What does Quebec want? It was a pressing question some time ago, when constitutional tinkering was in vogue, but hasn’t been heard much in the intervening years. Yet now the question looms starkly, and it begs to be answered by Quebecers.
This was driven home by Thursday’s concerted attack on the métro that shut the system down, disrupting the lives of tens of thousands of Montrealers. It was an attack on a vital public service – in effect, an attack on the general public, on us all. Thus all of us now, all Quebecers, have an obligation to reflect and decide – and let it be known – whether we want a society governed by democratic rule and a legitimate system of laws, or whether one governed by the dictates of mobs and vandals. If any good comes of this outrage, it will be to make it clear that this conflict over tuition fees has brought Quebec to a societal crossroads.
The crippling of the métro may or may not have been perpetrated by boycotting students. But it happened in the context of the student revolt, and would probably not have happened in the normal course of Montreal life. So the students who have pushed the confrontation to this intolerable point will find themselves rightly wearing some of the blame.
Some hard facts have to be faced by reasonable and rational people in this province – which, it would appear, excludes the leaders of the student rebels and their hangers-on, like the artistes engagés taking advantage of the situation to polish fading street cred.
The boycott movement has thoroughly discredited itself by any reasonable measure. It has rejected all compromise, even when the government bent to sweeten its proposal. It has made a mockery of democratic practice, both by seeking to intimidate the government with mob tactics and in its own assemblies, with dubious voting methods and sparse turnouts for votes. (On numerous campuses, votes to reject the last government offer have passed with fewer than a quarter of student-body participation.) Student leaders, meanwhile, showed themselves unworthy of trust by reneging on an agreement they had signed at the first hint of blowback from their ranks. And this despite the fact that it was an agreement that for practical purposes ensured that no deserving student would be denied higher education for financial reasons.
Thoroughly unhelpful contributions to this mess have come from other quarters, including the Parti Québécois leadership, which all along has advanced no better suggestion than that the government appease the mob ever more. And then there’s Quebec solidaire’s Amir Khadir, who persistently asserts that the government is inciting mob violence by holding to its reasonable decision to raise tuition rates.
Khadir is also stridently calling for an inquiry into police tactics in response to last weekend’s violent assault on the Liberal Party meeting in Victoriaville. He makes no mention, though, of an inquiry into who started the fracas, or who was throwing bricks and billiard balls at the police, or who administered the beating to an officer who strayed too deeply into the crowd. One can certainly question the Sûreté du Québec’s use of plastic bullets. But it was clearly the protesters who incited the violence, and it was incumbent on those who sincerely wished to protest peacefully to back off as soon as it broke out and to discourage their fellows bent on mayhem.
The time has come for true majority rule enacted by Quebec’s democratically elected government backed by a decisive majority of Quebec’s citizenry – something that the latest polling happily shows is shaping up. It is evident by now that no accommodation short of abject surrender will becalm the student mob. It is up to the government to draw its own line, and to draw it hard. Students who wish to attend classes or exams should be enabled to do so, if necessary by law-enforcement authorities. Students who wish to keep cutting classes in defiance of a deadline to return should have their semester scrubbed. And teachers who don’t show up on the job should have their pay suspended.
An assertion of the lawful and legitimate order of things would be in the long-term interest of all Quebecers.
It would take some concentration of the Québécois mind, to be sure. The kindest thing that can be said about the folly of the student rebels is that the blame rests in large part with their parents. The students have grown up in a Quebec society defined by a culture of collective entitlement at others’ expense: limousine services at bus-ticket cost to the beneficiaries. It is a society where past governments in succession caved in to special-interest groups that could incite a sufficiently threatening mob. It is perhaps understandable that they might think that if it worked for their parents’ generation, there’s no reason why it shouldn’t for theirs as well.
But it is madness to repeat now what was foolish then. It may take a certain wrench of the collective mindset, but in light of the current situation, Quebec must decide in short order what it wants, now and for the future: order or anarchy.