Protesters are having an exciting time despite their lack of real justification

Goal has become stopping democratically elected government from governing

The fantasy of the Grand March … is the political kitsch joining leftists of all times and tendencies. The Grand March is the splendid march on the road to brotherhood, equality, justice, happiness; it goes on and on, obstacles notwithstanding, for obstacles there must be if the march is to be the Grand March.

— Milan Kundera

You have to admit it’s all very exciting. It’s traditional at this juncture for people like me to say something like: whatever your opinion on the underlying issue, can’t we all agree that violence and lawlessness are the wrong way to make your point? But that strikes me as divisive and out of step with the times. What I prefer to focus my thoughts on just now is: whatever your opinion on violence and lawlessness, can’t we all agree how exciting, how thrilling it is?

I’m thinking, particularly, of the students “on strike” in Quebec, and within that group the marchers, and within that group the ones with the masks, the ones who are nervy and determined enough to take a brick and smash it through a shop window, or lob it at the nearest police officer, the ones who blocked and intimidated the scab students from entering the schools, or — where they had already done so — invaded the classrooms, jumped on the desks, daubed the walls with graffiti. I’m not thinking of the shopkeepers or the cops or the scabs just now. I’m just focused on how exhilarating this is.

To break the law is heady enough to begin with. But to be fighting for a cause worthy of breaking the law, that surely is what counts. Or rather, to be the sort of person so committed to fighting for that cause that you would be willing, no, driven to break the law — not to suffer the consequences, of course, that’s what the masks are for — but still, to realize that you are that sort of person, to be conscious, in the moment you are hurling rocks or chanting slogans or beating a cop, of how sublimely sensitive to injustice you must be, that you could be so enraged by it …

So there can be no going back. The particulars of the dispute are irrelevant, if not forgotten: this has become about the students themselves and the movie of their lives in which they are now starring. The students — the minority, that is, that are en greve, and the smaller minority that are causing the havoc — cannot claim to be the victims of any real injustice in the matter of the tuition fees. They cannot pretend that raising fees to the same level, after inflation, they were at 44 years ago presents some sort of unique hardship. They cannot argue they are fighting on behalf of the poor, since no student with family income of less than $ 100,000 would be affected.

They cannot, and so for the most part they no longer even bother. Instead, they change the subject. It’s not about that, they will say impatiently: it’s about a broader vision of society. Or, in the latest mutation, it is about the right to protest itself — a protest about a protest. But in this they are as ill- supplied with genuine grievance as they were with the fees.

While Bill 78, the Charest government’s belated response to weeks of mayhem, may be heavy- handed in this or that provision — for example, in making teachers’ unions liable for damages caused by individual members who act to support the students, or in the discretionary powers it assigns the minister of education — in the main, it imposes just two obligations on the protesters, both perfectly reasonable: one, don’t prevent dissenting students from attending class, and two, before you block the streets, give police some notice. Not “get the police’s permission;” just tell them where and when it’s taking place.

Yet out of this has been conjured a grievous assault on students’ human rights, the worst law since the War Measures Act, and more. The latter provision, in particular, is commonly represented as restricting or even banning public demonstrations. It does nothing of the kind: indeed, it is no more than the norm in democratic jurisdictions around the world.

But that is unexciting to believe and so the students and their supporters prefer to believe something else: that the government is taking away their freedom of assembly — as if the right to protest meant the right to protest wherever you want, whenever you want, at whatever harm to the rights of others.

Out of such illusions has a few dollars a week in extra tuition been transformed into a crisis of democratic government, the most serious in a generation. For make no mistake: the strike leaders’ aim is no longer merely to roll back the tuition fee increases, if it ever was. They, and their backers in the broader union movement, are intent on crippling the Charest government, to prevent it from taking any further steps to trim the size and scope of government in the continent’s most heavily taxed, heavily indebted jurisdiction.

If they succeed, the precedents set will be very clear: that a democratically elected government may be prevented by force and intimidation from enacting laws in the public interest; that the law itself may be broken or defied, openly and at length, without consequence; that the beneficiaries of public spending are entitled to veto legislation that would reduce it. It is not hard to imagine what others might make of this.

But in the meantime, how exciting!