[Multitude Project] The days of Charest's government are numbered

[Blogger]

In this post I present my own analysis of the current situation in the Canadian province of Quebec. My conclusion is that PM Charest will be forced out of power within days, the cause being the conflict between his government and student organizations, over the increase of tuition fees.

There is a lot of material available on the student movement in Quebec. The aim of this post is not to describe the situation, but to provide some analysis in order to speculate on the near future.

The conflict between student organizations and the government of Quebec enters a new phase. This transition is caused by a new special law, Bill 78, recently adopted. This law, which expires next year, is heavenly criticized by the general population and even by serious organizations:

Louis Masson, Bâtonnier of the Bar, said Bill 78 does not balance rights, suggesting the government should have taken another course to deal with the tuition-fee dispute.
“We have serious concerns about this bill and the bill infringes many of the fundamental rights of our citizens,” Masson said.
“We must respect the rule of law and we must respect the orders of courts and we must also respect all the fundamental rights that we have; the right to peacefully protest, our liberty of expression and the liberty of association.” [The Gazette]

The argument of the Government for this measure is that it will diffuse the movement and help reestablish the social order. As soon as the law was adopted the students' reaction was very clear. The general sentiment I felt through mainstream and social media was that this gesture of the government, to use the law to force the students down, was only aggravating the situation. The current situation is the streets of Montreal clearly shows that this sentiment is now materializing. The intensity of protests has increased since the bill was passed. The government stands its ground, saying the this law will provide the necessary tools to calm the conflict. The reality shows that this law has the opposite effect. The media is now directly questioning the strategy of the government.  

Question: Is the government so naive not to see what everyone saw before they passed the Bill 78? Was this a mistake or a calculated risk, for other future gains?

The situation becomes very complex, and I see it rapidly spiraling towards the collapse of the Liberal Government.

First, well over 10,000 people marched through the streets of Montreal Saturday night chanting "la loi speciale on s'en caliss" (i.e. your special law, we don't f***** care), and calling on Charest to resign, among many other things.

This is IMPORTANT. It shows that the Liberal Government has lost it's moral authority. It is now incapable of restoring order. We have a government using the law instead of politics to solve a social problem, and the population choosing not to obey the law, basically telling the government to go f*** itself. We've seen the same energy and the profound disrespect for the government authority in Tunisia, when the people started chanting (for Ben Ali) "degaje!" (i.e. get the f*** out!).

Second, it seams to me that the city of Montreal's mayor is not very happy with the way the provincial Government is handling the situation. Gerald Tremblay is in charge of the city and wants to restore order as soon as possible. It is now clear that the Bill 78 has the opposite effect. There is the mask rule recently adopted by the city, which is also a desperate effort of the mayor to restore order, highly criticized in the streets. But the main issue is the special law adopted by the provincial government. When it comes to apply and enforce the new provincial law, I sense some tension between the provincial and local governments, and their respective forces. The SPVM (Montreal municipal police) is basically doing all the hard work on the streets. They understood very rapidly that the Bill 78 will only increase the tension. They are now basically steeping back from enforcing the provincial law, putting the entire burden on the SQ (the provincial police). This tension is NOT very clear on mainstream media, but it is not entirely invisible. In one interview to LCN, mayor Tramblay didn't make any reference to the provincial law, he only spoke about his police and about enforcing mask rule. In other words, Charest's government relies ONLY on his SQ to apply his special law, which makes the task impossible. Charest finds himself isolated, unable to have the population obey the new law and unable to enforce it. Charest is a lame-duck PM, waiting for members of opposite forces to jump at his jugular.  

Panda, the mascot, defies the municipal mask rule, police tolerates...

Third, the pressure on Charest also comes from outside of Quebec. Quebec is known to be the province with the lowest student tuition fees. Students in Ontario, next door, are in the worse position (see tuition fees across Canada). They are now talking about joining this struggle. The conflict in Quebec can easily spill over to other Canadian provinces, within a demographic that was already sensitized by the #occupy movement.

We know from our sources that the association between the student movement in Quebec with the broader occupy movement is feared by the elites. There were serious discussions among local business leaders to stop the fusion of the two movements, to keep the student struggle focused on the tuition issue. But the reality shows that the bond between the two movements is only getting stronger. The terms "Printemps Quebecois" and "Printemps Erable" are now widely used to talk about the situation in Quebec, with clear references to the Arab Spring. La Classe itself, the sexiest of all the student organizations involved in this struggle, is a direct democracy. The government is very conscious that it's problems are much wider. Those behind the government, the shadow forces that undermine our democracy, must also understand the situation. I think these factions are stating to panic, because they don't have a clear understanding of what could come after a representative democracy and after capitalism. They need to understand that it is not the end of the world, just the end of an era and the beginning of a new one.

By t!b!

By AllOfUs

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Posted By Blogger to Multitude Project at 5/20/2012 01:49:00 PM