5

PREPARING THE SOIL

In the Corridors of the Movement

We were born with the disillusions of an autumn

and grew up with the despair of a winter.

We are the children of a world asleep

beneath the snows of cynicism, of bitterness

and of individualism.

They called us land that bore little fertility, a generation laying fallow,

deficient soil, in short,

quite a meagre harvest...1

— Sébastien Moses, “De ventôse à germinal” (my translation)

The student movement was the heir to the Quiet Revolution’s democratic dream of Québec and the keepers of the commons, who embodied one of the last remnants of a time when social forces had the power to sway governments.2 In the Liberals’ push to accelerate the shift away from that legacy and toward a commercialist society, education was thus a central plank. The students lived these years on the perpetual defensive. So when government reports and comments by finance minister Raymond Bachand presaged the arrival of a new “cultural revolution” to Québec, they began to fear the worst was finally arriving.3 In the corridors, rumours circulated among the activist core that foresaw “a defining struggle for the survival of public and accessible education, and for the future of the student movement itself.”4 The rush to a war footing had begun.

In February 2010, barely three years since the last increase, education minister Michelle Courchesne spoke of a consensus emerging in Québec on the importance of raising tuition fees further — a “consensus” from which she explicitly excluded the students themselves.5 To the minister of education, it seemed, neither her mandate nor any notion of decency required that the primary ones affected by her policies be involved in the discussion. The stakes were simply too high for such petty concerns: “A tuition hike,” explains Éric Pineault, “epitomized the long-term changes sought by the élites: attacking the culture of gratuity and entitlement,” challenging Québec’s social-democratic exceptionalism and “consolidating a new model of the university as a corporatized research organization.”6 As goes education, so would go Québec: toward a landscape of consumers and investors, all competing for materialist advantage in the forums of the ultimate market society.

The establishment within:
The student movement’s divided currents

The ASSÉ saw the government’s long game immediately and launched a meticulous two-year process in preparation for an eventual general strike.7 The student federations, the FEUQ and FECQ, began their own campaigns by launching a petition on the site of the Assemblée nationale in the fall of 2010 that was submitted on December 9. It garnered thirty thousand signatures, representing a (then) record number for an official online petition in Québec.8 It made no difference. Two years before the $500 five-year increase decreed in 2007 had fully entered into effect, the Charest government convened a Rencontre des partenaires en éducation in which the Conférence des recteurs et des principaux des universités (CREPUQ) requested yet another, much sharper, round of hikes — and the premier quickly acquiesced.9 The labour unions and student federations, joined by the smaller Table de concertation étudiante du Québec (TaCEQ), which had recently formed,10 responded by walking out in protest, leaving only business leaders, the government and the CREPUQ to discuss the modalities of the hike amongst themselves.11 The ASSÉ, for its part, had boycotted what it decried as a public relations stunt aimed at legitimating a fait accompli, and organized a one-day strike to protest outside the meeting, which drew an estimated sixty thousand students.12 The 2010–2011 school year announced growing turbulence, as dozens of small student protests followed one after the next, cumulating in a large demonstration days before the release of the March 2011 budget. Fifty thousand citizens from across a wide swath of civil society poured into the streets that day, rallying around a simple message that channelled the hardening rebuke of the government’s there-is-no-alternative (TINA) rationale: “An equitable budget: a question of choice.”13

The different approaches of Québec’s national student associations revealed the conflicting currents within the student movement. On the one side, the FEUQ and FECQ operated from within the establishment and were the outflow of the same élite-based culture that produced the governing parties, and in particular the PQ. Transparency and information-sharing are more highly valued by the ASSÉ’s culture, which explains in large part the relative lack of indepth information currently available on the behind-the-scenes organizational and mobilization campaigns of the federations, and the resulting imbalance in the information offered here (Martine Desjardins is said to be publishing a book shortly, which we can hope will shine further light). What we do know at present is that in the 2012 campaign, the presidents and executives of the FEUQ and FECQ focused their strategies on person-to-person contacts within government and the opposition, and prioritized lobbying and participation in official negotiations over pressure tactics (although they engaged in both). While the government closed all communications channels with the associations at the start of the conflict in February, before and during the crisis the FEUQ and FECQ entertained regular contact with the opposition parties, and especially intimate relations with the leadership of the PQ. The Official Opposition became the eyes and ears of the federations in the corridors of power, providing intelligence on the advent of any tensions within Liberal ranks that were otherwise hidden from public view. The Opposition also served as their direct channel into the Assemblée nationale. The education critic for the PQ, Marie Malavoy, coordinated her questions in the assembly with the FEUQ, and both kept each other abreast of developments that could impact the debate.14

By sharp contrast, the ASSÉ (widened to become the CLASSE in December 2011) vigorously defended its independence from all political parties and positioned itself solidly outside and beneath the establishment in the same vein as Occupy Wall Street and the Indignados. The association’s culture of direct democracy leads it to a deep mistrust of the institutions of representative power and to a wariness of being co-opted, deceived or instrumentalized for partisan purposes.15 Instead, the horizontalist organization is built on a highly decentralized structure that empowers the local associations, and the ASSÉ invests its resources heavily in educating, engaging and training its base. While not always refusing negotiation (any more than the federations shy away from protests), their strategies favoured grassroots engagement and the mass mobilization of its members to apply pressure on the government from below.

The CLASSE’s contestational character became the focal point for tensions on numerous occasions during the conflict. They came to the fore at the end of Martine Desjardins’ term as president of the FEUQ in 2013, when she accused the CLASSE of having hurt the cause by encouraging violence and vandalism.16 This criticism, while facile and frequent, has always been incorrect. The diversity of tactics model defended by the CLASSE/ASSÉ, with its roots in the alter-globalization movement, upholds the legitimacy of a wide array of protest actions, which includes both economic disturbances (such as bridge blockades) and direct action (such as occupations of campuses or ministers’ offices). Yet pointedly, the CLASSE/ASSÉ draws its red line at violence perpetrated against individuals. They have no blanket position to either support or condemn acts of vandalism, but generally refrain from condemning such actions that, for example, target the property of multinational banks and corporations.17 Never did the CLASSE directly or indirectly encourage vandalism or violence during the spring of 2012. They were pilloried, rather, for not rushing to show revulsion at the minor collateral damage that is the inevitable outflow of a deepening social crisis.

This was in fact the triumph of government strategy: Every minute the media lights were aimed at the CLASSE’s position on violence was one that spared the government questions on the causes for the rising anger in the streets. Every microphone in Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois’s face was one far away from Jean Charest’s, sparing him scrutiny of the government’s responsibility for having let the conflict envenom for months. Prodded incessantly by the mainstream media, which sheepishly took up the government line, the CLASSE reacted with genuine disgust: For as its spokespeople were being tried publicly for not condemning a handful of broken windows — which they neither directed, nor encouraged, nor ever had the power to control — real physical violence was being meted out daily against unarmed protesters and with the wholehearted complicity of the political and economic establishment. The FEUQ and FECQ played the government’s game in consenting to the moral equivalency between violence against humans and property. Yet the CLASSE called the question the deflection that it was and tried to turn the spotlight back on the government’s sanctioning of force against civilians.

Frustrations over the CLASSE’s tactics were exhibited both during and after the strike by Bureau-Blouin and Desjardins, then presidents of the FECQ and FEUQ, respectively. Yet in hindsight, we can say that the former presidents doth protest too much. For when all is said and done, the unlikely complementarity between the CLASSE’s campaign and that of the federations produced the most important mass mobilization in Québec history.

The first student common front

By May of 2011, the ASSÉ’s campaign was well under way, and despite the important differences that opposed them to the federations, they were determined to prevent a repeat of the divisions that undermined the student mobilization in 2005. At the ASSÉ’s initiative, therefore, all student associations were invited to a Rassemblement national étudiant held in May 2011 at the Université Laval in Québec City. In an effort at devising a solidarity pact between the national (i.e., Québec) associations, the ASSÉ proposed an “entente minimale,” which included the following three deceptively simple yet astute clauses: that all national student associations refuse to negotiate if the government excludes one from the negotiating table; that the national executives commit to not recommending any entente to their members, instead allowing the local assemblies the first and final word; and that all national and local associations refrain from denouncing to the media the actions of other national and local associations.18

Renaud Poirier St-Pierre, who was the CLASSE’s press attaché during the strike, and Philippe Ethier, a member of the executive at the time, explain that the intention of the pact was to bring the FEUQ and FECQ closer in line with the more robust democratic practices of the ASSÉ. Most crucially, the second (or “non-recommendation”) clause sought to prevent the executives of either federation from announcing an entente before the local assemblies had a chance to consider it, as the FEUQ had done in 2005 much to the anger of its base. The pact caused an enormous amount of consternation in the ranks of the federations, and ultimately the FECQ ratified it while the FEUQ balked. In practice, however, it appeared the exact inverse: It was the FECQ’s Bureau-Blouin who ultimately criticized the CLASSE publicly for not condemning violence during the 2012 strike, and even offered to sit down with the government without them present on the pretext that they had thereby excluded themselves.19

Most important is that the significant tensions that existed within the student movement were ultimately confined to the corridors, owing to two young leaders with an uncommon sense of duty. The entente minimale had planted the seeds of a fragile common front, the first of its kind in the history of the student movement. Yet it was the student leaders themselves who would ultimately be charged with nurturing or neglecting the pact, and throughout the duration of the crisis, they who would be sorely put to the test. Independent of personal or ideological sentiments, thirty-year-old Martine Desjardins and twenty-one-year-old Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, of the FEUQ and CLASSE respectively, demonstrated a shrewd and unwavering grasp of the political necessity of maintaining a united front. The result, which prevented the movement from fracturing, was a Léo Bureau-Blouin of the FECQ who, despite numerous attempts to break ranks, ultimately found himself too isolated to go it alone.20 In spite of plentiful backroom dramas, the events of spring 2012 therefore publicly exhibited a student movement united in common cause for the first time since the schisms of the 1980s. The importance of this triumph for the success of the movement was enormous, as Charest discovered much to his dismay.

Indignation’s in the air this year

Following from the Rassemblement national étudiant, protest actions were stepped up by all three organizations, each in line with its particular character. On the side of the FEUQ and FECQ, joint sit-ins were organized every weekend throughout the summer of 2011 in front of the offices of the Ministère de l’éducation.21 On November 10, 2011,a demonstration organized jointly by the FEUQ, FECQ and ASSÉ drew a crowd of between twenty thousand and thirty thousand students in Montréal despite the rain, marking the second largest student protest in Québec history after the rally in 2005.22 More than 200,000 students were on strike throughout Québec that day.23 Yet the response from the government was swift and clear: “The hike will be maintained at all costs.”24 It was around this time that the ASSÉ began to talk publicly of the potential for an unlimited general strike for winter 2011.

From the perspective of St-Pierre and Ethier, this moment also marked a turning point in the campaign. Before, many of the ASSÉ’s local affiliate associations were virtually moribund, having been inactive for so long that even the most traditionally politicized members had trouble achieving a quorum at their assemblies.25 But an important shift was suddenly under way, and it was coming from beyond Québec’s borders: In the spring of 2011, massive student revolts had erupted in London against the tripling of tuition fees by the British government. In Chile that year too — where Pinochet, freed of democratic confines, had imposed one of the world’s purest iterations of the free-market educational model26 — the students mounted a historic mass mobilization to restore the democratic and civic nature of the system through demands for free and universal post-secondary education.27 All of this was happening as the Indignados were in the streets and occupying squares across Europe with their networked and leaderless movements inspired by Spain’s Democracia Real Ya. By autumn, the protests had travelled across the Atlantic in the form of Occupy Wall Street, which cascaded across North America and to Montréal where hundreds occupied Square Victoria (or “Place du Peuple”) in the heart of the city’s business district. Against this backdrop of worldwide struggles to reclaim the public good from powerful private actors, the organizers with the ASSÉ noted a surge in students’ attendance at general assemblies near the end of 2011. Suddenly, the assemblies were packed to breaking point.28 Something historic was under way, as the potent convergence of global currents was laying fertile ground for what would become the Printemps érable.

The ASSÉ, positioning itself as the natural heir to the Occupiers and Indignados, eagerly seized on the moment. Reviving a strategy from 2005, they formed the Coalition large de l’ASSÉ (CLASSE) in December of 2011, inviting in all CEGEP and university student associations (whether unaffiliated or already affiliated with one of the federations) who had voted a strike mandate, were governed democratically via general assembly and shared their longer-term goal of free university education.29 Contrary to the FEUQ and FECQ’s lengthy and bureaucratic processes of affiliation (and disaffiliation), the CLASSE was able to quickly widen its reach and influence, and initiate new local associations into its culture and structures of direct democracy. Much to the annoyance of the FEUQ and FECQ, who ardently opposed the CLASSE’s luring of their members (to the point even of refusing to accept the disaffiliation votes of local assemblies), the youngest of the national associations thereby became the undisputed motor of the 2012 mobilization.

The CLASSE’s structures simply extended those of the ASSÉ to encompass the new members. The national congress was held almost weekly during the strike and actively oversaw the actions of the executive to ensure close adherence to the decisions adopted democratically.30 The limited manoeuvring room of Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois and Jeanne Reynolds was reflective of their mandates during the strike as spokespersons rather than presidents. In his book Tenir Tête, awarded the Governor General’s Literary Award in 2014 (and soon to be released in English as In Defiance), Nadeau-Dubois explains how the distinction, to which the conventional media had evident trouble adapting, was far from merely nominal. In fact, at precisely the same time as Nadeau-Dubois was being lambasted in the press for not exerting “leadership” by condemning all violence, those within the CLASSE were actually taking him to task for taking too many liberties in his public stances, to the point of even placing his mandate into question.31 The distinction between the horizontal and hierarchical student associations was one of substance and quite patently, one of consequence.

A discourse of weakness, a discourse of revolt

At the moment the tuition increase was officially announced in the March 2011 budget, many of the ASSÉ’s affiliated associations were in need of rebuilding from the ground up. The national executive sent representatives onto campuses to find members to lead class-by-class tours aimed at introducing the local associations to students and to organize general assemblies to elect executives and approve action plans for the coming year. As St-Pierre and Ethier stress, the amount of organizational and educational work required was tremendous, and the ASSÉ was determined this time not to be caught off guard. Once the local associations were placed on a solid footing, they could move on to the crucial task of raising awareness and rallying the base through a rigorous line of argumentation. The main thrust of the CLASSE’s rhetorical offensive was to undercut the government’s TINA-esque insistence on the hike’s financial necessity by highlighting the government’s priorities. It was thus that the policy’s ideological underpinnings would be exposed. Throughout, the CLASSE’s discourse around this “choix de société” was heavily imbued with the language of Occupy Wall Street, and their anti-austerity protest that was fuelled by indignation at the control exerted by “the One Percent” over the democratic process.32

Following in this line, the daily class visits cast Charest’s multibillion-dollar Plan Nord centre stage to illustrate the government’s guiding values, and most especially its partiality to foreign resource-sector giants that came at the direct expense of its commitment to Québec’s students.33 Visits emphasized recent government decisions that removed billions of dollars from the public purse, ranging from years of corporate and income tax cuts to the rich, to the specific $1.9 billion decision in 2007 to abolish the capital tax on business and financial transactions.34 Representatives further pointed out that even if only the part applicable to banks were reversed, the resulting revenue would cover the full cost of free university education for every Quebecer.35 The issue of tuition fees was thus inscribed within the Liberals’ broader shift from progressive taxation toward flat user fees across all public services, with the direct result of deepening economic inequalities. In the wake of the Duchesneau Report in 2011, the stench of corruption overhanging the government served handily in the CLASSE’s campaign as well, and aided in completing the portrait of an illegitimate and self-serving élite — now challenged by the CLASSE in the name of “the 99%.”36

It was a sharp contrast from the economistic discourse of the two student federations, which limited itself to condemning the steepness of the hike for its impacts on educational accessibility and the budgets of “middle-class families.”37 From the release of the provincial budget, the FEUQ and FECQ adopted the government’s language to challenge the tuition hike from within the boundaries demarcated by the capitalist class. Their arguments accepted the basic premise of tuition fees as the mark of students’ contributions and objected only that students were struggling to make ends meet after having “already done their share”38 following from the 2007 increases. Yet according to all evidence, the progressive mantle they claimed in defending the living standards of students was the cannibalized and commercialized “social democracy” of the present-day PQ: The student federations argued for the importance of educational accessibility within a globalized knowledge economy where an educated workforce is seen as the key to attracting foreign investment.39

In its effort to combat the governmental premise of insufficient public funds, the FEUQ rightly targeted the mismanagement within the university network, most notably by spotlighting the exorbitant salaries of university presidents.40 The low-hanging fruit of waste and inefficiency seemed a bid at positioning the federations as reasonable in the eyes of a monetarist establishment. Yet targeting the academy’s own internal One Percent may amount to attacking the symptoms while neglecting the disease, and ultimately prove highly inadequate. Martine Desjardins has written, with reason, that the tuition hike was a betrayal of the legacy of the Quiet Revolution.41 Yet the discourse of the FEUQ and FECQ wholeheartedly endorsed the commercialist paradigm used to rationalize such hikes and accepted the necessity of the tuition fees that the same Quiet Revolution had promised to abolish. The casting of their arguments within the establishment’s language may well have been designed to attract the sympathies of the public at large, which skews toward the older generations. In any case, it certainly succeeded quite naturally at garnering them the label of “moderates” awarded by the corporate press.

From the grassroots to the horizon:
Building a twenty-first-century movement

The CLASSE’s campaign, by contrast, took direct aim at the market logic on which a tuition increase depends, and turned to the emerging tactics of social media-era movements to expand the mobilization as broadly as possible. Their robust argumentation and demands at the ready, outreach followed with the creation of an Internet site and with class-by-class visits, face-to-face mobilization and the massive production and distribution of informational material that included flyers, pamphlets, buttons and online videos.42 Petitions were used primarily as a mobilization and outreach tool by the CLASSE to build a preliminary database of supporters; only once significant numbers adhered to a petition could the true organizational work commence, and the CLASSE took pains to ensure that no step was initiated before students exhibited a readiness to proceed.43 Significantly — for it is indicative of the new era in Québec — the “question nationale” was evacuated from the discourse of all national associations, with the CLASSE consciously avoiding sovereignist (which is not to say nationalist) language for fear of alienating anglophone and federalist sympathizers.44

The escalation and diversity of tactics model embraced by the CLASSE was central to efforts at gradually amassing a wider and wider base.45 Beginning with petitions, it graduates to symbolic actions, then small-scale demonstrations, and then escalates to include limited strikes, direct action and economic disturbances. If all other measures should fail to sway the government, the final step is an unlimited general strike whose crescendo effect is achieved by freeing up students’ time and resources to mobilize en masse. The students, however, were not the only target of the CLASSE’s outreach strategies: Building networks and synergies outward was equally instrumental and was facilitated by the breadth of the CLASSE’s discourse, which invited solidarity across civil society.

The student federations, for their part, had also engaged in alliance-building, forming the Alliance social, which encompassed seven union federations, namely the Fédération des travailleurs et travailleuses du Québec (FTQ), Confédération des syndicats nationaux (CSN), Centrale des syndicats du Québec (CSQ), Centrale des syndicats démocratiques (CSD), Syndicat de la fonction publique et parapublique du Québec (CFPQ), Alliance du personnel professionnel et technique de la santé et des services sociaux (APTS) and Syndicat de professionnelles et professionnels du gouvernement du Québec (SPGQ).46 Where the conventional federations built ties to the union leaderships, however, the CLASSE — whose relations with the latter have often been frosty, since their defence of their members’ narrowly defined interests has served to undermine student mobilizations in the past — instead sought support from the labour grassroots, in a bid at exerting pressure on the leaderships from below.47 Outreach was also initiated with community, feminist, environmental and other groups in a bid at sharing best practices and nurturing networks of solidarity (feminism is one of the ASSÉ’s core orientations and was front and centre in their campaign owing to the disproportionate impacts of fee increases on women). Among the most important of the CLASSE’s allies was the Coalition opposée à la tarification et la privatisation des services publics, a decentralized coalition of eighty-five civil society organizations formed in 2010 to challenge the government’s austerity budget that year. The CLASSE was able to rely on the Coalition’s support on numerous occasions, both on the organizational front as well as with communications.48

The CLASSE executive envisaged a strike lasting approximately eight weeks (then a record in Québec) and circled the week of February 20, 2012, for its launch. The campaign necessitated an enormous degree of intelligence work, research and ground-level political organization. Specialized committees were created and together counted fifty members (and over a hundred volunteers) at the height of the struggle, including legal, communications and training teams, among others. The Comité pour le maintien et l’élargissement de la grève (for the maintenance and widening of the strike) occupied a particularly crucial role, sending more than twenty people every day to campuses across Québec to aid in the organization of strike mandates and to keep the troops motivated and mobilized through speeches to the general assemblies.49 The scale of the mobilization committee’s work was nothing short of tremendous, with one member alone travelling 60,000 kilometres in his car in the space of a few months — one and a half times the circumference of the Earth.50 One of the committee’s principal tasks was the construction of a database listing every vote result from every affiliate association, most of which held weekly assemblies to either reaffirm or revoke the strike mandates.51 The CLASSE was thereby able to keep its finger on the pulse of the membership and anticipate trouble brewing weeks in advance, allowing the executive to prioritize its support accordingly.52The CLASSE’s contestational campaign was in marked contrast to the strategies of the federations, which favoured less obstructive and symbolic fixed-term strikes in the place of unlimited strike mandates, which encourage an escalating mobilization.53 This explains why the strike’s peak arrived on March 22 when it attained 304,242 students during a national day of action launched by the federations, but why CLASSE affiliates demonstrated far greater resilience over time. For most of the spring, the CLASSE represented approximately three times the average number of striking students represented by the FEUQ and over five times the number represented by the FECQ.54 Despite the frames of the mainstream media, CLASSE affiliates were thus the overwhelming heart and muscle of the student revolt.

Courage to cast the dream: The messaging of the CLASSE

On the level of branding too, the ASSÉ had learned the lessons of 2005. The polysemic acronym for its coalition this time around, CLASSE, cleverly evoked the class-based interests behind the government’s austerity agenda, as well as their campaign for the right to education. It was a positive contrast to the maladroit selection of CASSÉÉ in 2005, which played to government attacks in evoking casseurs, the derogative French term for vandals or rioters.55 The red square was proposed as the emblem of the contestation by the ASSÉ as early as fall 2011 and was adopted by all national associations to highlight that students are “carrément dans le rouge.” This was another play on words invoking carrément’s dual meaning of “squarely” (literally) and “completely” (in colloquial usage) to signify a population that is “in the red,” or in debt.56 While substance was always the heart of the CLASSE’s messaging, they knew too well the power of image for their generation, and employed it astutely to strike the imagination and brand their cause with force.

The CLASSE’s mass media strategy was another area where the lessons of 2005 were instrumental.57 The contestational nature of the organization renders it naturally hostile to mass media (and vice versa), who are considered inherently conservative social actors by the CLASSE: too attached to and dependent upon the establishment and too prone to personalizing conflicts by attaching leaders to broad-based movements.58 In the particularly hostile environment of Canada’s corporate media oligopoly, this wariness was all the more entrenched. In 2005, this ambivalence prevented the CASSÉÉ from dealing with the media effectively, but by 2012 the lesson had been fully absorbed. Well before the strike was launched in fact, the CLASSE set to developing a sophisticated and innovative modus operandi for the media, which sought to turn the tables and place the students in control of their messaging. Where the conventional federations directed their media interventions at the broad swath of public opinion, the CLASSE decided to use mass media to mobilize five to ten percent of their most devoted sympathizers first and aim for the general public second.59 The strategy is one that stresses the importance of coherence and sincerity to an organization’s messaging, if even at the expense of being perceived as radical. Rather than fearing criticism, the CLASSE thereby invited it, and confidently embraced the full range of public debate that would follow. This also enabled the CLASSE to stay loyal to its stances and principles — a further aid to keeping a base motivated — without the need to cater toward a mushy middle or elusive majority of public opinion.60

In sum, the CLASSE made the highly strategic decision to play the game, but on their own terms. Press attachés (three at the height of the crisis) were made available twenty-four hours a day to respond to up-to-the-minute events and requests and maintain constructive contacts with the press. The strategy would at times call for intelligent manipulation of coverage as well, for instance by providing “exclusive” information to select outlets so as to guarantee front-page coverage. Frequent press releases, briefings and the entirety of the political milieu’s professional communications strategies were deployed to combat the governmental campaign and keep the spokespersons abreast of anything that could affect the movement.61 Students they may have been, but these Net Geners were no media amateurs.

Demonstrators strip down for a maNUfestation on June 7, 2012, at Place du Canada in Montréal.

On top of traditional media strategies, the CLASSE’s manipulation of mass media’s cinematic and photographic qualities — especially its affinity for the clip, soundbyte and image — revealed a shrewdly sophisticated grasp of the affective power of symbols and spectacle in inspiring and casting a movement. Members of the CLASSE often engaged in symbolic protests and those known as the “pseudo-event” in a bid at harnessing the qualities of mass media to construct a potent political imaginary. Some examples were the Kraft Dinner eat-ins to highlight student poverty, or more famously, the many maNUfestations where protesters stripped down to highlight the Charest government’s lack of transparency, evoke humans’ fundamental equality and contrast the heavily armed riot police with their own pacifism and vulnerability.62 Often, the CLASSE would issue a call-out to graphic design students, most notably at UQÀM’s École de la montagne rouge, to stamp the movement with a twenty-first-century revolutionary aesthetic.63 These were the apt pupils of Guy Debord, raised in a hypermediated age where representation had become its own reality. And more than just playing the media game, the CLASSE often seemed a few steps ahead of it.

The revolution will be networked:
The CLASSE’s social media campaign

The CLASSE’s mastery of contemporary communications tools shines through with even greater force when we turn to their social media strategies. Activists within the ASSÉ early on expressed reservations in relying on corporate-owned social media platforms, particularly flowing from privacy concerns. Yet having witnessed the power of Web 2.0 mobilizations with the Arab Spring, Spanish Indignados and Occupy Wall Street movements, they quickly recognized the enormous potential of social media’s unmediated sharing of content and information and its capacity to bestow autonomy to the grassroots of a movement.64 Reflections on the use of social media during strikes thus began as early as the summer of 2011, and by September of that year a member of the ASSÉ’s executive submitted a plan to the congress on a strategy for the coming campaign.65

Here as with other areas, the CLASSE, through a four-person dedicated social media team, demonstrated a keen grasp of the medium employed: More than broadcasting the organization’s own messages and information over Twitter, the team of tweeters engaged in constant debate with users online, posting articles and multimedia content related to the movement and creating the hashtag #GGI (grève générale illimitée, or unlimited general strike) to serve as the principal wire through which people could tap in to the movement.66 The CLASSE account was also a steady source of up-to-the-minute information, from assembly vote results to live press conferences, updates on government negotiations, media articles, images, videos and more.67

Significantly, the CLASSE knew to harness Twitter’s potential in nourishing synergies with sympathizers by engaging with them and retweeting their posts, thereby favouring reciprocity and solidarity between them. Rather than the unidirectional flow common to traditional political parties and media, the CLASSE understood social media’s distinctive character to serve as a forum and facilitator of networks.68 The results were clear and concrete: The CLASSE’s online presence in social media during the spring eclipsed that of all political parties, mainstream media and the student federations.69 The CLASSE’s broader approach to the Internet followed the same line too, with their website, Bloquonslahausse.com (“stop the hike” conjugated in the collective imperative) hosting an open calendar where members could freely post actions and activities organized in their campuses and communities. The CLASSE’s Web strategy thus fell squarely in line with their organizational, outreach and communications campaigns, which all came together to form a single and spirited thrust: to empower the base and favour the cause’s appropriation by the grassroots. It was felt that such a networked and horizontal movement — diffused and decentralized, self-reinforcing and self-propelled — would by its nature and structure be that much more motivated and that much harder to divide, discourage or defeat.70

Fuelling the dreamers, framing the debate

Many have criticized social media politics for producing what some call “cyberbalkanization,” where citizens “glue themselves into electronic enclaves” and find confirmation of their beliefs, thereby hardening and radicalizing into camps as a result.71 Yet in a context of acute media concentration like Canada’s, where the corporate press is often an echo chamber for the opposite side, social media can also become a crucial counterweight. In 2012, the autonomous space of the Twittersphere, its population heavily dominated by youth, became such a base of the pro-student left, serving to deepen and inform the convictions of those at the core.72 And by virtue of quite literally incarnating the future, the young carrés rouges were even permitted to believe, all hubris aside, that they fought on the side of history.

Such passion, when sincere and cogently defended with substance, can surprise with its force of persuasion. The more that Quebecers came to view the depth of what this struggle meant for the youth, the more those sitting on the sidelines were invited to reflect and choose their camp. Beyond the inevitable polarization that followed, the heart and fire that fuelled a generation’s protest brought a truly remarkable and more consequential triumph: In an age of debilitating cynicism, where the space for democratic debate is being persistently narrowed by market “imperatives,” Québec, for six long and intense months, came face to face with its image in the mirror. And for the first time in decades, the people were forced to question the most fundamental values on which society ought to rest.

If nothing else remained of the Printemps érable, this, alone, will have been worth the whole fight.