Quebec student ‘strike’ reeks of fascism
MONTREAL — The day had started normally enough Wednesday inside the Universite du Quebec a Montreal, that is to say masked thugs roamed the corridors disrupting classes. But before the night was out, riot police were ramming down a door to dislodge some 200 protesters who had barricaded themselves inside and proceeded to trash the building.
With the destruction left behind, forcing the closure Thursday of a central building on the downtown campus, the people behind this year’s protests could not have done a better job discrediting the notion of a student strike if they had tried.
It was the crowning achievement in a week of idiocy, which featured student radicals purging leaders who had the temerity to suggest their “strike” had stalled and a marathon meeting at one Montreal CEGEP where strike advocates held repeated votes until enough opponents left and they got the outcome they desired.
UQAM has a history of activism dating back to its founding in 1969, but to suggest, as one professor did Thursday, that the agitators are carrying on a proud tradition is nonsense.
If anything, they are exposing the hollowness of their cherished “right to strike,” which, as Quebec Education Minister Francois Blais put it Thursday, is really a right to refuse the taxpayers’ gift of a subsidized education. When a few hundred people out of a student body of 44,000 feel free to force their peers out of class and destroy university property, it is not democracy but closer to fascism.
At a news conference Thursday, some UQAM staff and students denounced the violence inflicted upon them Wednesday by the administration’s decision to call in the Montreal police, first to prevent protesters from disrupting classes and later to end the illegal occupation of the De Seve building.
Judging from the many professional and amateur videos available, the police showed restraint Wednesday, and no instances of brutality have been made public. The violence documented so far in the UQAM dispute has come from the student side.
In his April 1 decision granting the university an injunction preventing students from blocking access to classrooms — an injunction ignored by the so-called student democrats — Justice Robert Mongeon of Quebec Superior Court catalogued the incidents reported during a March 30 protest that shut down the university.
A female employee was shoved and thrown to the ground as she tried to enter the business school. Another woman was hit in the face as she tried to enter the music school. There was “an exchange of blows” outside one building and people trying to enter another building had kicks “rain down on them,” Mongeon wrote. A little later, two students arriving on campus were hit in the face. The judge noted that these assaults were supported by photographic evidence and affidavits, none of which was disputed by the student associations targeted by the injunction.
Mongeon wrote that the jurisprudence coming out of the 2012 student protests in Quebec is clear: students are free to boycott classes but they enjoy no right to prevent others from attending class. The legislators have never granted such a right, and doing so would hand students the power to paralyze all post-secondary education whenever they wished, the judge concluded.
The students perhaps can be forgiven for having an inflated view of their powers. For years, their strike votes have been treated as inviolable and the levee de cours (class-closing) as a bit of youthful fun. But when the people disrupting the classes start dressing up like terrorists, there is nothing playful about it. And this year the strikers’ demands are so vast — an end to government austerity and all hydrocarbon development — that the conflict could go on for years.
It would help if their teachers offered a dose of reality, but the evidence Thursday was not encouraging.
Marcos Ancelovici, a professor of sociology called university rector Robert Proulx a “pyromaniac firefighter” for refusing to make any concessions, but in truth he and the others encouraging the out-of-control protesters are the ones fanning the flames at UQAM.