Democracy Demands It

Fourteen weeks and counting.  Quebec university and CEGEP students have taken their initial push-back against tuition fee hikes to ascending heights of civil disobedience, class disruptions, and violence.  They're on a mission and it seems to be invigorating, exhilarating to them, as though they have assumed the power to transform society, bending it to their will.

Mature adults tend to try to be reasonable when speaking with excitable and immature emerging adults.  Reasonably enough, they try to find solutions that might appeal by assuaging the pent-up rage against societal structures that annoy those arrested in juvenile immaturity.  Who reject appeasement out of hand, because it isn't quite appeasing enough.

It is their demands in their totality or nothing at all. And nothing at all commands them to hide their facial features with masks and the assistance of the black bloc is not entirely unwelcome, since from them the methods of violence and the fear it inspires has proven useful indeed. 

REUTERS/Christinne Muschi

It was, perhaps, unwise for Premier Jean Charest and his education minister to attempt to water down the tuition hike legislation in an effort to make it more acceptable for the raging, rampaging student protesters.  The power they have assumed, of mass protest, of disruption, of threats and violence, has been a heady experience for the more militant of the student protesters.

Students invading a university where a court injunction meant what they were indulging in was unlawful, stopping other students from attending classes.  Protesters jumping on desks, flicking lights on and off, scrawling graffiti in classrooms, intimidating other students wishing to get on with their studies, calling them "scab!".  Venturing into the wider world of the public street, stopping traffic, irritating citizens.

Hastily introduced new legislation to deal with the chaos and ongoing defiance of the students to be tabled in the National Assembly would prohibit the blocking of access to schools, with violators liable for stiff fines.  But if the students are protesting now when they feel justified to do so, by claiming it is their right to such "democratic" action, which the government denies them by its own undemocratic denial of their 'rights', how will the Quebec government enforce fine collection?

Incarcerate wholesale all the students who will refuse to pay fines?  This is a precious demographic of entitlement; entitlement to behave as they wish, to reject societal norms, to impose their juvenile tactics on the greater community, to refuse to be placated by goodwill attempts to answer some portion of their grievances.  This is an entitled generation that must have it all, all the time, in every way.

These students see that thuggish tactics work.  The government is taken aback, hardly knows how to respond.  The new Education Minister, Michelle Courchesne recognizes them for what they represent, as did her predecessor, Line Beauchamp, who threw up her hands and her political career in sheer frustration.

"there was not any more room for compromise, and from their side I noticed a hardening of their position", commented Minister Michelle Courchesne.  This minority of a minority that has held the province to the ransom of their inchoate rage, demanding their 'democratic' right to do as they wish, when they wish, whenever they wish.

Tellingly, a new poll indicates that Quebecers are fed up with the students.  "The Liberals have improved their standings incrementally, and this may be due to increasing public impatience with the striking students", according to pollster Lorne Bozinoff. 

And the Parti Quebecois that supports the students?  Close to 1/3 of Quebecers feel the Liberals are best able to handle the student strike, followed by the PQ with 24%, the CAQ at 12%, Quebec solidaire at 10%.