Translating the printemps érable

Joël-Denis Bellavance & Martin Croteau                 June 19, 2012

Original French Text: 

(Ottawa) The Conservative government has made a grand gesture to defend Quebec’s right to have adopted Law 78, a measure aimed at stifling the student conflict. What’s more, the conservatives are challenging opposition parties to follow its lead. Stephen Harper’s lieutenant in Quebec, Christian Paradis, introduced a motion to this effect a few minutes after entering the House of Commons on Thursday.

“This Chamber recognizes the right of Quebec’s duly elected National Assembly to adopt laws, like Law 78, within its areas of jurisdiction”, stipulates the motion. Christian Paradis is also the Minister of Industry.

This decision comes 24 hours after Quebec and Ottawa had each had to brush off criticism from the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. In a long discourse on the state of human rights on Monday, Navi Pillay said he was “dissappointed” over the Charest government’s adoption of a law restricting the right to protest.

The strategy of the conservators is to force the New Democratic Party to defend the sovereignty of the National Assembly, which adopted the controversial law in the hope of putting an end to the student conflict which has been raging for several months. The issue is a troublesome one for Thomas Mulcair, as many of his deputies come from student backgrounds.

Some of these deputies have publicly expressed their sympathy for the student casue. M. Paradis asks for the unanimous consent of the House of Commons for his motion to be adopted, beginning on Tuesday.

More details to follow.

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Translated from the original French byTranslating 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.