The battle for democracy

Sandy White 


Caught up in the emotion and romance of their narcissistic movement, Quebec’s students have considerably overplayed their hand. Soon enough they will find that it was they who stacked the deck against themselves.

Weary of the protests, vandalism and the damage the students continue to do to Quebec’s image, public opinion has turned against them and sides firmly in opposition to the boycott. The students have now made themselves less popular than Jean Charest, which is a feat in itself.

Were an election held today as a referendum on the tuition question, it is likely that those who oppose the students would win. Even the Parti Québécois, after being admonished by none other than its former leader, Lucien Bouchard, has recoiled somewhat from their cause.





Although demagogues like Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois and his ilk can pontificate about the student movement being a bulwark against global austerity measures, this reverie is utterly misguided. He and his followers wilfully ignore the fact that acquiescence by weak governments to the unreasonable financial demands of groups like Quebec’s students are the very reason why austerity measures are being enacted to begin with.

Certainly no one likes budget cuts and the resulting lowered standard of living. But opposing austerity is akin to arguing against trimming one’s personal budget when the bills that you can’t afford to pay start to pile up. This head-in-the-sand attitude can carry on for a time, but eventually the collections agents will repossess your home.

But damn the facts; Quebec’s students soldier on to their idyllic Jerusalem of free tuition and “social justice” – whatever that means.

In their crusade, they have become one-part interest group and one-part mob. With their intelligent, well-spoken and professional leaders, they play the system much like the lobby groups they claim to loathe. But this facade conceals the other side’s masked anarchy, as much of the student movement has morphed into that which it supposedly deplores, trampling on the very democracy and justice to which it pays lip service.

The students are rightfully upset at university mismanagement and the ineptitude and corruption of the government. As they accurately argue, Quebec is in need of change. But the needed change is not the cradle-to-grave statism and anti-capitalism that some seek to impose. Nor is it the furtherance of a broken social-welfare system. And it cannot be achieved through intimidation by a jackbooted minority horde of students who seek to circumvent the democratic process.

With the students’ rejection of the eminently generous terms that their own leaders negotiated, they alone will be held responsible for the demise of their movement. The agreed-upon changes to the tuition-fee-increase plan made the increase more affordable than it was at the outset, and gave access to anyone wishing to enrol in post-secondary education through widely available loans and bursaries. But rather than being pleased about the concessions they achieved, which the government was by no means obligated to grant them, the students retreated back to a stalemate.

The smart move would have been for them to quickly mount the gift horse they were presented and ride it swiftly back to class before their semester escaped them (which is now a real possibility). Instead, they may be facing yet another vote – a provincial election whose overriding theme would be certain to be their cause. And this one they are almost certain to lose.

