Translating the printemps érable

Canadian Press                    June 10, 2012

Original French Text: http://www.ledevoir.com/societe/education/352104/les-etudiants-doivent-maintenant-miser-sur-le-malaise-de-la-population-dit-la-fecq

The FECQ plans to continue mobilizing over the summer, but this mobilization should now be focused on the malaise expressed by Quebeckers, according to new FECQ president, Éliane Laberge.

This is the assessment made by the members of the association during their congress this past weekend.

The congress was an opportunity for FECQ members to gain some perspective on and update their campaign against tuition hikes, now over 115 days long

Laberge believes that the student movement is entering a new stage, but that it will still be possible to “keep the population engaged” during the summer. Her group will be launching a large mobilization between June 17th and 22nd, which will culminate in two large gatherings in Montréal and Québec. Students will also be participating in mobilizing and awareness-raising in different festivals in Québec.

Laberge is confident that activists will respond to the call “with as much joy as willingness” when last-minute events are proposed. The FECQ president also reacted to criticisms of CLASSE put forward by the former leader of the Bloc Québecois, Gilles Duceppe, saying that she was not there to “judge [her] comrades” and that different people (and organizations) will do things differently. She added that all Québecois citizens, including Mr. Duceppe, had the right to their own opinion.

When questioned about the strong police presence in Montréal during the Grand Prix, Laberge invited her members to “rise above the chaos” and to not “act like the government is acting.” Despite her urging cegep students to not respond with violence, she admits that repression inevitably leads to confrontations.

Laberge reiterates that the government of Québec was not using the right methods to resolve the conflict, saying that it would have been far better to “discuss and be open” to end the crisis.

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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.