Translating the printemps érable

Original text: http://www.caomsc.qc.ca/

This morning your executive decided, unanimously, to strongly denounce Law 78, adopted by the government last week. This law is unprecedented in that it is now necessary to have the police’s authorization for any gathering of more than 50 people. Such a requirement is undermining citizens’ fundamental right to express themselves and to demonstrate in public.

Ultimately, this law could harm the actions taken by the trade union movement. It could become very difficult, for example, to demonstrate in the future against the PPP. Remember the events in 2005 when nearly 1,000 members from 1983 participated? Today, these demonstrations of our dissatisfaction would be illegal …

You have all heard about peaceful protests where police acted savagely against citizens. And even against customers at a bar’s terrace that had nothing to do with these events. These individuals could be your friends, your children or yourself!

Have you ever wondered how officers were transported to the sites of their aggressive interventions?? Unfortunately, we must regret that they used STM buses… Your Executive ask you to no longer transport police and consider other options.

We invite you to visit the following links so you can measure the extent of police actions. [see link for videos]

Translated from the original French by Translating the printemps érable.

*Translating the printemps érable is a volunteer collective attempting to balance the English media’s extremely poor coverage of the student conflict in Québec by translating media that has been published in French into English. These are amateur translations; we have done our best to translate these pieces fairly and coherently, but the final texts may still leave something to be desired. If you find any important errors in any of these texts, we would be very grateful if you would share them with us at translatingtheprintempsderable@gmail.com. Please read and distribute these texts in the spirit in which they were intended; that of solidarity and the sharing of information.