8

FOR THE FUTURE, FOR US ALL

A Generation’s Struggle to Rescue the Commons

you don’t want to sleep anymore

the visions have seized you

sufficiently

you dreamed of a dazzling world

and you returned to us

blind and collapsed

lend your ear

our steps call to you from the possibilities

of a shared insomnia1

— Zéa Beaulieu-April, “Entre l’amorce et la suite” (my translation)

With the student mobilization fast exploding into a full-blown social crisis, Jean Charest organized a “job fair” in the heart of downtown Montréal to promote his Plan Nord. The temeritous move painted a massive bull’s eye on the Palais des Congrès where the event was being held. Three separate protests targeted the event, where a growing throng of angry demonstrators massed outside as indigenous activists, anarchists, organized labour and members of the CLASSE converged to soon outnumber the ill-equipped police that were guarding the site.2 Before long, a group had penetrated inside the underground parking lot, as protesters smelled their rare advantage outside and rained stones down on the police contingent to beat them into retreat. For four hours straight, the riot at the Salon du Plan Nord rattled many with the intensity and resolve of demonstrators that was unlike anything Montréal had ever known.3 As the fierce street battle raged outside and protesters were poised to gain entry into the building, Charest, standing before a room full of white-collar executives and corporate investors, ventured a light-hearted jab at the violent unrest that their gathering had so thoughtlessly sparked: The meeting, quipped Charest, was so popular that “people are running from all sides to get in.” And indeed, pursued the premier, it was a good occasion for job-seekers and students in particular, who may find opportunities — “in the North, as much as possible.”4

Instantly, the premier’s indelicate Gulag-esque evocation sparked a firestorm in the press, in social media and among the opposition parties, who were all utterly incredulous at his aggressive lack of decency and judgment.5 The Radio-Canada clip of Charest’s joke went viral to become one of the most watched YouTube videos of the strike, and had been viewed over 411,000 times by March of 2014.6 Fuel had been thrown once more onto the flames with what seemed like such gleeful, and inexplicable, abandon, as the street chanted back its irreverent retort: “Charest, dehors! On va t’ trouver une job dans l’nord!” (“Charest, out! We’re going to find you a job in the North!”) Fortunate enough for the carrés rouges, Charest’s sense of timing proved nearly as astute as his sense of humour.

#22avril: For the common good

Simmering beneath the surface of the contestation from the start, Charest’s controversial Plan Nord had invited itself forcefully into the crisis mere days before the arrival of the second national march on April 22 — Earth Day, 2012. With the student crisis at its height and the Liberals’ fire sale of Québec’s natural resources now front and centre, the released torrents of unrest converged on Montréal as the Printemps érable grew outwards to fully assume its lofty moniker. Sixteen red maple trees were planted that morning at the base of Mont-Royal by the École de la montagne rouge. Once grown, they will form a perfect square that will endure as a natural imprint of the spring of 2012.7 The force of the symbolism punctuated the historic moment. That day, a seemingly endless throng of 250,000 to 300,000 citizens flooded the city streets. They converged on the mountain, as the ubiquity of red rivalled the green slogans of the traditionally small Earth Day processions to announce that the protesters were one and the same.8 The people marched for public education, for the Earth and then for more: They marched, in the words of the protest theme, “for the common good.”9 On that Earth Day of a spring awash in red, the sea of colourful and creative slogans spoke eloquently and imaginatively to the thread of a unifying narrative: “Le combat est avenir,” proclaimed the newest set of placards signed by the École de la montagne rouge. Not for us but for the future, and the real fight is still to come.

Faced with a second outcry from the streets that surpassed the prior shattering of all precedents only a month before, the government at last conceded it could remain silent no more. The following day, as Amnesty International issued a pointed plea for Charest to cease all violations of the rights to free expression and peaceful protest, Line Beauchamp announced the imminent launch of negotiations with student representatives and the inclusion of all topics — and all actors.10 The crisis had just entered its tenth week.

The democrats at the generals’ table

The show of humility was fleeting, however, as the government’s obsession with stratagems resurfaced almost instantly: The student associations would be allowed at the table only after condemning the protesters’ “violence,” and they would have to observe a forty-eight-hour truce on all “economic and social disturbance” activities or else risk being excluded. “Obviously, the envisaged truce is unilateral: Never will there be any question of withdrawing the police from the streets.”11 The federation heads, with their full decisional authority independent of their base, immediately agreed to the government ultimatum. The glare of the spotlight was aimed directly at the CLASSE, as their members debated for hours in a special meeting convened to decide on a response. Eventually, the CLASSE congress voted a “classically humanist” compromise that pointedly rejected the equivalency between material property and human life, denouncing only violence directed against individuals except in cases of legitimate self-defence.12 Yet on the public relations front the government had won the day, exploiting the slowness of their ultra-democratic procedures to again present the CLASSE as violent radicals and its spokespeople as lacking in leadership. The autocracy of the status quo is admittedly more efficient.

Succumbing to enormous pressure, the CLASSE executive went against its own nature in trying to suspend its members’ actions, but to no avail.13 To all evidence, the movement no longer belonged to them, if indeed it ever did. It belonged to the youth. By mid April, the great majority of protest actions and economic disturbances had in fact become entirely autonomous from the student leaderships, as Nadeau-Dubois relates in his book Tenir Tête. With many of them anonymous, even to the CLASSE, it became “impossible — as much for the police, the media, the CLASSE and its spokespersons — to know who is responsible for which action and what is the target.”14 In short, this social media-era mobilization had little to do with the world imagined by the Charest government. And as the Collectif de débrayage relates so eloquently, the Liberals’ demands only served to shine a piercing light into the political culture of another age.

With this idea of a truce, we’re transported suddenly to the era of the civilized wars, where we agreed in advance on the time of the battle and the weapons allowed; where peace was negotiated between generals around a cup of tea and biscuits.[…] Its transposition to a strike context, in the face of an adversary like the CLASSE, amounts to conceiving of the levers of resistance to power through the same model as that power itself; to consider it as a competing sovereign, disciplining its troops, directing their aspirations and launching their actions by a pyramidal network of authority.[…] Yet the movement that’s emerged at present is by all accounts without a head.15

Pushed to mould itself to the frames of a top-down political culture that didn’t fit, the CLASSE’s membership fiercely rebuffed the affront to their autonomy. “Never were we consulted about the ridiculous truce proposed by a desperate minister,” fumed one group that launched a call on Facebook for an “ostie de grosse manif de soir” (loosely: “a fucking huge night demo”). That call drew twelve thousand angry protesters into the streets on April 24.16 “Will the injunctions also hold a truce, will the administrations suspend their courses, will the police stop their investigations and their repression that are dragging our comrades through the courts? WE ARE WINNING. No time to stop.”17 The government saw the protest call posted online to an unmoderated open-source calendar hosted by the CLASSE, yet that bore no tie to the national executive.18 Beauchamp wasted no time in seizing on the apparent violation as a premise to expel the CLASSE from the talks. Whether the minister genuinely failed to grasp the grassroots and autonomous nature of the movement — and of the Internet — or whether she merely used the protest as a cover to keep the wheels of Charest’s divide-and-conquer tactics turning, is open to conjecture. Less so, however, was what would come of aborting the first glimmer of hope to surface in more than ten weeks of escalating unrest, and how the street, already ready to burst, would respond to a spit in the face of their primary spokesperson.

In a fury, the FEUQ and FECQ immediately broke off talks and closed ranks around the CLASSE. “That’s enough,” boomed an exasperated Martine Desjardins. “We’re not in a classroom. The minister has to stop playing school headmistress and assigning consequences and punishments to everyone. She has to sit down and negotiate with us in good faith, because we’ve seen no clear openness from the minister, who’s been there for one hour out of the last forty. It’s unacceptable.”19 Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois (GND) added that Beauchamp’s exclusion of the CLASSE, which then represented more than half of students on strike throughout the province, was a simple pretext that hid her unwillingness to even discuss the tuition hike.20 Yet Beauchamp, warned GND, had “just thrown oil on the fire”21 — and the response from the fire was immediate. That night, April 25, thousands responded to a protest call issued by the law and political science association of UQÀM, as the students’ rage boiled over into the streets.22 Corporate media outlets (including Liberal-friendly La Presse and Québécor-owned TVA) were physically and verbally attacked by protesters, as banks, cars and shop windows were vandalized.23 In the face of such unceasing disdain and dismissals, the students’ untiring resolve to stare the premier down grew ever more unshakeable: “Chaque soir! Jusqu’à la victoire!” they promised to march — every night until victory.24 And with that defiant vow from the street, the crisis entered its tensest, and most violent, phase.

#manifencours: The streets are ours for yelling

With the advent of the nightly marches, any remaining illusions that the student representatives controlled anything at all were washed away to reveal a leaderless and autonomous movement of the twenty-first century. As the marches ebbed and flowed in size from hundreds to thousands in intimate relation with the day’s events, the nightly processions dominated morning headlines and became a finger placed on the pulse of the student base.25 The street had taken over, and Twitter moved into the front seat of the mobilization.26 Trending almost constantly in Montréal for months, the hashtag #manifencours (“demo in progress”) became an open window into the movement’s collective brain. Every evening at eight o’clock, without organizers, itineraries or prior confirmation of any kind, people converged at Place Émilie-Gamelin downtown before winding their way through the city streets for hours on end. The SPVM had its well-stocked arsenal, but the students had their own: Tracking the crowds’ movements on Twitter, protesters met up with the marches en route as they inflated and decreased in mass, splintering and reconverging in a game of cat-and-mouse with police that often stretched well past midnight. As the exhausted security forces were worn thinner by the around-the-clock protests, their brutality escalated to match their anger and fatigue. In response, protesters armed with smartphones continuously monitored the actions of the riot squads and converted all records of their repression into fuel to further the movement’s expansion and resolve. The police couldn’t win.

Pursued for over 130 nights straight, the marches would come to form a core pillar of the student spring, and provided the setting for the daily reinforcement of its values and goals. More than a simple vow of defiance or a pressure tactic, the regular occupation of public space was also an essential outflow of the movement’s collectivist riposte. In this deeper sense, Québec’s students picked up the baton from the citizens who occupied public spaces under the banners of the Indignados and Occupy — and carried it further. In a talk held in the early days of the Occupy movement, Judith Butler attempted to capture the common thread of these interventions.

Bodies congregate, they move and speak together and they lay claim to a certain space as public space.[…] Collective actions collect the space itself, gather the pavement and animate and organize the architecture.[…] At such a moment, politics is no longer defined as the exclusive business of public sphere distinct from a private one, but it crosses that line again and again, bringing attention to the way that politics is already in the home, or on the street, or in the neighborhood or indeed in those virtual spaces that are unbound by the architecture of the public square.27

The regularity of the carrés rouges’ nightly marches constituted an amplification of this claim to public space, as read against the backdrop of their reimagining as commercial conduits and compartments by neoliberal capitalism; for working and consuming, that is, but not for debating, organizing or launching political demands.28 The contours of this present-day clash over the nature and ownership of public space was sharply delineated by the unprecedented repressiveness of legal and police tactics employed to crush the 2012 mobilization. In both Montréal and Québec City, municipal bylaws enacted during the crisis imposed a requirement, backed by steep fines, to have protest itineraries approved by authorities in advance, an ordinance justified on the basis of minimizing “disruptions” — read: to the efficient operation of commercial life.29 Failure to comply resulted in protests being declared illegal, often before they had even begun. Yet in the era of social media, the state’s very conception of protests — of organizers and itineraries — was marked by precisely the same model of top-down control that these children of the twenty-first century were revolting against.

Neither police nor the politicians seemed to grasp this essential nature of the movement. No more, anyway, than they understood that in a true democracy, one doesn’t require the permission of the state to protest against the state. This first affront against civil liberties then served in turn as a pretext for police to deploy chemical and physical weapons indiscriminately and a degree of violence that was wildly disproportionate to the threat posed by protesters — except, that is, to the unfettered flow of commerce and consumption. Peaceful protesters, bystanders and many established journalists thus found themselves caught in the onslaught, charged at, knocked to the ground, beaten by batons or pepper-sprayed, all by trigger-happy security forces too often devolved into the brutish automatons of state violence and given the enthusiastic and unqualified go-ahead of their political masters.30 Jacques Nadeau, a photojournalist for Le Devoir for over twenty years, recounted the trauma he suffered at the hands of a police cavalry in his emotional testimony to the Ménard Commission on the Printemps érable, launched by the Marois government.

There’s an arrest. I know that for the police, before …, when there’s an arrest, you’re not supposed to get too close … because they need to … secure the site. So I start, but the scene there, it was still pretty far away … I’d say about forty metres from me. And so I figured, “Okay, I’ll go into the streets to not harm the police so that they don’t think I, y’know, want to hurt anyone.” And right then, I can tell you, I was almost alone on the sidewalk running and suddenly, I felt a push in the back like I’d never felt. A push … It’s not … You don’t feel … It’s not a hand, it’s an enormous mass, that crushes you, and I fell … completely flat, in about … a tenth of a second, the speed I was going at. And what’s more, I was running, okay? I have three cameras, I have one across the shoulder hanging in front of my stomach that digs right into my stomach then. […]

Then I found myself underneath the horse, a bit dizzy. I see the hoofs of the horse stepping around my head. It’s enormous, it’s not a pony, these horses. It’s really … It’s … They’re this big. They stomp on you, and it’s over. And then … I’m … I’m completely, I’m totally afraid, I have no idea what’s happening, but there are people, the horse continues and in the end, I didn’t get … the horse was … was more intelligent, I think, and he … as if … he told me … he spared my life.31

One of Nadeau’s cameras, worth more than $10,000, was destroyed by the attack and never reimbursed by police.32 What Nadeau experienced was nothing out of the ordinary for the spring of 2012, however, as police routinely disregarded journalists’ repeated identifications as members of the press and even deliberately targeted them — particularly those filming — with intimidation, aggression, arrests, violence and destruction and seizures of equipment.33 The same treatment, in short, as that experienced by students. Throughout the spring, protesters were often met with kettling and mass arrests by police, despite repeated condemnations from the United Nations in recent years that denounced these practices in Canada as flagrant violations of citizens’ rights to peaceful protest and assembly.34 The legal bases for some of these arrests, moreover, spoke quite eloquently to their underlying goal: namely, safeguarding the myth of the economy’s untouchability at the expense of wider social and democratic rights.

The new police model of the corporate age was crystallized in the SPVM’s response to the annual May Day march in the spring of 2012. Long devolved into a tired and token parade of labour union activists reciting pre-rehearsed slogans, the student spring transformed the “anticapitalist May 1st” demonstration into an impassioned march attracting three thousand unemployed women and men, students, workers, families, children, anarchists and feminists.35 With police officers massed imposingly along both sides of the procession from the start, the SPVM decreed the protest illegal barely thirty minutes after it had departed, on the basis of unnamed “offences” that were unremarked by reporters of Le Devoir.36 The police provocation itself, however, instantly sparked attacks against property that resulted in a barrage of tear gas, sound grenades, pepper spray and batons, which all ended in at least seventy arrests.37

The heavy-handed and disproportionate police response is highly typical of the neoliberal order, where the security establishment’s overreaction to perceived threats against the economy is directed not only at physical repression, but more importantly, at emotional and psychological intimidation. Thus a week and a half later, a minor incident involving smoke-bombs thrown onto the tracks of the Montréal metro at rush-hour was elevated by media paranoia into a veritable national security crisis. No one was injured, and the smoke was cleared in a matter of minutes; the only tangible harm, in fact, was that employees were delayed in getting to work.38 Immediately, the media and political establishments erupted with hysteria at the “attack” that caused police to shut down the metro system, leading to a frenetic and high-profile chase to find the culprits of the misdeed. Panicked by the unexpected reaction to their prank, the students turned themselves in to police the next morning. Yet as the Collectif de débrayage observes, “a political act, a symbolic act, demands an equally symbolic response: It requires an exemplary penalty, designed to put an end to the brinksmanship. This last word that the justice system wields carries the sinister name of ‘terrorism.’”39 Indeed, with no threat to public safety to justify it, the three women accused were kept imprisoned for a week pending their court dates, while the fourth accused, a man, was held for two. And with nary a concern for the effects on the futures of the youth in question, the four were charged with the bizarrely contrived offence of “inciting fear of terrorist activities,” carrying a sentence of up to five years in prison.40

As police interventions multiplied that could not even claim to be motivated by public safety, the benevolent image of police still held by many segments of the population was unmasked as a quaint and fading fantasy. Those arrested were often peaceful by the police’s own admission — at times involving journalists, and in one case the leftist legislator and co-spokesperson of Québec Solidaire, Amir Khadir41 — yet were trapped in kettles (at times for hours), arrested and charged for obstructing traffic (keep the economy moving!), and fined $494 under the provincial highway code.42 Other instances of mass arrests were on the basis of “illegal assembly” (protesting spontaneously or without submitting your plans for approval), including one that ended in the arrest of 506 individuals at once.43 Crowning a steady and growing trend toward the criminalization of dissent in neoliberal states, Québec’s troubling new status quo was reconfirmed in 2012 as the total number of arrests made between February 16 and September 3 soared to a staggering 3,509, with 83 percent of them the products of mass arrests. To this number of undiscerning detentions, we can add another 1,500 arrested in 2013 following protests linked to the Printemps érable.44

“À qui la rue, à nous la rue!”45 is thus far more than a mischievous police taunt. It is the battle cry, rather, of a protracted social counterattack against the marketization of our city spaces and the narrowing of our human and civic existence to that of mindless consumers and workers on the capitalist treadmill. The police model of preemption exhibited fully during the student spring was the expression, tyrannical in its essence, of what political and cultural theorist Brian Massumi calls neoliberalism’s “depoliticisation of life under the mantle of economism.”46 In 2012, the students sought to “collect the pavement,” in Butler’s memorable phrase, and reconstitute a civic and public realm from the ashes of the streets-cum-commercial-corridors. The act of marching thus represented nothing less than the aggressive reassertion of popular sovereignty over the polis and the revival of the political nature of the community’s physical domain.

#Victoriaville wasn’t a riot, it was a war

In response to the latest escalation of unrest that was increasingly paralyzing downtown Montréal, the government made a second offer to student representatives on April 27. The Liberals proposed to add $39 million to loans and bursaries, and to replace the $1,625 hike with an increase totalling $1,778, spread over seven years instead of five.47 Student representatives furiously labelled it yet another insult, and the CLASSE responded a few days later with its own counter-offer: redirect a portion of research funds toward instruction, outlaw spending on advertising by educational institutions, ban the construction of satellite campuses and institute free university education by 2016 by reinstating a 0.7 percent capital tax on banks.48 The government ignored the proposal, and the demonstrations roared on. Indeed in the fictional board game where Charest played, the pyromaniac premier seemed to be quite enjoying himself. Yet it unfortunately wouldn’t be up to the government to pay the price of his frivolity just yet. The next victims came the following week.

Fleeing the unrest that was engulfing Montréal, the Liberal Party moved their congress scheduled for May 4 to Victoriaville, located 140 kilometres northeast of the metropolis. The premier couldn’t get far enough away, however, as the name of this small town of 46,000 would soon be marked with a weighty significance for years to come. Summoned by the Coalition opposée à la tarification et à la privatisation des services publics (of which the ASSÉ is a member), two thousand to three thousand protesters converged outside the hotel that housed the congress, which was protected by a metal fence designed to keep the rowdy discontents at bay. No order was given to perturb the event, and the planned march, after a ten minute procession that wound its way through town, ended in front of the hotel.49 It was around that time that some protesters decided to remove a segment of the fence and throw it toward the Sureté du Québec (SQ) officers guarding the event. Advancing through the breach into the hotel’s parking lot, the protesters came face to face with a row of riot police staring them down.50 And then, all hell broke loose.

Swift and brutal as per their habit, the police unleashed an offensive to shock and awe. An uncommonly potent tear gas was launched into the crowd as plastic bullets were fired at close range, sparking a furious reaction from demonstrators, who pelleted the cops with rocks retrieved from a nearby construction site.51 The riot was of a rare violence and intensity that bespoke a social crisis racing ever closer to the brink. Frontline protesters battled with the provincial police for hours, with many seeking safety far back while others cared for the wounded.52 A first-hand account conveys the scene so potently that a more abridged version would fail to do it justice.

I saw the first stones thrown toward the police and wanted to get further back from the front line to escape the coming surge of the crowd toward me. But the first shots of tear gas were immediately launched at the colourful multitude, at the hooded activists and the union members, at the young and old, at the families and their children, and we dispersed in a panic. People were screaming, coughing, and I heard the cries of choking children from afar.[…] Numerous explosions rang out through the grey sky, and I could no longer distinguish the blasts of the fireworks from the detonation of the gaseous bombs.[…]

We approached the combat zone, and a group of demonstrators had suddenly formed behind the front line. And when I was able to see why they were gathering, I saw there was a man unconscious on the ground, blood trickling down his neck, his legs soft; his face had been struck. Around him, some were calling for help while others fumed with rage. They told me he’d received a plastic bullet in the temple.[…] Among the demonstrators, we asked everyone to create a space to allow an ambulance to arrive. But the police squadron immediately charged the crowd again, and the paramedics struggled to move the man toward a calmer space. They moved many times to avoid the gas, trying in vain to alert the police that they held a gravely wounded man in their arms.[…]

A squadron of police quickly formed a combat line to protect the hotel from the invaders, and we started launching all the projectiles we could get our hands on. We were hundreds, we threw in waves, we surprised ourselves with the power of our strikes. The SQ helicopter was a spectator at the back of the combat scene, a voyeur of the historic rage; and the gawkers looked at the scene from afar, stupefied by the force of the attack.

And it was there, among that epic setting, that the squadron in troubled waters decided to launch a second salvo of plastic bullets. In the middle of the crowd, I first saw a young woman hit in the ankle, leaning on her peers as she fell back from the front. And in the middle of the crowd, a few metres away from where I stood, I then noticed a young man collapse under the impact of another bullet. All around him, some erupted into screams while others sobbed. And when I got closer to the wounded man, I saw the horror of a disfigured face. I heard other shots without being able to localize the wounded in the large crowd, and then I withdrew from the combat zone before the horror of such unspeakable violence.53

When the battle at Victoriaville had come to a close, a handful of police officers and upwards of four hundred students (according to certain sources) were injured, including four who were hospitalized, two of whom suffered cranial traumas.54 One of these, Maxence Valade, permanently lost vision in one eye after a rubber or plastic bullet struck him in the face, and he hovered between life and death while four surgeons laboured over the course of an eight-hour operation. The other, Alexandre Allard, was permanently robbed of hearing in his left ear, which was almost entirely severed, almost certainly by a police projectile. He lay unconscious for days, and also nearly died. A third student who was hospitalized at Victoriaville, Dominique Laliberté-Martineau, suffered a double jawline fracture, lost six teeth and will have to undergo numerous bouts of reconstructive surgery after a police projectile struck her in the mouth.

Arrests that day totalled 106, but the SQ hadn’t issued its final word.55 At around eight o’clock on the night of the riot, two buses full of students were stopped en route back to Montréal and escorted to a police station in Saint-Hyacinthe, where they were detained for questioning. After each being identified, individually photographed and thoroughly searched — a mounting practice that is strictly illegal, but along with the others, highly effective as a means of psychological intimidation56 — the students were finally released without charge at six o’clock in the morning. They had spent nearly ten hours in detention, deprived entirely of food and water.57

Sheep among wolves: The entente that wasn’t

At the same time as “bricks are flying” in Victoriaville, “as an eye is lost and lungs are burning in the toxic fog,” the national student representatives were locked up in Québec City for a marathon bout of negotiations at the offices of the Ministère de l’éducation.58 With all sides radicalizing and the talks viewed as the last chance to rescue the school semester, the pressure on the student leaderships was becoming increasingly untenable.59 The conflict was growing more volatile by the day, and many, the student leaders first among them, began to fear the imminent arrival of a first tragic death. Yet not once did Charest step foot into the room to speak with the students, while Line Beauchamp made “a cameo” of only five minutes, preferring to send professional negotiators and notaries in her place. Labour union representatives were present to act as mediators, or as the Collectif de débrayage suggests, as proxies there to push the students into accepting the first available offer, with the argument that they would “never succeed in getting more.”60 This was not a negotiation, but a high-stakes game of psychological chess that the students had never agreed to play. The government knew very well that the pressure on the student representatives was becoming unbearable, and were determined to exploit their advantage. The students were thus shut up in a twenty-two hour negotiation session with only three hours of rest allowed, while government negotiators overwhelmed them with endless “contradictory paperwork, threats and deceit.”61 The CLASSE, in its naïveté, had taken the meeting seriously enough to come armed with research studies from IRIS illustrating how savings could be made in the education system without the need to raise tuition.62 Yet facts that fit outside the Liberals’ dogmas never concerned the government a whit. Charest’s strategy, which the Collectif calls “inspired by the KGB,” was to simply wear the students down mentally and physically until they broke.

With the sense of urgency bearing down on them, the student leaders finally accepted a preliminary entente that was concluded on May 5. The tuition increase would be maintained in its entirety, the students announced to the press — the government was utterly immoveable on this point — yet would be compensated for by a decrease in mandatory administrative fees in function of the savings identified by a new provisional committee on universities.63 “The bill paid by students will not rise,”64 declared Nadeau-Dubois, as a gust of tepid optimism blew in from all sides of the political spectrum. The excitement in the air at the first signs of hope to surface in almost three months was palpable. Yet unfortunately it also proved premature, as it was not moderated by quite the sufficient dose of cynicism, it seemed. The agreement later presented to student representatives differed from the one they had been read during negotiations. Immediately after, government negotiators had left the room to make “some small last minute corrections,” read: altering anything that could have constituted a gain for the student movement.65 A war of words immediately erupted in the media that pitted Beauchamp’s view of the supposed entente against the leaders and spokespersons of the national associations. In numerous interviews with the press, Beauchamp stated that the total bill paid by students would inevitably rise under the entente, and even went to lengths to reassure Liberals in an email to party members that it was false to presume the increase would be compensated for by decreases to administrative fees.66 And indeed, the entente modified unilaterally by government negotiators — after garnering the signatures of the student representatives — undermined any potential for the committee on universities to identify the required savings. The committee would be composed in large part by business leaders and university presidents and rectors, who would greatly outnumber the student delegates.67

The student base fumed, as the student representatives and union leaders of the three largest labour federations accused the government of sabotage.68 Yet unfortunately for Charest, the student representatives were neither the sovereigns nor generals he took them for, and the true sovereigns, the students themselves, were now eager to have their say. The rolling assemblies held by student associations in the week that followed sounded a virulent condemnation of the government deception. By May 12, 300,000 students — almost three quarters of Québec’s student population and far more than those who were still on strike — voted en masse to reject the entente, leaving a scant three of 111 student associations to ratify it.69 After months of the government dismissing the student protesters as a minority within the student body, the student assemblies thereby launched their most resounding riposte. Yet ensconced within the government’s windowless submarine, the Liberals plowed ahead with their tired lines of attack, forever unfazed by the facts laid out before them — or by the aggravating repercussions mounting daily in the streets.

The episode of the entente de principe left a putrid taste in the mouths of many, aghast at the depths of treachery to which their government was willing to sink in its senselessly unceasing face-off with Québec’s youth. As the soaring costs of the police repression were poised to surpass the amount of the tuition increase, the steely intransigence of the government could only confirm the ideological essence of a move cast in dogmatism, pushed forward with near religious fervour by the reigning priests of the neoliberal creed. The Collectif de débrayage was among those less surprised by the government’s comportment. Their cynicism steeled them from the shock.

To be amazed that a government in power, which manages eight million inhabitants spread out over an immense territory, with its universities and hospitals, could resort to so puerile a fraud, would be to underestimate the scale of the lie that they try to present as the very basis of society: the economy.70

They are probably right. For indeed, what is the economy — oikonomia, “law of the house” — if not a fiction whose shifting contours are traced by the society that writes the rules? And what use to humanity is an economy that counts anything that produces or consumes as progress, irrespective of the destruction caused; an economy that’s severed from all the vital signs that matter to a species — biologically, environmentally, socially or in any way that allows it to survive, to evolve and to flourish? One where the costs are misplaced to the point where nothing has its true value anymore, and to the point, today, of driving humanity off an ecological cliff while those in power avert their eyes from the impending catastrophe announced from all quarters. These are the zealots of our times who will stop at nothing to achieve their “cultural revolution,” and the Economy, as defined by the worshippers, is their god that must be appeased — with sacrifices, if we must.

Dear elders, what is this world you’ve given us?