In the last provincial election, in 2008, the turnout among voters ages 18 to 24 hit an all-time low of 41.2 per cent. The office of Quebec’s Directeur général des élections called it a catastrophe, and properly so. The apparent lack of engagement of young Quebecers was rightly a cause for concern.
But that was before the large-scale “strike” by thousands of students in the province against the Charest government’s proposed tuition-fee hike of $1,778 over seven years. It’s a whole new game now.
With a provincial general election looking likely for next month, young Quebecers are starting to mobilize in a way they have not in decades. Those who have been the most active in the protest against higher tuition fees now have a clear political objective – the defeat of the Charest government.
CLASSE, the biggest and most militant of the three large student organizations, threw itself into the political arena this week, issuing a manifesto and announcing its plans to campaign heavily in Liberal ridings where voting results were close in 2008.
This is a legitimate, and logical, action for CLASSE to take. It is preferable to apathy and disengagement, and preferable to the kind of street action and thinly veiled sanctioning of violence that the organization under spokesperson Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois engaged in last spring.
Whether or not Quebecers agree with higher university tuition fees, all Quebecers should see reason for optimism in CLASSE’s plan, as outlined in a news conference Thursday, to start on a new course of action, geared toward influencing public policy primarily through the voting process.
One can hope some of those young people who have been organizing on behalf on CLASSE and the other student associations might even present themselves as candidates. True, they’re still just students but on the other hand the principal leaders have shown themselves to be intelligent, personable and well-spoken .
In its “manifesto,” CLASSE (which stands for Coalition large de l’association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante) says, “We are the future,” and it goes on to outline a vision for Quebec that is clearly on the political left, even more to the left than the Parti Québécois has traditionally been.
Again, whether Quebecers agree or not with CLASSE’s claim to represent the future, it is important that young people see themselves that way. And it matters enormously that they move beyond a kind of obstinate, disruptive protest to real involvement in the political process.
As they campaign for support among voters in targeted ridings throughout Quebec, CLASSE will come face to face with a major political player in Quebec: ordinary middle-class voters. These are the voters who will decide the next election. They are sovereignist and federalist. They are on the political right and the political left. They are young and they are old. And if they are young, and if they are students, two-thirds of them weren’t involved in the student class boycott and they stand as evidence that one must be careful not to generalize when it comes to “the students” in Quebec.
Very likely CLASSE is going to find something out in the coming weeks as it embarks on its pedagogical road show: Politics is the art of compromise. It’s about trying to balance competing interests and of doing one’s the best for the greatest number of people.
Up to this point, student protesters have kept it simple, just marching and protesting. It is to their credit that some of them have now moved forward to engage with fellow Quebecers and the political process.