For Pauline Marois, it was easy to put on the red square symbolizing the student “strikes” and have her Parti Québécois members of the National Assembly put it on as well. Maybe too easy.
Marois and the PQ know that even students who haven’t joined the walkouts are understandably unhappy about having to pay more for their education. She hopes that their anger at the Charest government will rouse them from their usual electoral apathy to support the PQ.
Apparently she calculated that merely promising to cancel the Charest government’s tuition-fee increases wasn’t enough. In a show-don’t-tell age, when more than ever a screen shot is worth a thousand words, she wanted the PQ to show its solidarity with students.
Hence the red squares conspicuous on the suits of Marois and her PQ MNAs whenever they appear on television, a constant, non-verbal message for the students to see. Trouble is, everybody else sees the red squares too. And increasingly they are putting the PQ on the wrong side of public opinion.
Since the start of the student walkouts two months ago, polls have consistently suggested that more voters side with the government than with the students. And as the students’ protest tactics have become more disruptive and destructive, support for their position has declined.
On Tuesday, the Journal de Montréal reported results of a Léger Marketing poll in which only 38 per cent of voters favoured the students’ position, their lowest level of support since the walkouts began.
Léger pollster Christian Bourque attributed the drop to the protesters’ tactics. “The Québécois don’t like disputes, so seeing a movement become more radical risks displeasing them,” he told the Journal.
Increasingly, those tactics target not only the government but also the general public – especially working people. There have been disruptions of rush-hour traffic and acts of sabotage interrupting service in the métro, a mode of transportation not generally favoured by university rectors or Jean Charest’s rich businessmen friends.
The apparent purpose of such acts is to turn a public that values social peace against the government, so that it will cave in to the protesters’ demands and order will be restored. So Marois and her MNAs find themselves wearing a symbol that has come to be associated not only with opposition to the fee increase, but also with the tactics being used by the opponents against the public.
For example, on Wednesday morning, commuters trying to get to work on the métro’s Green Line were delayed when a smoke bomb was set off in a tunnel between two stations (in a provincial riding represented by the PQ). One witness said the person who set off the smoke bomb was wearing the red square.
The trouble with a non-verbal symbol such as the red square is that its message lacks nuance, and is open to interpretation by whoever sees it.
The red square might not mean to voters what it meant to Marois when she put it on. They might see Marois to be expressing unqualified support for the protests.
By putting on the red square, Marois has made her party hostage to a movement that increasingly appears to be led by its most radical elements.
But if she and her MNAs remove the red squares, it will be noticed (as it was when Marois briefly removed hers to deliver a speech in Montreal on Thursday). And it will be interpreted as the PQ abandoning the students and admitting it made a mistake by supporting them.
Marois must hope that the students will return to class soon. Because while putting on the red square was easy, taking it off might not be.
Following up my column last month about David Smith, the unilingual anglophone executive who was made a scapegoat by being publicly humiliated, demoted and banished from the Montreal head office of a subsidiary of the Caisse de dépôt:
Daniel Fournier, the executive who last year chose Smith for the latter’s former post over two experienced, bilingual francophones, still has his job. Not only that, the Caisse’s 2011 annual report, published on Wednesday, shows that last year Fournier was paid a performance bonus of $1.3 million.
dmacpherson kDz montrealgazette.com
Twitter: kDz MacphersonGaz