Gabrielle Duchaine     August 1, 2012

Original French Text: http://www.lapresse.ca/actualites/dossiers/conflit-etudiant/201208/01/01-4561497-des-milliers-de-marcheurs-pour-une-100e-manifestation.php

PHOTO ROBERT SKINNER, LA PRESSE

(Montreal) Summer vacation hasn’t taken the drive out of the student movement. One hundred days after the first night demonstration against tuition hikes, and 12 hours after the official launch of an electoral campaign, thousands of casseroles and demonstrators took to the streets of Montreal Wednesday night. A warning to disperse was given by the SPVM at 10:30pm.

Even the famous Anarchopanda came to the head of the demonstration. He received a veritable ovation on his arrival, which galvanized the crowd, already feverish under a stormy sky.

Masks, a giant red square, mascots, flags, fireworks, whistles, scarves…there was everything, and there was a lot of it.

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La Presse Canadienne    July 3, 2012

Original French Text: http://www.ledevoir.com/politique/quebec/353739/droits-de-scolarite-delanoe-discute-avec-leaders-etudiants-quebecois

Jean Charest minimized the impact of this meeting. 

Caption: The mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoë, received the honor of Officer of the National Order of Quebec from Jean Charest today. Photo : La Presse canadienne (photo) Jacques Boissinot

Today, the premier Jean Charest minimized the impact of a meeting between the mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoë, and student leaders on the subject of the increase in tuition fees.

Before coming to Quebec to participate in the International forum on the French language, Mr. Delanoë had solicited this meeting with student representatives.

A few hours before receiving the honor of Officer of the National Order of Quebec from Mr. Charest, Mr. Delanoë met the leaders of the Fédération étudiante universitaire du Québec (FEUQ), the Fédération étudiante collégiale du Québec (FECQ) and the Table de concertation étudiante du Québec (TACEQ). 

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M.J.    June 25, 2012

Original French Text: http://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2012/06/22/carre-rouge-et-recomposition-politique_1723325_3210.html

“The strike still hasn’t found its electoral expression”, notes quite rightly Jean-François Lisée, director of the Centre d’études et de recherches internationales de l’université de Montréal (Cérium). The Quebec political landscape hasn’t, however, waited for the “maple spring” to start a slow recomposition, after years of bipartisanism accentuated by the voting method (for a single member at a time, like in the United Kingdom).

Since 1960, the Liberal party (PL, federalist) and the Parti québécois (PQ, pro-independence) have in effect taken turns governing. “In 1998, 90% of Quebeckers declared themselves members of the PQ or the PL. Today, no more than 43% do.”, notes the Institut du Nouveau Monde in Etat du Québec 2012 (Boréal). Brought to power in 2003 and reelected twice since, the center right Liberal party, lead by Jean Charest, has 64 of 125 members of the national assembly (MNAs). In surveys, a new group is biting into its electorate: created in November 2011, la Coalition Avenir Quebec (CAQ), 9 MNAs strong, is led by François Legault, ex-minister of education for the PQ, founder of Air Transat, and by another business man, Charles Sirois, with the vague plan of “proposing a unifying plan of action”, without taking a position on the national question. The CAQ approved the tuition increase as well as the special law.

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Joël-Denis Bellavance    June 20, 2012

Original French text: http://www.lapresse.ca/actualites/quebec-canada/politique-quebecoise/201206/20/01-4536841-loi-78-ottawa-vole-a-la-defense-du-gouvernement-charest.php

(OTTAWA) Twenty-four hours after adding its voice to that of the Charest government in denouncing United Nations critics with regard to the special law (78), the Harper government took grande measures to defend Quebec’s right to adopt the controversial law.

Industry Minister Christian Paradis made a motion to recognize the National Assembly’s right to adopt this law, adopted at lightning speed in hopes of ending the student conflict.

Mr. Paradis’ original proposal reads: “This House recognizes the right of the Quebec National Assembly, duly elected, to pass laws such as Law 78, within its jurisdiction.”

Conservative strategy was to force the New Democratic Party (NDP) to become muddled in the student conflict. This file is seen as a thorny issue for the party of Thomas Mulcair, as several of its MPs and activists come from the student community and some have publicly expressed their sympathy for the “red squares.”

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Antoine Robitaille   June 16, 2012

Original French text: http://www.ledevoir.com/politique/quebec/352673/les-ravages-de-la-polarisation

Not since the referendums has Québec been so divided.

You might laugh, but Pauline Marois had something of Pierre Trudeau about her yesterday. Over the course of this spring, she said, “many kitchens and living rooms in Québec have become sites of debate as heated as in our [parliamentary chamber]. I think it’s time for us to come together.” She also suggested that this summer will be a time for Quebeckers to “come together peacefully and joyfully” after a period of intense polarization.

She might almost have added Trudeau’s elegant phrase from the evening of May 20th, 1980, a time of another great political polarization: “If we take into account friendships broken, hearts scorched,  and hurt pride, there is no one among us who has no wounds in their soul to be healed over the coming days and weeks.” Jean Charest, also yesterday, wished that, after an intense spring, Quebeckers would at least celebrate la Fête nationale [St Jean Baptiste, June 24th], (which also happens to be Charest’s birthday…) “to maybe put aside the debates that have divided us” so as to “concentrate more on what we have that is important and essential, common values, the fact of being Quebeckers.”

Not since the great battles of the referendums has Québec been as divided as it is today.

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Patrick Lagacé    June 14, 2012

Original French Text: http://www.lapresse.ca/debats/chroniques/patrick-lagace/201206/14/01-4534781-une-theorie-a-cinq-sous.php

The further we settle in to this maple spring that’s slowly turning to vinegar, the more I feel I understand how entire societies can be sucked into heinous spirals. I understand more and more how a the Irish, Palestinians, and Israelis can think the things they do.

Quebec isn’t Northern Ireland; our springtime hubbub is not an intifada. What we call a social crisis is not the same as a fight over religion or territory, it’s still just, at its base, a matter concerning tuition hikes.

But it’s caused polarization so strong that one might think that this is about our fundamental identity. The ambient climate has been dirtied with verbal pollutant of a sort rarely heard in Quebec, where we’re normally so peaceful and even-tempered.

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By Rémi Nadeau (Agence QMI)     13 June 2012

Original French text: http://tvanouvelles.ca/lcn/infos/national/archives/2012/06/20120613-210238.html

The Charest government has spent $866,000 to promote its position on tuition fees in a large-scale publicity campaign.

The Parti Québécois (PQ) has vigorously attacked the minister for Education, Michelle Courchesne, accusing her of having wasted taxpayers’ money in a partisan operation  designed to boost her own interests.

“These advertisements are clearly Liberal electoral propaganda, paid for using public money, only months away from an election”, fulminated the PQ Member of the provincial assembly, Bertrand Saint-Arnaud.

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Pierre Saint-Arnaud   June 12, 2012

Original French Text: http://www.lapresse.ca/actualites/quebec-canada/justice-et-faits-divers/201206/12/01-4534002-la-loi-78-est-contestee-en-cour-superieure.php

On Tuesday, student associations have begun to elaborate their legal arguments to the opening of the hearings of the Superior Court of Quebec, which examines the first of two motions which aim is to ultimately overturn Bill 78, adopted on May 18.

This first motion, supported by 70 trade unions, social, environmental and community organisms, is a request for a stay of execution in order to suspend the application of certain provisions of the law, until courts study the issue thoroughly.

“If a year later, this law is found to be unconstitutional, there are people who will have been arrested and convicted while the law is unconstitutional. That’s the reason for the stay of execution request” explained Giuseppe Sciortino, lawyer for the Association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante (ASSÉ), during a break in hearings.

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Chloé Cotnoir   June 11, 2012

Original French Text: http://www.lapresse.ca/la-tribune/estrie/201206/11/01-4533653-loi-78-gaetan-arel-quitte-la-caq.php

(Richmond) The Richmond candidate from the Coalition avenir Québec, Gaétan Arel, announced his resignaion yesterday. The adoption of bill 78, with the support of the MNAs of François Legault’s Coalition avenir Québec was a determining factor in his decision.

“Jean Charest’s liberal party as well as the CAQ have not caught the fundamental message of the students and the population protesting in the streets today all over Québec. We should be proud of our youth who shake us a little and who push outside of our comfort zone and our collective torpor to tell us that they have had enough of being governed by incompetents who blindly indebt us,” he explains.

Gaétan Arel maintains that the adoption of bill 78 goes again democracy, freedom and its value of respect toward human beings. “Seeing our youth and my people get a beating for a question of political ego royally disgusts me. When our values and our principles of life are flouted we have to react and that is what I’m doing today in giving my resignation”, states M. Arel.

He mentions nevertheless that he is still greatly interested in politics, but that he will be more prudent in his next choices.

François Bergeron and Christophe Reutenauer, Professors at UQAM; Sylvie Hamel, Professor at the Université dé Montréal     11 June 2012

Original French text: http://www.ledevoir.com/politique/quebec/352279/l-illusion-de-l-election

For many, the only possible way out of the student crisis is simple: all that is needed is for the government to call an election. In the worst hypothetical case, let us suppose that the Charest government is re-elected.

The government would then believe that the tuition fee increase is entirely legitimate and that the students have nothing left to do but to submit to its commands. What will happen if the students refuse to do so? People will say that this is how “democracy” works, and that the minority must bend to the will of the majority. Regardless of this rather reductive conception of democracy, we believe that there is reason to expect that a large group of students will make a plea of inadmissibility.  In fact, such a response is quite legitimate in a real democracy, not least because there is every reason to expect that the question will not be debated in depth during an election campaign (if we judge by the very superficial level of past campaigns). Moreover, the vast set of problems which lie beneath the student movement, and the controversy surrounding law 78, run a great risk of being drowned in the great variety of issues which must necessarily be considered during an election.  In this sense, to vote for one party or another will not necessarily mean that one adopts all the positions of that party.

Rather than just putting our heads in the sand, an end to the crisis that is beneficial to the whole of Quebec society must pass, first of all, by way of a citizens’ forum (or “Estates-General”) on our universities: their future, their role, their funding model. It will only be after a broad consensus has been reached on a “quebecois” way of achieving the universities’ mission that we will be able to decide whether it is better to prioritize free tuition, or what should be the “fair” contribution of the students to the “cost” of their education.  It is essential that the students have a role [in this discussion]* if they are to embrace with enthusiasm the choice that comes out of [such a discussion], rather than being forced to accept a model of the university imposed on them by a few who believe themselves to have the monopoly on what a “fair” description of it should be.