Citizens resist politics of austerity, push back right-wingers' assets grab.
by Ish Theilheimer
with YouTube video rant, produced by Samantha Bayard
While Stephen Harper's omnibus Trojan Horse garbage truck bill is painfully discouraging for progressive Canadians, at the same time, an amazing and encouraging story continues to unfold in Quebec with the student protests over student debt.
Although the majority of recent mass protests have been peaceful, a small faction of crazies has managed to tarnish the reputation of the other hundreds of thousands of protestors. The violent tactics and property crimes of masked "Black-Bloc" types have again attached the adjective "violent" to media descriptions of the demos.
After the revelations of agents provocateurs at the G20 protests in Montebello, QC, and suspicious photos from the G8 two years ago in Toronto, the activities of these people is highly suspect.
Ish Theilheimer's rant on Quebec student protests and the politics of austerity. Please view and share.
Whether they are police agents or just idiots trying to make trouble, these provocateurs make the brave actions of the hordes of legitimate protestors even more amazing. The violent loonies make it much more dangerous for people to turn out for demos both because of what they do and the way they escalate police violence.
The loonies also gave the provincial government excuses for the Draconian civil liberties infringements of Bill 78. Under this new emergency legislation, individuals who take part in demonstrations deemed to prevent someone from entering an educational institution are now being charged as much as $5,000 apiece just for being there. Student leaders can be fined up to $35,000, and union or student federation leaders can be fined up to $125,000.
What's amazing is the depth of popular support for this unnamed movement. Critics claim that students with an undeserved sense of "entitlement" are protesting a tuition increase that doesn't sound like much — compared with what students are paying elsewhere.
As Straight Goods News contributor Andrew Gavin Marshall reminded us last month , however, these protests, while triggered by arbitrary tuition hikes, are about far more.
"The core issue is debt," wrote Marshall. "With the average tuition at $5,000/year, the average student debt for an undergraduate in Canada is $27,000, while the average debt for an undergraduate in Quebec is $13,000." Moving Quebec tuition fees toward average Canadian levels will "bankrupt" his generation of students.
The cover of a recent issue of The New Yorker magazine featured a cartoon of university graduates in caps and gowns, stranded, like penguins who can't swim, on icebergs, presumably, of debt, afloat in a sea, presumably, of youth unemployment. The Quebec students are protesting being set adrift in this way. They're also outraged about being told to pay extra for what is both a necessity and a public good — higher education — as news emerges about hundreds of millions of dollars in corrupt government construction and other spending.
Quebec is always far ahead of the provincial pack, culturally and politically.
In many way, Quebec is to Canada what California is to the USA. The province is always far ahead of the pack culturally and politically. That's why tens of thousands of Quebeckers who aren't students are coming out to join the protest, at great personal risk.
It is heartening to see so many ordinary citizens there so fed up they are taking to the streets. Austerity politics has become dominant across Canada and around the world. The details vary from place to place, but the storyline is always the same.
We are told endlessly that social programs like public health care and education, which right-wingers always hated, have bloated deficits, made us all lazy and contributed to a sense of entitlement. The Establishment voices never mention how corporate tax cuts have combined with global trade deals — putting millions out of work — to suck treasuries dry here in Canada, in the USA and Europe. What a great way to kill government and all the good things it provides, like post-secondary education!
The Occupy Wall Street people got all this, and they started a worldwide movement. The Greek protestors got all this, and whatever government they get as a result may pull their country out of the EU, which economist Paul Krugman argues may be very beneficial for Greece.
The Quebec protestors get it too, and clearly, they are going to get a deal. Even more clearly, they've made a point. We hope that people in the ROC (rest of Canada) get it too, that job-killing, service-cutting federal and provincial austerity budgets are a real threat to their well-being and something worth getting mad enough about to toss out governments.
About Ish Theilheimer
Ish Theilheimer is founder and president of Straight Goods News and has been Publisher of the leading, and oldest, independent Canadian online newsmagazine, StraightGoods.ca, since September 1999. He is also Managing Editor of PublicValues.ca. He lives wth his wife Kathy in Golden Lake, ON, in the Ottawa Valley.
eMail: ish@straightgoods.com
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