http://www.wsws.org/articles/2012/may2012/queb-m10.shtml

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Quebec government defends police assault on striking students, plans further repression
By Eric Marquis
10 May 2012

Quebec’s Liberal government has fiercely defended the Quebec Provincial Police’s savage attack on a demonstration of striking students and their supporters last Friday. The attack left one student fighting for his life and several other protesters severely injured.

Last Friday’s demonstration was mounted outside the Quebec Liberal Party’s policy convention, which was moved to Victoriaville, a city of 40,000 located 150 kilometers from Montreal, in an attempt to prevent it from being targeted by the strike movement. Regardless, thousands of demonstrators travelled to Victoriaville to express their opposition to the government’s plans to hike university tuition fees by more than 80 percent over the next seven years.

Using the pretext that certain individuals attempted to break through the security perimeter behind which the police were sheltering the Liberal Party meeting, the Quebec Provincial Police (QPP) brutally attacked the crowd with tear gas, truncheons and rubber bullets. Two young men suffered serious head trauma after being struck in the face by rubber bullets shot at close-range. One has lost an eye and the other remains in hospital in critical condition.

According to an article published in Tuesday’s La Presse, a team of volunteer nurses had to treat about 400 injured protesters. Many of the injured had burns to the face and eyes, some had sprains or fractures. About 200 people had to be treated for tear gas inhalation.

Public Security Minister Robert Dutil rushed to defend the police’s actions after protesters charged that the police had set upon them without giving a clear, audible order to disperse and after reporters from several media outlets expressed alarm over the police violence. “The Quebec Provincial Police,” declared Dutil from the sidelines of Liberal convention, “have the duty to maintain order in our society. It has the right to use necessary force to maintain order. … A student is between life and death, which is terrible. But that is a risk that arises when there is violence like we saw yesterday.” Saying perhaps more than he intended, Dutil then asserted that the police is “not a special class that is there to oppress the population.”

Dutil’s comments reprise the line that the authorities and the corporate media have taken since the student strike began thirteen weeks ago, with acts of petty vandalism invoked to justify systematic and increasingly violent police repression.

Parroting police propaganda, La Presse initially claimed that the serious injuries suffered by one of the young men on Friday could have been caused by projectiles thrown from within the crowd, although many eye-witnesses reported through social media that they had seen him struck by a rubber bullet.

Reporters from CUTV (Concordia University TV) who filmed the scene after the attack said that QPP officers refused to summon an ambulance for the injured students. When an ambulance that had been called by the demonstrators did approach, the police used the opportunity to intensify their efforts to break up the crowd—further delaying the injured students from getting to hospital.

These events took place as the leaders of the three province-wide student federations (FEUQ, FECQ, and CLASSE), accompanied and pressured by the presidents of Quebec three major union federations, were capitulating to the government and agreeing to a “settlement” that abandons the students’ fight for education to be a social right and calls for the full implementation of the government’s tuition fee hikes. (See: “Unions and student associations betray Quebec student strike”)

In the middle of the negotiations, the government seized on the police riot in Victoriaville to intimidate the student leaders. It demanded that they issue a public appeal for calm—thereby lending credence to the government’s slanderous claims that the student movement is “violent.” The government’s demand was amplified by the head of the Quebec Federation of Labour, who said his organization would repudiate its ostensible support for the students unless the student leaders bowed to the government’s demand. This they then did.

From the beginning of the conflict, the ruling class has used police repression to try to break resistance to the unpopular hike in tuition fees, a measure that is part of the broader austerity agenda of the Liberal government and the drive across Canada to make working people pay for the capitalist crisis.

Over the past month, the province’s courts have increasingly intervened against the student strike, issuing injunctions that limit and even ban picketing and legally compel universities and CEGEPs (pre-university and technical colleges) to provide classes at the demand of even a single student.

Mass mobilizations of students have prevented some of these injunctions from being implemented, causing increasing anxiety and anger in ruling class circles.

Last week, the head of the Quebec Superior Court, Chief Justice Francois Rolland, urged the province’s attorney-general and police forces to enforce the injunctions over students’ opposition—a policy that would require mass arrests and heightened violence as police forcibly break up student picket lines.

In addition to issuing this reactionary appeal, Rolland has personally taken in hand the issuing of injunctions against the students, travelling to various cities so that he could hear requests for court orders for an immediate resumption of classes. He urged administrators at Montmorency College and CEGEP Saint-Hyacinthe to call for police intervention, if his anti-strike injunctions are not respected. “We are in the twelfth hour, never mind the eleventh,” declared Dutil. “There is peril. Someone must intervene.”

The need to reestablish “order” through the coercive powers of the state was also voiced in an open letter, entitled “Choose University Excellence”, co-authored by prominent representatives of the political elite, big business, and the academy, including former Parti Quebecois Premier Lucien Bouchard.

“It is time we react,” reads the letter, “We must reinstate order … This is a situation when, regardless of political allegiances, the population must support the state, which is ultimately responsible for the public order, the safety of individuals and the integrity of our institutions.”

Francois Legault, a former PQ Minister of Education and currently the leader of the right-wing Coalition Avenir Quebec (CAQ-Coalition for Quebec’s Future), deplored that “in Quebec, in 2012, the government makes a decision and we are not capable of respecting it.” He has called for police to be mobilized across Quebec next Monday so as to ensure that “every student who wants to go to school can do so.”

Meanwhile, the ruling class is already preparing new legal weapons in anticipation of future movements in opposition to its austerity agenda of social spending cuts, privatization, tariff-ication, regressive tax increases, and electricity rate and tuition fee increases. In Monday’s La Presse, its editor, Andre Pratte, argued that lawmakers must ask themselves, “should we restrict student unionism in order to assure that democratic laws are respected?”

The municipal government of Montreal, for its part, is preparing to adopt regulations that forbid the wearing of masks and make illegal any demonstration for which the route is not communicated to the police in advance.

Workers and students must be on guard. The ruling elite in Quebec, like its counterparts internationally, is increasingly unwilling to tolerate any opposition to its austerity program and is more than prepared to run roughshod over elementary democratic principles and use the coercive powers of the state to implement it.

The author also recommends:

Unions and student associations betray Quebec student strike
[8 May 2012]

Workers must rally to the defense of Quebec’s striking students
[27 April 2012]

Major daily publishes fascist diatribe against Quebec student strike
[25 April 2012]

Copyright © 1998-2012 World Socialist Web Site - All rights reserved

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2012/may2012/queb-m11.shtml

World Socialist Web Site
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Quebec students reject union-promoted sellout of their fight for accessible education
By a WSWS reporting team
11 May 2012



University and CEGEP [pre-university and technical college] students have overwhelmingly rejected the agreement that was reached last Saturday between the Quebec Liberal government and leaders of the three province-wide student associations to end a three-month long student strike.

After affixing their signatures to the entente, student leaders touted it as a partial victory. But subsequently they refused to publicly call for its ratification for fear of a hostile reaction among students.

The entente completely abandons the students’ fight for education to be recognized as a social right.

The government, as Liberal cabinet ministers were quick to point out, did not cede an inch on its plan to raise university tuition fees by $1779 or 82 percent over the next seven years, beginning this September. Moreover, the entente makes student leaders auxiliaries in implementing the government’s cost-cutting agenda by giving them seats on a new university finance watchdog committee, dominated by state and big business representatives. “Savings” identified by this committee will be used to reduce the administrative fees charged students.

In an obvious gimmick, the government agreed, as the watchdog committee’s report would be pending, to give students a rebate this September on their administrative fees of $125 (virtually the same amount as the tuition fees are to rise.) But if the committee does not identify sufficient savings, students will be ordered to repay even this puny sum. (For a more detailed examination of the entente see: “Unions and student associations betray Quebec student strike”)

The unions, which have feigned support for the students while systematically isolating their struggle, played a pivotal role in pressuring student leaders into accepting the government’s terms. Participants in all 22 hours of negotiations held on Friday, May 4 and Saturday, May 5, the presidents of Quebec’s three major labor federations were adamant that the student leaders accept the entente. “We told them,” Confederation of National Trade Unions President Louis Roy told the Montreal Gazette, “that they got the maximum from the government that day; that the government will not go any further.”

In the days preceding last weekend’s talks, the union leaders had repeatedly voiced their alarm that “social peace,” i.e. big businesses unfettered domination of social-economic and political life, was threatened by the confrontation between the government and the students.

To the dismay of the government, the corporate media, and all sections of the establishment, including the union officialdom, the 170,000 striking students have overwhelmingly repudiated the entente.

As of Wednesday evening, students at fourteen CEGEPs had rejected the entente, while those at only two had voted in favor. And students from not a single striking university department had endorsed the proposed agreement.

Yesterday, CLASSE (The Broader Coalition of the Association for Student-Union Solidarity), became the first of the three student associations to go on record as rejecting the entente.

The other two—FECQ (the Quebec Federation of College Students) and FEUQ (the Quebec Federation of University Students)—have indicated they might be willing to accept the government’s offer of a reworded agreement.

FEUQ President Martine Desjardins, for example, has taken exception to statements by Education Minister Line Beauchamp and other Liberal ministers that it is the task of the student representative on the watchdog committee and not all its members to look for “efficiencies”—as if this in anyway changes the character of the entente.

FECQ and FEUQ are formally aligned to the trade union bureaucracy through the so-called Social Alliance and have repeatedly termed the big business party supported by the unions, the Parti Quebecois, an ally of the students.

While CLASSE’s leadership uses more militant rhetoric, its perspective is fundamentally the same—to separate the students’ opposition to the tuition fee hikes from any broader challenge to the austerity program of the Charest Liberal government and the federal Conservative government; to seek a negotiated settlement based on the reactionary fiscal framework created by the political representatives of big business and with a government that has insisted for 13 weeks that the tuition fee hikes must be implemented in full and that has presided over an unprecedented campaign of repression against the striking students; to promote the union bureaucracy as an ally of the students.

“It’s up to the government to act in this situation,” said CLASSE spokesman Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois Thursday in announcing CLASSE’s rejection of the entente. “It will require concrete acts to solve the situation. That means a new round of negotiations and not dealing with administrative fees, not dealing with loans and bursaries. They must deal at last with the tuition fees.”

What in fact has been demonstrated over the past three months is that the conflict between the students and the government cannot be bridged by negotiation because it arises from a conflict between opposed class forces representing opposed programs. The government and the elite are determined to destroy what remains of the social gains made by the working class through the social struggles of the last century; while the students—albeit, only implicitly and this is at present the political Achilles heel of their movement—are opposing the ruling elite’s austerity agenda and fighting for the notion that there are social rights.

If the students are to prevail in their struggle, they must make it the catalyst for the mobilization of the working class across Quebec and Canada against the big business assault on wages, jobs and public services and for the development of an independent working-class political movement aimed at radically reorganizing economic life so as to make human need, not private profit the animating principle.

The World Socialist Web Site spoke with students about last weekend’s entente at a student demonstration in Montreal earlier this week. For more than two weeks, students and their supporters have been staging nightly marches through the downtown of Quebec's largest city.

“The last negotiations didn't give us enough,” said Université de Montréal (UdM) student Mathieu. “It's 12 weeks that we have been on strike. I am very involved and have come to a lot of demonstrations. An offer like that is not enough. [If the entente is accepted], it will be a defeat for the student movement.”

Mathieu’s friend and UdM classmate, François-Xavier pointed to the duplicitous character of the proposed agreement. “The reduction they’re giving us in first (i.e. the fall 2012) semester, we’ll have to pay back, if they (the provisional watchdog committee) don’t succeed in financing it through cuts. It’s a big ‘if.’

“If I vote according to my values,” continued Mathieu, “I’ll vote for Quebec Solidaire (QS), but I need to take into account voting strategically. … If I vote QS, it’s a vote that will directly help the Liberals return to power.”

QS is a Quebec nationalist “citizens’” party that claims to be a leftwing opponent of the big business PQ. But it has repeatedly offered to form an electoral alliance with the PQ to oppose the “right,” the Liberals and the ADQ, now re-packaged as the Coalition Avenir Quebec (CAQ—Coalition for Quebec’s Future).

Michel, a worker who had come out to show his support for the students, told the WSWS the deal accepted by the student associations at the urging of the union leaders, “is not good enough.”

“All the people here today, we say ‘no’... [Quebec Premier Jean Charest] did this to look like he is trying to negotiate. I would never say ‘yes’ to this if I were a student.

"To me, there is so much money from banks, gas companies, pharmaceutical companies—they are making millions, so we can take some of that to let the students keep their minds on their studies.

"The question is: ‘what next?’ This government is helping out the higher class people. As for the rest of us, we have nothing. They keep all the money for the rich."

Dorothée told the WSWS, the entente “sucks because there is absolutely no change... I thought that [the negotiations] were good, but I don't know why the associations agreed to this deal. They don't have the experience that the government has."

Ariane, said "this strike is about the type of society we chose. We're not as stupid as the [government and establishment] think."

"They have the money to avoid these cuts,” said Laurence-Karl, “The banks have money but the government won't tax them.”

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the poor who have little access to higher education now have to inform the cops that they're going to demonstrate to reduce tuitions? WTF?? this will only ramp it up!

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2012/may2012/pers-m21.shtml


World Socialist Web Site
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Police state bill passed to suppress Quebec student strike
21 May 2012

Quebec’s National Assembly adopted emergency legislation last Friday that imposes draconian restrictions on the right to demonstrate and criminalizes the fourteen-week, provincewide student strike against plans to raise university tuition fees by more than 80 percent.

Passed in less than 24 hours, the Quebec Liberal government’s Bill 78 includes a series of police state measures:

Striking students and their supporters are banned from picketing within 50 meters of university and CEGEP (pre-university and technical college) buildings.

Teachers are dragooned into the government’s strikebreaking drive. Bill 78 legally compels them to perform their work duties in full, in defiance of a democratically decided boycott of their classes, and to make no accommodations to striking students.

Student associations and unions representing teachers and other university and CEGEP employees “must employ appropriate means to induce” their members to abide by the law, i.e., act as auxiliaries of the state in suppressing the student strike.

Demonstrations of fifty people or more—no matter the cause—are illegal, unless protest organizers submit to police in advance the proposed route and duration of the demonstration and abide by all changes requested by police. Organizers are legally obliged to enforce the police-prescribed route.

Persons convicted of violating any of these provisions are subject to massive fines.

Canada’s ruling elite has enthusiastically welcomed Bill 78, dismissing concerns over the legislation’s assault on the rights to free speech and assembly. Quebec’s most influential daily, La Presse, backed the legislation as a necessary weapon to kill “the snake of violence and disorder.” Alongside an editorial endorsing Bill 78, the Globe and Mail, Canada’s newspaper of record, carried a comment titled “Tuition Protesters are the Greeks of Canada.”

The legislation is the culmination of a campaign of state violence against the student strike. Police have provoked violence, then used tear gas, baton charges, sound grenades and rubber bullets to disperse students and their supporters.

Speaking in the National Assembly debate on Bill 78, Natural Resources Minister Clément Gignac compared the student strike to an “insurrection.” Earlier in the week, Finance Minister Raymond Bachand blamed “Marxists” who “use intimidation tactics” for the mass pickets that have frustrated government efforts to break the strike.

Behind the ruling class’s frenzied response to the strike is their recognition that it represents an implicit challenge to the austerity measures being implemented by governments at every level and of every political stripe in the spectrum of official Canadian politics.

Their greatest fear is that the student strike could become the catalyst for a mass movement of the working class against their drive to place the full burden of the capitalist crisis on working people.

The events in Quebec exemplify a global process. Capitalist governments the world over are responding with state repression to mounting resistance to their class-war program of wage and jobs cuts and the dismantling of social services. They are trampling on democratic rights and criminalizing working-class opposition.

Over the past year, Canada’s federal Conservative government has repeatedly use emergency laws to break or prevent strikes, including by Air Canada and Canada Post workers, and to strip workers of their collective bargaining rights.

In response to riots that erupted last August following a police murder, the British government ordered police to invade inner-city neighbourhoods across the country and told the courts to set aside normal due process in order to impose exemplary punishments.

The Spanish government mobilized the military to break an air traffic controllers strike and the French government mounted a massive nationwide police operation against striking oil refinery workers.

When the Greek and Italian governments proved unable to impose the staggering cuts demanded by international financial markets because of popular opposition, they were replaced with unelected “technocratic” governments and the austerity measures were imposed in full.

Taking place in the wake of elections in France and Greece in which voters repudiated austerity governments, this weekend’s NATO summit in Chicago has been the occasion for yet another massive state security operation. The aim is to intimidate opponents of big business and social reaction and acclimatize the population to the gutting of civil liberties.

As in the 1930s, the bourgeoisie’s response to the global breakdown of capitalism is to turn toward dictatorial methods of rule, even as it invokes democracy and human rights to justify imperialist wars in Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and other countries.

Two vital conclusions must be drawn: the working class faces a struggle for political power against the capitalist social order and the defence of democratic rights requires the revolutionary mobilization of the working class.

Keith Jones

Copyright © 1998-2012 World Socialist Web Site - All rights reserved

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2012/may2012/qust-m23.shtml

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Quebec: Huge protest supports striking students, denounces Bill 78
By Keith Jones
23 May 2012



More than 100,000 people took to the streets of Montreal yesterday to mark the 100th day since the beginning of the Quebec student strike and to denounce the Quebec Liberal government’s Bill 78.

Adopted in less than 24 hours late last week, Bill 78 criminalizes the student strike by outlawing picket lines anywhere in the vicinity of the province’s universities and CEGEPs (pre-university and technical colleges) and by threatening teachers with criminal prosecution and massive fines if they make any accommodations to striking students or fail to perform all of their normal functions.

Bill 78 also places sweeping restrictions on the right to demonstrate anywhere—and over any issue—in Canada’s second most populous province. Any demonstration of more than 50 people is illegal unless demonstration organizers submit to police in writing more than eight hours in advance the route and duration of the protest and abide by any changes requested by the police. Demonstration organizers are also legally compelled to assist the authorities in ensuring that protesters do not transgress the police-prescribed protest route.

The same day the Liberals rammed Bill 78 through the National Assembly, Montreal’s municipal government, meeting in special session, adopted its own emergency bylaw compelling police authorization for demonstration-routes and making it illegal to wear any form of face covering—including face-paint, a nijab, or a scarf—while participating in a demonstration.

Quebec’s corporate elite has strongly supported Bill 78, just as it has the government’s insistence that its plan to raise university tuitions by 82 percent over the next seven years is non-negotiable.

The huge turnout for Tuesday’s demonstration is testimony to the widespread support for the students and recognition that Bill 78 constitutes a sweeping attack on the democratic rights of all.

There were numerous hand-made placards denouncing Bill 78. One read, “Academic Freedom=Free Speech and Free Assembly”; another “Bill 78, May 68”; a third, "A government that uses repression is a government that is afraid. We won’t give up.”

While students comprised the majority of the protesters, there were also large numbers of workers, a significant contrast from the massive province-wide demonstration in support of the student strike held in Montreal on March 22. There were union delegations, including of teachers, and Montreal blue-collar and transit workers. But most of the workers did not appear to have come as part of an organized contingent. Some were recent university or CEGEP graduates, others retirees.

Midway through yesterday’s march, CLASSE (The Broader Coalition of the Association for Student-Union Solidarity)—the province-wide student association that initiated the current student strike—broke away from the police-approved march itinerary and led tens of thousands on an alternate course through downtown Montreal, briefly paralyzing rush-hour traffic. Police did not intervene.

The breakaway march was meant to exemplify CLASSE’s vow, announced Monday after a meeting of its leadership, that it will not submit to Bill 78. “We believe our fundamental rights should take precedence over respecting an unjust law,” announced CLASSE spokesman Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois. “The Liberal government talks about intimidation since the beginning of the conflict. But with this law as it is, it is practicing intimidation.”

CLASSE’s defiance, however, is not from the standpoint of making the students’ strike the catalyst for the mobilization of the working class against the austerity program of the Liberal government and of the Quebec and Canadian ruling class as a whole. Rather it is entirely within the framework of a single-issue protest aimed at pressuring Premier Jean Charest and his Liberal government into a negotiated settlement—a perspective typified by the refrain taken up by many of yesterday’s demonstrators, “Criions plus fort que personne nous ignores” (Shout louder so that nobody can ignore us.)

On the basis of this perspective, CLASSE negotiators already put their signatures to an entente with the government—later massively repudiated by the students—that imposed the tuition fee increases in full and would have established a government-business dominated tri-partite committee to cut university spending.

Although police did not immediately intervene to arrest CLASSE leaders for defying Bill 78, Justice Minister Jean-Marc Fournier emphasized that the government will not tolerate civil disobedience. “Civil disobedience,” he declared, “is a nice word for vandalism.”

Later Tuesday the state struck back, invoking for the first time the draconian provisions of Bill 78.

For almost four weeks there have been nightly demonstrations in Montreal in support of the students. On Tuesday evening, no sooner had protesters converged on the park that has become the starting point for these nightly protests, than police declared the gathering illegal under Bill 78, since demonstrators had not obtained police sanction for the demonstration.

This clearly was done with a double purpose. First to show that notwithstanding yesterday’s massive protest, the government intends to pursue its campaign to forcibly break the student strike. Second, to provoke a violent confrontation that could be used to drown out coverage of yesterday’s massive march and provide grist for the government-corporate media campaign tarring the students as violent.

Unlike, CLASSE, the other two province-wide student associations, FECQ (Quebec Federation of College Students) and FEUQ (Quebec Federation of University Students), have declared they will comply with Bill 78, while contesting its constitutionality in the courts.

FECQ and FEQ, which have close ties to the trade union bureaucracy, are also placing renewed emphasis upon their campaign to defeat the government at the next election. The call for students to pursue their strike at the ballot box is a transparent attempt to boost the electoral fortunes of the big business Parti Quebecois, a party which when it last held office instituted the greatest social spending cuts in Quebec history, then slashed taxes for big business and the most privileged sections of the population.

The trade unions have denounced Bill 78 as a grievous attack on democratic rights, but also said that they will comply with the law, which stipulates that they use all means at their disposal to ensure that teachers and other university and CEGEP employees assist the government in breaking the student strike. Earlier the unions played a major role in pressuring the student associations to accept the sellout entente that was subsequently repudiated by the students.

At yesterday’s march supporters of the Socialist Equality Party and the International Students for Social Equality distributed a thousand copies of a statement titled “Faced with state repression, students must turn to the working class.”

It read in part: “The passage of Bill 78, which criminalizes the student strike and tramples on the right to demonstrate, shows that the ruling class is ready to use authoritarian and anti-democratic methods to impose its class program—the dismantling of public services and the impoverishment of broad layers of the population.

“This assault on living standards and democratic rights cannot be repelled by single-issue protests, no matter how militant.

“What is required is the independent mobilization of the working class, in opposition to the pro-capitalist unions, in a counter-offensive against government social spending cuts, the destruction of jobs and wage cuts. Such a mobilization must be part of a political struggle uniting the working class, French- and English-speaking and immigrant, in Quebec and across Canada in the fight for a workers’ government. Such a government would use the vast resources created by workers’ collective labor to meet the social needs of all, not fill the pockets of a tiny capitalist elite.”

Copyright © 1998-2012 World Socialist Web Site - All rights reserved

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2012/may2012/queb-m24.shtml

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Quebec student strike:
Police begin to apply draconian Bill 78
By Keith Jones
24 May 2012



Quebec authorities have begun to make use of the sweeping repressive powers contained in Bill 78—the emergency legislation the provincial Liberal government rushed through the National Assembly late last week to suppress the province-wide student strike.

On Tuesday evening, just hours after 150,000 people had demonstrated in Montreal to mark the 100th day of the strike and denounce Bill 78, police invoked the new law to declare a nighttime student protest illegal.

In addition to criminalizing the student strike, Bill 78 makes all demonstrations in Canada’s second most populous province—irrespective of their cause—illegal, unless organizers have submitted to police more than eight hours in advance the protest route and duration and undertaken to abide by any changes demanded by the police.

The organizers of Tuesday’s nocturnal protest, the 29th successive evening demonstration held in downtown Montreal in support of the student strike, had defied the legal requirement that they seek police permission for their demonstration. Citing this failure, the police declared the protest an “illegal assembly,” then used tear-gas and baton charges to disperse the crowd of more than 2,000.

In the melee that followed, 113 people were arrested. According to police none of these arrests were for violating Bill 78 itself. Rather they were for alleged acts of violence committed while resisting the police’s violent dispersal of the protest or for wearing a mask. The same day that Quebec’s provincial government adopted Bill 78, Montreal City Council, also meeting in special session, passed a bylaw that makes it illegal to wear any face covering—including face-paint, a niqab or a scarf—while demonstrating.

Although Montreal police chose on Tuesday night to use Bill 78 only as a pretext for their declaring the protest illegal, they told a press conference yesterday that they may, at a future date, charge the protest organizers with violating the new law.

In Sherbrooke, the city that Quebec Premier Jean Charest represents in the Quebec legislature, police have gone further. On Monday evening they arrested 36 people and charged them under Bill 78’s Article 16 with participating in an unauthorized demonstration. If convicted, the 36 face a minimum fine of $1,000 and could be ordered to pay as much as $5,000.

Tuesday’s massive march in Montreal attests to the widespread support for the students’ struggle against the government’s plans to raise university tuitions by more 80 percent over the next seven years and a groundswell of popular opposition to Bill 78.

Even the corporate media, which has strongly supported the tuition hikes and defended Bill 78 as a necessary measure to quell violence and disorder, was forced to concede Wednesday that far from ending the “social crisis,” the government’s draconian law has exacerbated it.

An opinion poll conducted by one of Quebec’s most respected pollsters found that 78 percent of Quebecers believe the government has “gone too far” and, despite the massive media campaign aimed at depicting the students as violent and selfish, found respondents equally split between those for and against the government’s attempt to legislate against the students. The poll found opposition to Bill 78 concentrated among the young, those with “low revenues,” and residents of Montreal.

Emerging from a cabinet meeting Wednesday, Education Minister Michelle Courchesne said she was ready to meet with leaders of the three province-wide student associations, including representatives of CLASSE (The Broader Coalition of the Association for Student-Union Solidarity), which the government has repeatedly denounced as “extremist,” most recently because it has said it will not submit to Bill 78.

However, even as she proclaimed that the government’s “door is open,” Courchesne made clear that the government remains as determined as ever to force through the tuition fee hikes, which are only an element in its sweeping austerity program. Courchesne explicitly ruled out any discussion of a moratorium or delay in implementing the tuition fee hikes, let alone reducing or rescinding them, and said the government is not prepared to discuss any changes to Bill 78.

The leaders of the student associations have nonetheless indicated a willingness to resume talks with the government. Earlier this month, under pressure from the leaders of Quebec’s principal trade unions, they signed on to a sellout agreement that not only called for the implementation of the tuition hikes in full, but also for the establishment of a government-business dominated tripartite committee under which student leaders would have worked with the government to cut university spending. This agreement subsequently collapsed because of massive student opposition.

While denouncing Bill 78 as an unprecedented attack on democratic rights, the trade unions have announced that they will comply with all its provisions, including those that conscript teachers into the government’s drive to break the student strike. The unions are seeking to use their political and financial influence over the student associations and the student movement to promote their longtime ally the Parti Quebecois (PQ)—a big business party which when it last held power implemented the greatest social spending cuts in Quebec history.

The leaders of Quebec Solidaire(QS), a Quebec nationalist party that presents itself as a leftwing alternative to the PQ, meanwhile, have backed away from statements from their lone member of the Quebec legislature that suggested they were counseling defiance of Bill 78. The comments of Amir Khadir had been vehemently denounced both by the QS’s establishment opponents and by editorialists, who said that those not prepared to uphold the laws adopted by the National Assembly have no right to serve in it. “We cannot encourage defiance of Bill 78,” announced Francoise David, QS’s co-leader Wednesday.

The Quebec students and their supporters must draw far-ranging conclusions from the all-out campaign being mounted against them not only by the Charest Liberal government, but by the Canadian ruling class as a whole. The capitalist elite fear and hate the student strike because it represents an implicit challenge to their class strategy—their drive to make the working class pay for the breakdown of capitalism through austerity measures that aim to destroy all the social benefits working people won through the great social struggles of the last century.

To prevail, the students must make their strike the catalyst for the mobilization of the working class in Quebec and across Canada in an industrial and political offensive against all social spending, job and wage cuts and for a workers’ government.

The World Socialist Web Site spoke with some of those who participated in Tuesday’s mammoth march in Montreal

Alexis Chartrand is one of the many high school, students who have become politically activated by the student strike. He told the WSWS: “The emergency legislation is totally abusive on the government’s part. They cannot pass a law that restricts the fundamental freedoms in the [Canadian and Quebec] Charters [of rights]—it is unthinkable. It’s very dangerous to push through laws in the name of public security. There are lots of fascist, dictatorial, regimes that came to power like that. We must be watchful and ensure that public safety not become an excuse to reduce peoples’ freedoms.

“I don’t think that a democratic government can afford to break a popular protest movement with such overt repression. It will eventually have to listen.

“I am fighting for university education to be a right. I think that education, health care and essential public services should be totally free for everyone. This is an elementary egalitarian measure which should be assured in contemporary society. But certainly in a context of crisis, negotiations are necessary and a little give-and-take is required to arrive at some agreement.”

Alexis was aware of the parallels between what is happening in Quebec and Europe. “The more you push people to the limit, the more they will push back and seek to regain what was lost. We see what is happening in Greece and Italy: There are big economic problems and the population is paying heavily for the current economic system. In Quebec, even if we are much less worse off than in Greece, there are still unjust measures—measures that we are beginning to stand up against, so that they do not pass.”

Estelle, Sandrine and Asma attend Sophie-Barat Secondary School.

Both Estelle and Sandrine spoke out forcefully against Bill 78. “It’s almost becoming a dictatorship where you don’t have the right to say or do anything,” said Estelle.

Added Sandrine, “I really feel that I’m living under a dictatorship with this law. I do not find it normal that we should feel unsafe in wearing the red squares [the symbol of the student strike] in front of police officers. It is not normal for Quebec to sink to the point where political opinions can be so derided.”

Asked why they thought the government is so intransigent, Sandrine said, “I think that there was pressure from richer people, so that they can avoiding paying their share of what they should pay.”

Asma complained about an opinion poll that had claimed Quebecers massively supported Bill 78. “I believe that polls are biased. La presse`s Thursday poll on the legislation was conducted before details of the Bill were even given. Then we see after the Bill’s passage that people do not agree with it. Whenever I talk to people in the street, most are for the student movement, and not against it. In recent demonstrations, people cheered us on the street.

“The majority of the population is in from the middle class and the poor, and if we were to unite to protest against inequality, it would be a much larger movement than the current one protesting the tuition fee increases.”

Emil Grigorov a lecturer at the Université Laval in Quebec City, explained that Bill 78 had caused him to come out in the street in support of the students. “This law is a fundamental attack on democratic principles. It is an undemocratic law and recognized to be unconstitutional legislation. It must be stopped.

“I think [the government] is under pressure from big business and that it has reached sort of an impasse. I do not think that it will succeed in breaking the student movement since this is more than a student movement. It's much broader, a social movement, a political movement … a movement for democracy.

“Myself I lived under dictatorship [in Bulgaria]. I spent half of my life under a totalitarian regime, and it always starts with little changes here, small attacks against democracy there, and finishes with the abolition of democracy.”

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Quebec legislator arrested as state repression of student strike continues
By Keith Jones
7 June 2012

Quebec City police arrested 65 people, including Amir Khadir, Québec Solidaire’s lone member of the provincial parliament, Tuesday evening. Their crime? Demonstrating illegally—that is, without police permission.

Tuesday’s arrests are part of an ongoing campaign of state repression directed against the four month-long Quebec student strike and the mass opposition that has erupted against the provincial Liberal government’s Bill 78. Adopted May 18, Bill 78 criminalizes the student strike and places sweeping restrictions on the right to demonstrate over any issue, anywhere in Quebec.

Khadir and all of those arrested with him Tuesday were handcuffed and transported to a police station where they were forced to identify themselves and subjected to police checks. They were given $494 tickets for violating the Highway Code, on the spurious grounds that the protest was interfering with traffic.

Fearful of the mass opposition to Bill 78, police authorities have been highly selective in its application. Frequently they have chosen to charge people arrested for participating in an “illegal assembly” under municipal bylaws and the Highway Code rather than Bill 78. But both the government and police have said that they reserve the right to lay charges under the punitive provisions of Bill 78 at a later date. Quebec’s emergency law makes persons who participate in a demonstration that has not been police-approved liable to criminal prosecution and minimum fines of $1,000. Demonstration organizers face minimum fines of $7,000.

The Liberal government was quick to endorse the Quebec City Police’s arrest of the parliamentarian Khadir, providing further proof of its contempt for democratic rights. Transport Minister Norm Macmillan accused Khadir of seeking publicity by getting himself arrested. “What he wants is what you’re doing now—talking about him.”

In fact, as Khadir explained at a press conference Wednesday, his arrest was anything but planned. While biking home from the National Assembly, he happened upon a casserole (pots and pans) protest and decided to join it. When police declared the peaceful protest illegal, he ignored them, arguing that the right to demonstrate is constitutionally protected.

Khadir said that his arrest and handcuffing had been a humiliation, even if the police had not been abusive to him. “What I deplore,” said Khadir, “is that there were orders [to illegalize the demonstration and make mass arrests] from the police top command who are allowing themselves to serve as a tool of the government.”

Khadir is the co-leader of Québec Solidaire, which promotes itself as a “left” Quebec souverainiste (pro-independence) “citizens” party. While it claims to oppose the big business Parti Quebecois, it has repeatedly proposed an electoral alliance with the Quebec elite’s alternate party of government in the name of fighting the “right.”

Following the passage of Bill 78, Khadir suggested that the legislation was so draconian that it raised the question as to when civil disobedience is permissible. These remarks were vehemently denounced by the corporate media and by the other parties in the National Assembly, with many questioning the “fitness” of someone serving in the legislature who isn’t ready to obey its laws. Québec Solidaire then beat a hasty retreat, declaring that it would not and could not counsel defiance of Bill 78.

This remains its position and no doubt accounts for its meek, pro-forma protest over Khadir’s arrest and handcuffing for participating in a peaceful protest—an outrageous action that has once again demonstrated the government’s readiness to run roughshod over basic democratic rights.

In recent days, the government, corporate media and big business have been mounting a propaganda offensive against the student strike focusing on the claim that student protests constitute a threat to Montreal's tourist industry. Premier Jean Charest himself led the charge, labeling one of the student association’s a “menace” to Quebec on the basis of the concocted claim that it had threatened to disrupt this weekend’s Montreal Grand Prix. The transparent aim of this campaign is to bully the students and opponents of the government’s flagrant attack on democratic rights into silence. Failing that, the propaganda campaign is aimed at providing the pretext for the state suppression of protests through mass arrests and violence. Since the adoption of Bill 78 over 1,500 people have been arrested, most for the “crime” of demonstrating.

Also Tuesday Education Minister Michele Courchesne rejected any further talks with the student associations. Last Thursday the government broke off negotiations, because the student associations were balking at its demand that university tuition fees must increase this September and every year for the next seven years.

Egged on by the Canadian ruling elite, the Liberal government is determined to impose its schedule of massive university tuition fee hikes for two reasons: to intimidate opponents of its austerity program and because the fee hikes exemplify its drive to make the “user pay” principal for public services the new “norm” in Quebec, so as to slash social spending and pave the way for privatization.

“There are no negotiations planned.” Courchesne told reporters Tuesday. “Absolutely not.”

“If they [the students associations] do not agree to move on the [tuition] Increase, we are in a dead-end.”

The Liberal government and the Canadian ruling class a whole have been shaken by the tenacity of the striking students and the depth and breadth of the opposition to Bill 78. Their greatest fear is that the strike could become a catalyst for a mass movement of the working class in Quebec and across Canada against their drive to place the burden of the capitalist crisis on working people through job cuts, contract concessions, and the dismantling of public services.

Having failed to break the strike through court injunctions and police violence in April and Bill 78 in May, the government now hopes to wear down students’ resistance, while continuing to brandish the threat of still greater repression and police violence, especially when it tries to resume the suspended winter semester in August.

Above all it is relying on the unions, the NDP, Québec Solidaire, and the student associations to isolate the students—restricting their struggle to a single issue protest aimed at pressuring the government to reduce its tuition fee hikes and confining it to Quebec.

At the beginning of last month, Quebec’s major labor federations prevailed on the student associations to accept a sellout agreement that was subsequently massively repudiated by students and no sooner was Bill 78 adopted than they announced they would comply with all its provisions.

Earlier this week Courchesne met with the presidents of the Confederation of National Trade Unions (CNTU) and of the CNTU affiliate, FNEEQ, that represents teachers at the strike-closed CEGEPs (pre-university and technical colleges) to discuss the government’s plans to have the suspended winter semester completed in a compressed time frame in August and September. The unions’ participation in these talks, which concern how Bill 78 is to be implemented, underscore that they stand prepared to assist the government in breaking the student strike.

The unions are arguing that teachers should be compensated for what will be a dramatically increased workload during the proposed compressed semester and so they should. But to entertain discussion on this when Bill 78 hangs over the heads of students and teachers alike is a crass betrayal: the law compels teachers under the threat of criminal sanction to assist the government in breaking students’ boycott of classes, and stipulates the unions must do everything in the power to ensure that teachers do the government’s bidding.

The Quebec student strike and the growing working class opposition to Bill 78 have demonstrated the chasm that exists between the interests and aspirations of working people and big business and its political representatives and revealed the potential for a challenge to the elite’s class war agenda. But if this potential is to be realized, the student strike must become the spearhead for a cross-Canada mobilization of the working class, independent of and in opposition to the pro-capitalist trade unions and NDP, against all job and wage cuts and in defence of public services and as part of a widening offensive of the international working class against capitalism.

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“The banks don’t want human beings, they want indentured servants”
Jerry White talks to Montreal students and workers
By Bryan Dyne
21 June 2012

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On the eve of a public meeting in Montreal, Socialist Equality Party US presidential candidate Jerry White campaigned among workers and youth. They spoke to White about the Quebec student strike and the broader social conditions that people in the province face.

Lan Sinha spoke on the issues of education, the student strike and Bill 78, the anti-democratic ruling targeting protests. “I think education is a social right, and it should be free. I payed a fair amount for CEGEP [a two year pre-university education], and any more would have been too much. Some people argue that in Quebec, the tuition is lower than in any other part of Canada, but tuition shouldn't go up just because of that.”

“There is also growing debt. It's not nearly as bad as in the United States, where it's in the tens of thousands but it's there and growing, nonetheless. Because of this, I'm really glad that the strike is happening. We need action now rather than waiting around for the government to impose more fees on us. That it's gone on for so long means there is hope and determination in the students.”

“I'm also very upset about Bill 78. It very much impinges on our social rights. The whole point of living in Canada is because its supposed to be a democracy.”

Lan then asked what White thought about Bill 78. White responded, “There are attacks on the working class internationally. Bill 78 is a part of that. Look at events in Chicago and Egypt and Greece. All across the world, governments are inflicting massive repression in response to the working class rising up and challenging the bourgeoisie.”

Afterward, Lan thanked White for making him think about these issues.

Eric Lamothe, a 33-year-old professional musician, discussed his ideas on what would be needed to rebuild society. “We need a lot of people who know how to build. We can't solve problems by finding ways to make more profit. We need people. Everything is built on knowledge, and we need more of that.”

White responded by stressing the necessity for politics. “What is fundamentally necessary is a political leadership to fight for the working class, and a fight against the dictatorship of the banks.”

Eric agreed with the point on the banks, saying, “We're all under the control of the banks. The first step of the government against us has always been to attack culture and education, and then they do their best to take away natural resources and destroy them, like they are doing in Northern Quebec. It's because we all are in debt to the banks, including the government, and so they do whatever they want.”

White expanded on this point, “The governments are in the debt of the banks, but they are also the instruments of the banks, and inflict mass austerity on the working class to pay for the economic crisis while letting the banks hoard huge sums of money.”

Christophe Gauthier is a student involved in the Quebec student strike who is helping to organize a concert in opposition to Bill 78.

“We're holding this concert against Bill 78,” explained Christophe. “It will be performed by sixty student musicians, all whom have participated in the strike. It's entitled Requiem for Democracy because we feel that Bill 78 is the destruction of our democratic rights in Quebec. We want to challenge that.”

He also commented on the strike in general. “I'm glad that the strike has gone on for as long as it has. It's impressive for its size and breadth, and we have to continue the strike come August. There will be a lot of opposition from the university officials and violence from the police and security forces, but we have to stay strong.”

Julie Robitaille, a teacher in Montreal, spoke extensively on debt, the right to an education and democratic rights.

“My boyfriend just graduated from a university in the United States and has $60,000 in debt. Even with a decent job, he's never going to be paying that off. I just graduated from University of Quebec at Montreal (UQAM), and I'm $12,000 in debt. It's more reasonable, especially since I have a concrete job, but that's a rare thing. I'm lucky in that regard, in contrast to most people with a bachelor's degree who can't get a job.”

“Even with my job, paying off debts is still hard. There is a certain amount of help from the government, but with a job like mine, where the maximum salary is $39,000 and the starting salary is much less, paying off debt is trying. The banks don't want human beings, they want indentured servants.”

White discussed how conditions are similar in the US. “In the United States, charter schools are being used to privatize education. These are schools that receive public funds but are privately owned. They working conditions are terrible, with teachers having to teach classes of 40 students in some cases. In addition, the schools are in constant competition with each other so that they aren't closed down by the Obama administration.”

Julie talked about similarities in the British system. “I worked in the UK for a bit, and education was also bad there. I met 7-year-olds who couldn't read. It was really disheartening. Education, a good education, should be a social right. You shouldn't be forced to go to university to get a job just so you can pay back the banks. You should study because you want to study, you want to learn about the world and raise human culture.”

“This shows one of the many ways that democracy is being undermined,” said White, exploring the topic more. “In the US, the election campaigns of Obama and Romney will total three billion dollars. Both politicians are beholden to the banks and will make sure that their interests are defended through attacks on the working class in the form of even more austerity measures.”

“It's like that all over the world,” said Julie.

Julie then asked what the political content of the meeting would be about.

“It will be about building a political leadership for the student strike and the struggles of the working class”, responded White. The SEP seeks to build a political movement of the working class to challenge the banks. This means fighting for a program and perspective that isn't just focused on Quebec, but on the international situation as a whole, that sees the struggles of students here as part of the struggle against capitalism. This meeting will be discussing this and expanding on these ideas to build the leadership of the working class in Quebec, Canada and internationally.”

For details on the Montreal meeting, click here.


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Massive demonstrations in support of Quebec’s striking students
By Keith Jones
23 June 2012

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Tens of thousands took to the streets of Montreal and Quebec City yesterday to support the four month-long student strike against an 82 percent increase in university tuition fees and oppose the right-wing provincial Liberal government of Jean Charest.

According to the Quebec City daily Le Soleil, Quebec’s capital yesterday witnessed its largest demonstration since the strike began. Organizers of the Montreal march put the crowd in the order of 100,000 people.

The large turnouts attest to the government’s failure to break the strike despite an unprecedented campaign of police violence and the adoption of Bill 78—legislation that criminalizes the student strike and places sweeping restrictions on the right to demonstrate in Quebec over any issue.

The awareness that the tenacity and militancy of the strike and the groundswell of opposition to Bill 78 has rocked the government and Quebec establishment contributed to a spirit of festive defiance.

The size and composition of the demonstrations also underscore that the strike itself has become part of a wider social movement in opposition to the big business Liberal government.

Large numbers of workers and retirees joined the Montreal demonstration, although there were only a handful of official union delegations and these were quite small.

The unions claim to support the students and have denounced Bill 78. However, they have worked systematically to isolate the strike. No sooner did Bill 78 become law than the unions declared they would obey it, including provisions that legally compel them to do everything in their power to ensure that teachers and other union members assist the government in breaking the strike.

The unions, and the two student associations most directly under their influence and patronage, FECQ (Quebec College Students’ Federation) and FEUQ (Quebec University Students’ Federation), are openly seeking to divert the student strike behind the election of a Parti Quebecois (PQ) government. The Quebec bourgeoisie’s alternate party of government, the PQ imposed the greatest social spending cuts in Quebec history when it last held power.

Speaking Friday, FEUQ President Martin Desjardins declared, “The youth will change the face of Quebec in the next few years and will be called upon to mobilize massively at the next election.”

In recent weeks, spokesmen for CLASSE (The Broader Coalition of the Association for Student-Union Solidarity), the student association that initiated the strike movement last February, have spoken of the need for a “social strike,” in which the unions would play a central role in a wider opposition movement directed against other elements of the Charest government’s austerity program.

But the unions have rejected this out of hand. Confederation of National Trade Unions President Louis Roy has publicly rubbished the idea of a “social strike” and the province’s largest labour federation, the Quebec Federation of Labour, has proclaimed its central slogan “After the streets, to the ballot box.”

The unions’ vehement opposition to even limited job action against the Charest government was driven home by their effective boycott of yesterday’s demonstration in Montreal, which was organized principally by CLASSE.

CLASSE, for its part, did not seek to use the demonstration and the presence of tens of thousands of youth and workers, many of them actively looking for a means to broaden the struggle, to raise its call for a “social strike.”

Speaking at the pre-march rally, Yvonne Saulnier of Profs contre l’hausse (Teachers against the fee hike) denounced the government’s “user-pay” principle for public services and the dismantling of public education. “We refuse to accept,” said Saulnier, “that the business model is the only acceptable model for education and society. The university is not an enterprise and the more we fight the more we will stop it from becoming one.”

Arnaud Thierry-Cloutier, a Université de Montréal student and CLASSE member, said that at the time of the huge March 22 demonstration the idea of a “Maple Spring” was a “wish.” “Then came Bill 78 and the casseroles (pots and pans protest) movement and it became a reality with masses of people responding to our call for solidarity. Never has our movement had less support in the opinion polls and never has it been more implanted in the streets.”

The crowd cheered loudly whenever Thierry-Cloutier condemned big business. He charged the elite with seeking to “create richness at any price” and of “managing a state like one manages a Wal-Mart.”

Responding to the media’s denunciations of the students as “selfish” and mounting a “corporatist” struggle (i.e. one just for their group), Thierry-Cloutier observed that the strike had already cost most students more than the extra they would have to pay should the full 82 percent tuition fee hike increase be imposed. “The ones who always act in their self-interest and only their self-interest are the big businesses. They are the biggest corporatists in Quebec.”

“This,” he continued, “is not a strike for students’ interests. It is for the redistribution of wealth and now for revitalizing democracy.”

Neither Saulnier nor Thierry-Cloutier made any reference to the big business PQ and the campaign of the unions to divert the student strike behind the campaign to elect a PQ government. Nor did they point to the austerity measures being imposed by the federal Conservative government or those being imposed by capitalist governments around the world, let alone call for a united struggle against them.

Supporters of the Socialist Equality Party distributed more than 2,000 copies of a statement advancing a socialist program. It argued that if students are to prevail in their struggle to make education a social right, the strike must become the catalyst for a cross-Canada working class counter-offensive aimed at bringing down the Charest and Harper Conservative governments and developing an independent political movement of the working class to break the power of big business over socio-economic life through the establishment of workers’ governments committed to socialist policies.

The full statement can be read here: “The way forward for the Quebec student strike”.

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