QUEBEC PROTESTS
Anti-austerity student movement in disarray.
There are pickets blocking campus entranceways and masked agitators disrupting classes. Marches through Montreal streets still yield the occasional clash with police.
But for anyone nostalgic for Quebec’s so-called Maple Spring of 2012, when potbanging members of the public joined in the tuition protests aimed at Jean Charest’s Liberal government, there is clearly something missing this year.
In fact, the lack of energy was so obvious that last week the executive of the student group leading the Spring 2015 protests, the Association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante, or ASSÉ, recommended a “strategic retreat.”
In a letter to members, the executive noted the protests would be more effective in the fall, when public-sector labour contracts will have expired and trade unions might join students in the streets.
“You have to know when to slow down at the right time so as to better restart later,” the letter said, according to a report by Radio-Canada. There was also the tricky issue of knowing when a student strike against government austerity had suc- ceeded. “How far will we go to declare victory?” the executive asked. “Until the abolition of austerity measures?”
The student organization’s executive had come to its senses, if somewhat belatedly. And on the weekend, the executive paid the price.
In a news conference Monday, ASSÉ’s new spokeswoman, Hind Fazazi, explained that the executive had been purged for putting out the notion of a retreat ahead of last weekend’s strategy session. Feeling under attack, the executive resigned en masse, to which members gathered at the meeting responded with a symbolic firing. “You can’t quit, you’re fired,” the executive was told.
The Journal de Montréal reported that one of the outgoing executive members, Emmanuelle Arcand, wrote on Facebook that the weekend meeting was characterized by “extraordinary violence.”
She accused ASSÉ members of lashing out at their own while they were down. She said she had felt more threatened by fellow protesters than by the police at a recent protest as “people who are supposed to be our allies threw rocks and insults at us.”
ASSÉ has a long tradition of refusing to denounce violence wrought by its members, and Ms. Fazazi stuck to that line Monday, even when it was a former executive member of her organization complaining that she had been targeted. “ASSÉ is not the people in the street,” Ms. Fazazi said of the demonstrators who answered the group’s call to protest last Thursday. “They are there in their own name.”
Ms. Fazazi was prepared to denounce another form of violence, however. She complained that protesting students suffer “media violence” when journalists do not report their demands. Asked to specify their demands, she referred reporters to ASSÉ’s website, which provides no comprehensive list of what the students are seeking.
“We could have a two-hour news conference explaining our precise demands,” Ms. Fazazi said. A statement adopted at the weekend meeting gave examples of the impact of austerity that ranged from “pipelines crossing our territory,” to inaccessible daycare and health-care services and cuts in college and university funding.
Asked what the end game of the student strike was, Ms. Fazazi replied that it was to get rid of the Liberal government. Since elected governments are not overthrown as easily as student leaders, that would make for a very long strike. The next provincial election will not be held before 2018.
Though the radical elements in ASSÉ declared their previous leaders out of line for suggesting a more moderate path to member associations, they had no problem urging those associations to extend their strikes in votes that will take place this week. At the moment, 55,000 students on 10 university and college campuses have walked out.
The communiqué coming out of ASSÉ’s weekend meeting included a calendar of upcoming protests, including a climate-change protest on Saturday, the “disturbance” of the provincial Liberal convention in June and a summer campaign against hydrocarbon development in Gaspé and the Lower Saint-Lawrence.
If the students who voted to strike in hopes of recapturing the spirit of 2012 have any sense, they will return to class and the protests will flop. Otherwise, with a strike mandate seeking the defeat of a government elected a year ago and an end to hydrocarbon exploitation, ASSÉ may as well start scheduling protests for years to come.
People who are supposed to be our allies threw rocks and insults