The Shoe Ill-Fitting

"Starting with the last three demonstrations, we have been intervening faster. We do not want to hold citizens who wish to go to downtown Montreal hostage. The Charter [of rights and freedoms] protects the right to freedom of expression, but there is no right to protest."
Sergeant Jean Bruno Latour, Service de police de la Ville de Montreal

Last year, during the violent, frequent and unnerving protests launched by Quebec's university student unions to make the government understand the level of their collective unwillingness to pay a greater share of university and college tuition fees in the face of a burgeoning provincial deficit, the then-Liberal government tried talking reason to the outraged sensibilities of student union leaders who insisted that the move to raise tuition was clearly "undemocratic".

The union leaders demonstrated their version of democratic action by attempting to coerce students who wished to continue their classes to join their protests. The bulk of Quebec's university students chose to remain aloof from the protests and to try to get on with their studies, but they were bullied and became subject to violence, when protesting students ignored a legal injunction to absent themselves from the universities and stop their coercive tactics.

In the public arena, rampaging students under the direction of their unions stopped highway traffic, blocked bridges, destroyed public property and threatened those who opposed their uncivil behaviour. The ruling Liberal government which had the nerve to try to impose the tuition increase was berated by the opposition Parti Quebecois party whose leader, Pauline Marois, defended the students and protested alongside them.

The Parti Quebecois became the governing party in the provincial election that saw the Liberals defeated, and the first thing Pauline Marois did as Premier was to suspend the tuition increase. Until such time as she fully understood the parlous state of the province's finances, when she too attempted to convince the students that they should agree to increase their tuition at least to match the cost of living, while stiffing the universities with decreased operating funds.

Under the beleaguered and much-maligned Liberal government of Premier Jean Charest when 200,000 students took to the streets for their tuition protest in 2012 there were no arrests. Now, under the new Parti Quebecois government, riot police were on hand at the student demonstrations a week earlier with 300 students demonstrating. Police charged and arrested over 200 of the students.

During last year's student strikes Montreal's Municipal Bylaw P-6 required masks not be worn during protests, that protest organizers file advance notice of the intended route of a demonstration. Despite the violence of last year's many protests, police did not wholesale arrest demonstrators. This year, with more orderly protests police contain the protesters in small groups, then arrest and charge people.

The fines are costly at $637. Fines of this magnitude given out to students who defied authority and refused to accept that they might be expected to pay a little more of their actual tuition costs, heavily subsidized by the taxpayer. A situation which had they accepted the inevitable, that they should be responsible for a greater portion of the cost of being educated would still have left them with the lowest tuition costs of any province.

Now, under the Parti Quebecois which had gone out of its way to berate the Liberal government and stand in solidarity with the 'courageous' students, those same students are being arrested and fined a whopping $637 for taking part in protests, where police under this government are enforcing by-laws that when the Liberals governed, the PQ felt were outrageous.