Fourteenth week of protests

Quebec student demonstrators have a point.

by Stephen Block

Even after fourteen weeks of student protests, callers to talk radio here in Montreal, especially on the Anglo side, have trouble not comparing them to labour disputes. In fact many callers confuse them with union strike action. While there really is not much connection, the comparisons, albeit inadvertent, are nonetheless very illuminating.

First, student associations are very different from legally constituted labour unions. Unlike unions, student associations are not bound by a labour code. That's what makes this series of strike actions so interesting and socially important.

For unions to go on strike, they have to go through a lengthy period of negotiations, or lack of same and then, in essence, be given permission to strike. Indeed as labour theorists have pointed out, the whole idea of a labour code is to manage conflict. More and more, that aim translates into making it as difficult for unions go on strike as possible.

After delay after delay, all hope is crushed, collective bargaining is curtailed or denied, and power shifts to the employers, who are, at least in theory, themselves also bound by labour law. The outcome seems always to be the same: the public concludes, with aid of the media, that too much power lies in the hands of the rioting and unruly mobs who are simply making unreasonable demands.

In the case of Quebec under Charest, the growth of the student protest movement is exceptionally ironic. Not being bound by a labour code, organized students can pretty well do whatever they want, short of violence of course. That means they can continue pressure tactics well beyond the point where unions would have been ground down by penalties, sanctions and draconian laws — a game at which Charest is a master, or was until this year.

In this case, his potential reprisals are limited. All that the government can do is deny students their year. Many students have shown a willingness to make such a sacrifice.

Of course the media, beyond a certain point, never has talked much about the reason behind the protest, aside from reflexively pointing out that Quebec still enjoys the lowest student tuition fees in Canada, North America, the world, the cosmos.

A single voice here or there points out that this type of policy is what used to make Canada special; indeed its commitment to universal, more or less free education and health care is what once defined Canada. Quebec is unique in that it actually followed the advice of the Parent Commission report in the 1960's, thereby embarking upon a free Cegep (college) system, the goal of which was to offer every high school graduate the prospect of at least a nominal post-secondary education.

Today, while pretending to talk about a student protest over tuition fee hikes, and an exceptionally arbitrary fee hike at that, virtually every discussion in the media gets bogged down with comparisons to union strike action.

Mind you, most talk show hosts cannot even distinguish between a strike and a lock out. Most sports conflicts of late, for example, have begun and ended with owners locking out players. That detail has not impeded talk show hosts' enthusiasm for griping about greedy workers who cannot be bothered to show up for work, even at elevated levels of compensation.

As for the public service, the talk show hosts act like teachers earn as much as athletes. So do nurses. Economic literacy is not especially prevalent when it comes to these matters. And these caricatures spill over into discussions about students' protests.

Let's look at what sparked the student action. We see the same pattern as with the unions. The Charest government unilaterally and without consultation announced that it would increase tuition every year for five years, and quite substantially. Why? Because we have a deficit — and a deficit specifically in the education sector. And this is because? No one cares even to ask those questions.

If someone did ask the questions, they'd get a myriad of answers, ranging from investigations into contractors' extra charges, to expensive severance packages for university administrators, to claims students ought to pay their own way — even though their predecessors didn't, and now can afford to support the education others need to carry on.

Right! Drop it on the students, no muss, no fuss. Ignore the fact that the tuition increase won't lower the deficit much at all, much as Charest will look like the darling of the austerity crowd, as he always hopes to do.

Jean Charest is a very clever reactionary. The Anglo community does itself and this province no favour by supporting him, come hell or high water. He was and still is a Mulroney wolf.

Five or six years ago, when time came for the Charest government to begin serious negotiations with its public sector employees, it simply decreed the new collective "agreement". You might not have noticed, because most commentators assumed the workers were being legislated back to work. Trouble was, the workers were not on strike, and had not been, except for a half day here or there, during the entire period of non-negotiations and non-bargaining. In fact, that unilaterally decreed "agreement" is still in front of the courts.

This too is the legacy of Charest's reign. Until now he could find no willing partners for intractable conflict, no one as stubbornly resistant, as tenacious and unyielding as he. This is a variation on the old saying that the employer gets the union s/he deserves.

In this case, the union the Charest government so richly deserves is the student protest movement of Quebec. Only Education Minister Line Beauchamp's resignation on May 14 finally kicked the news media into noticing the students' resolve. These lowly students, unlike their union counterparts, have yet to be smashed and broken. More, they still know what's at stake when occasionally they join other protest movements — trying to save the planet from Plan du Nord or Alberta tar sands or casino banksterism, Wall Street style.

So what this little round of student action has done is bring back the very idea of pressure tactics. Although the demonstrators are not represented by any particular legally constituted organization, they are resurrecting what used to be guaranteed under Canadian and Quebec law: the right to use pressure tactics until a very bad and arbitrary employer wilts. In fact, going back to the 1930s, labour law was meant to provide employees with legal options against arbitrary actions of their employers.

Although Quebec unions now accept that laws are written to be stacked against them — with public opinion following suit in short order — students have yet to learn that bitter lesson. They fight on valiantly for the very important cause of universal access to higher education.

Charest, ever Machiavelli's fox, believed he would likely come out ahead simply by allowing the students to look like a spoiled, unruly mob of unappreciative truants who only wish to riot, cause trouble, and hold innocent people hostage. The one thing the Premier never addresses — which nearly all his predecessors held dear, or were forced to hold dear — is the great social experiment of providing universal access to education, which so many find worth fighting desperately to hold onto. That is what motivates so many young people to pound away at the will of a callous government that until very recently succeeded in crushing all opposition to its quiet austerity measures.

As a longtime observer of the labour scene in Quebec, I need not agree with the students nor their tactics to muse that they are doing something that countless organized workers with a lengthy history and tradition of resistance could not accomplish. The education minister resigned abruptly today and left politics. Perhaps the nastiness of the government's posture was simply too much to tolerate in good conscience. Or perhaps there was not much left of the stomach needed to be doing Jean Charest's dirty work any more.

In the meantime, of course Charest's handling of the "crisis" became more and more popular, as per his calculation, as the media and its mixed up metaphors continued to play down the reality and play up the worn clichés. By the end of this episode, whenever that may be, perhaps the mainstream media itself, especially the Anglo media, will be compelled to face the reality of what the student protests really mean and why their messages, plural, need to be more carefully listened to. We can only hope that part of that listening process will involve noting that it is time to stop supporting a government that has gotten so used to refusing to bargain in good faith, or to bargain at all.

The greatest hoax that the media has inflicted upon the public during this whole series of negotiated debacles is that it is Charest's counterparts who have been unreasonable and unwilling to negotiate. On the contrary. The problem is that Charest never expected to meet his match.

© Copyright 2012 Stephen Block, All rights Reserved. Written For: StraightGoods.ca