Translating the printemps érable

Pierre Desjardins, Montreal              August 11, 2012

Original French Text: http://www.ledevoir.com/politique/quebec/356690/les-couts-de-l-entetement

Politicians have been talking about money since the start of this campaign.  Isn’t it curious that no one is interested in the extraordinary sums being spent on public security in the last few months?  As a taxpayer, I would like to know exactly what I’m going to have to pay for Jean Charest’s sickening stubborn refusal to negotiate tuition fees with students.  We are talking about hundreds of millions of dollars in overtime, paid to municipal and provincial police to handle hundreds of demonstrations.  The cost is going to be higher than the amount of money the government hoped to bring in with the fee increase.  It seems like Raymond Bachand, the Liberal party’s back-room bean-counter, forgot to provide us with those figures.  

We all know that this strategy of refusing to negotiate with students is a big part of Jean Charest’s Machiavellian plan to win the election at the expense of the Parti Quebecois.  By letting the situation fester, at the expense of the students, Jean Charest hoped that his opponent’s support for the student cause would make the public turn a blind eye towards his own party.   If you trust the recent polls, though, it would seem that this foolish strategy did not work, and that our premier is stumped.  Good!  It doesn’t change the fact that his dalliances have incurred enormous costs for public security that we’re going to have to mop up at tax time.  The citizens of Montreal can expect the bill to be particularly bitter.  

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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.