Lessons for CLASSE
CONSTRUCTIVE IDEAS offered for making real changes to society
Dear members and supporters of CLASSE, I’ve been critical of your anti-tuition movement for months, but I want to be a constructive critic.
Your organization is about to send its members proselytizing across Quebec, trying to spread the ideas in CLASSE’s manifesto. Published this week, your manifesto goes beyond the tuition issue. It wants, among other things, a Quebec that won’t allow environmentally risky shale-gas development, that prevents the Plan Nord’s mining interests from mistreating native people and that won’t privatize public services. A lot of people who oppose your stance against tuition increases would agree with these ideas.
But your problem is this: You have no realistic plan for getting from A to B – for getting from the present to the better future.
To be sure, your outreach offensive will also preach against some Quebec Liberal Party candidates in the next election in the hope of ousting the Charest government. But the manifesto tacitly acknowledges that bringing down the government would not bring necessary change to Quebec: “Elections every four years serve too often only to change the faces (of politicians). Election after election, decisions remain the same and serve the same interests, favouring the soft murmurs of lobbyists over the clamour (of ordinary citizens).”
You’re suggesting, in other words, that while the election of the Parti Québécois might bring some relief on the tuition issue, it would not reform the political system itself. That’s a reasonable assumption.
Yet you have no realistic strategy for how to make government more responsive to the popular will. True, your manifesto concludes by calling for a “social strike” (in which people in many occupations would presumably demonstrate in the street instead of going to work). But such turbulence would just sow discord, stigmatize Quebec in the eyes of investors and add to Quebec’s economic/fiscal problems.
Indeed, it might well oblige the Quebec government to go down on its knees before those lobbyists whom you denounce: To attract investments, the government might, for example, have to devise lax shale-gas rules, tailor the Plan Nord to corporate desires or loosen its labour laws. Some strategy. Please, be serious. You need to try changing Quebec’s political culture itself. How?
Don’t take it from me, take it from Jacques Duchesneau – the guy who has explored that culture’s underbelly in greater depth than anyone. His conclusion: The financing of political parties by business interests largely accounts for the “clandestine universe” in which corporate and organizedcrime exercise influence over the state. This financing is what gives that “soft murmur” its clout.
But how do you change this entrenched system?
Curiously enough, the U.S. is showing the way. The U.S. might be notorious for the PACs, Super PACs and other grotesqueries that deluge federal politics with special interests’ money, but a hy- gienic way of financing politicians is gradually spreading among states and municipalities. (tinyurl. com/75cj3e5)
Maine, Connecticut, New Jersey, Arizona and Albuquerque are among the jurisdictions that give candidates the option (not the obligation) of replacing private donations with public subsidies. Typically, if candidates get signatures and token $5 or $10 cheques from several thousand citizens to show they are serious contenders for office, and if they accept no more private money after that, they can receive enough public money to run decent campaigns.
Taxpayers can save a lot of money in the long run since winning candidates won’t feel pressure to shower their corporate sugardaddies with inflated public contracts.
New York State’s liberal Democrat governor, Andrew Cuomo (of whom we’ll hear a lot if, as expected, he runs for president in 2016), said Monday he’ll work this fall to raise public awareness of the virtues of this concept so as to oblige a balky state legislature to adopt it. (tinyurl.com/736up2o)
Unfortunately, no politicians are doing such educational work in Quebec. We’re in the boondocks of electoral reform. Reforms that the Parti Québécois and Québec Solidaire propose are relatively modest.
Here’s where CLASSE could come in. If your missionaries want to change a political culture that is a vassal to corporate interests, you’d do well to rethink how to go about it.
The idea of a social strike is a pseudo-solution. The only real solution is elections that are fair and unpolluted.