Lead the Way in the Global Rejection of Voodoo Reaganomics
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