WAR ON A GENERATION
A Legacy of Debt
Mom, I’m asking you to ask yourself, to ask everyone, in Québec City, on the television, Dad, my little brother. Ask them. Ask them to ask themselves again. I am not in the madness of my youth. I am among a people in crisis. And so are all of you. Ask yourselves this. Don’t become indifferent. This is war.1
— Noémie Brassard, “À ma mère” (my translation)
The scale of the youth anger that erupted in 2012 shocked many across Québec and Canada. And to many who understood its origins the least, the instinctual response was often ridicule, when not derision. To those who converted incredulity into curiosity, however, the very strength and suddenness of the revolt were the sure signs of deeper acrimonies that lay simmering for years and that surged to the fore precisely because the political establishment had long refused them recognition. It’s not hard to see why: In their day, the greying members of Québec’s political classes enjoyed generous social protections, cheap public services and a promising economic and (comparatively speaking) ecological future. Yet in the eyes of many of Québec’s students, these élites were now pulling the rug out from under the feet of the following generation. Whether the subject was public education, social services, the climate crisis or our natural resources, the mobilizing sentiment was thus one and the same: a seething and even existential fear that by the time youth grew to assume positions of power, there would simply be little left to inherit, or to save. And the more the older generations backed the Liberals’ push to privatize the education system, the more the students’ sense of being ignored and exploited hardened into resolve, as they arose to go toe to toe against an aging establishment that was mobilized completely in the defence of its own interests.
This potent undercurrent of the student unrest surfaced in the earliest weeks of the strike. It appeared in the opinion pages of newspapers and online, and in informational material produced by some of the movement’s core backers, like the progressive think-tank, the Institut de recherche et d’informations socio-économique (IRIS). Although it was not explicitly featured in the public arguments of the student leaders during the strike, to many this undercurrent of intergenerational resentment served as the moral substructure of the mobilization and as an affirmation of the innate justice of their cause. The Trudeau Foundation’s Pierre-Gerlier Forest recalls a seminal moment in the spring after the rejection by students of the May entente, when the issue, once the elephant in the room, came sauntering out into the glare of the spotlights.
A new ideological dimension of the movement was revealed. This time, the issue was intergenerational equity — the notion that the benefits of the welfare state are skewed towards the baby boom generation, while their children are left with massive public debt and very few advantages. How could people who paid next to nothing to get a university degree now complain shamelessly about youth being expected to pay its “fair share”?2
Given the much-parroted governmental insistence on the students’ “fair share,” the only surprise was perhaps that it took this long for the issue to take its rightful place at the centre of the debate. Québec’s students, after all, were far from the first to raise the alarm over a generationally uneven balance of debts and benefits in the Western world. As far back as 1984, sociologist and demographer Samuel H. Preston warned of a sharp turn in the United States toward a spending bias that favoured the growing cohort of the elderly at the expense of children.3 Since then, much has been written about the financial strain affecting Western democracies, as fertility rates have plummeted while the elderly live longer without retiring later.4 With the electoral weight of the older generations inflated as a result, the distribution of public resources in democracies has skewed to favour the old over the young and contributed to making age an increasingly dramatic political divide.5
None of this, however, means that intergenerational conflict is inevitable in the context of the West’s aging populations.6 It is perfectly avoidable, in fact, in the presence of political will. Such was what sociologist Fred C. Pampel concluded in 1994 when he extended Preston’s investigation to a comparative study across countries. Pampel found that generational inequities in spending were strongest in countries without strong leftist parties (who tend to place a higher value on solidarity, presumably) and where a lack of official age-based representative organizations (age-based corporatism) meant that age groups were being excluded from the political structures.7 In other words, the emergence and gravity of the generational divide depends directly on policy choices and political regimes. This was confirmed again in a study of eight democracies performed by sociologist Clara Sabbagh and political economist Pieter Vanhuysse between 1996 and 1998, which found marked perceptions of injustice by university students when it came to the sharing of wealth across generations. Tellingly, the authors found these sentiments to be less pronounced in the more expansive welfare states of continental Europe, while they were at their most acute in the Anglo-Saxon market-based systems where neoliberalism has found its most fertile soil: Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom.8 Fifteen years later, the culmination of such mounting resentments blew out into the open during the Québec student revolt. Pierre-Luc Brisson, a young carré rouge and author of Après le printemps, articulates the shared sentiment well.
Numerous are the youth whom we ask to pay today to get an education, they who tomorrow will have to bear the weight of the aging population.[…] Right or wrong, we have the impression that the Baby Boom generation is making off with their golden parachutes (se sauve avec l’assiette au beurre), while the youth, who do not have the advantage of numbers, will have to struggle for numerous years before ever hoping to benefit from a minute fraction of the social benefits their elders once granted themselves.9
Clearly, issues of intergenerational justice were far from an ivory tower sideshow during the student spring. They were central. From the fall of 2011, IRIS launched conference tours across Québec to publicize their research that showed striking imbalances between students’ conditions today and at the time of their parents. Their research also sought to highlight viable policy alternatives, which served to expose the ideological roots of the hike.10 IRIS’s campaign provided heavy artillery to the CLASSE, who frequently invoked their studies in class visits and distributed their pamphlets to students. The think-tank even produced a series of YouTube videos entitled “The myths around tuition,” which garnered a total of 220,000 views online by the winter of 2012.11 History, in short, was a powerful presence at the centre of the students’ arsenal.
Drinking up and poisoning the well
The reports authored by IRIS painted a stark portrait: Québec’s students in 2012 had to work an average of 67 percent more to pay for their studies than the group that attended universities in the 1970s, who had basked in the benefits of frozen tuition levels and the full slate of the Quiet Revolution’s efforts at democratizing education.12 Indeed, by the government’s own ready admission, the hikes would have brought inflation-adjusted tuition levels back to 1968 — prior, that is, to the first student strike that year, which brought fuller implementation of the Parent Commission’s transformative reforms.13 And naturally, as tuition levels have risen, so too has the proportion of students who work part-time in order to pay for their studies. In 1970, only one in five Québec students worked during the school year; by 2012, four fifths of the student body worked sixteen hours a week or more, in addition to full-time summer employment.14
Such is the face of the advancing cultural revolution of the capitalist class, whereby life has value only when it is economically productive, to them — and even those who submit are incapable of stemming their rising indebtedness. Average student debt in Québec rose to $16,202 by 2009 for the final year of undergraduate studies, and the FEUQ estimates that 65 percent of students finish their undergraduate degrees with $15,000 of debt.15 Adjusted for inflation, these numbers represent multiples greater than what any Québec cohort since the 1970s has had to contend with.16 Indeed, with the current provincial system that makes it impossible for students to keep the grants and loans portions of their aid separate, the process is virtually designed to guarantee that students graduate with debt the second they accept help.17 Yet far from inciting concern among the establishment, the powerful interests behind the scenes are surely satisfied with the trend: Interest fees on student loans in Québec are funnelled directly into the pockets of the largest banks, in contrast even to the federal system, which was modified in 2001 to correct for this perversion.18 Since 1989, $1.5 billion of public funds has been transferred by the Québec government to the banks to cover the interest fees of students while they are still engaged in their studies, and $30 million is paid to them annually by students who have graduated. The bank lobbies thus have a direct interest in the indebtedness of Québec’s students — as well, it would appear, as in the Liberal Party’s success. Under Charest, the banks boasted impressive victories, notably gaining the abolition of the capital tax in 2007 that had been in place since 1947, a gift worth nearly a billion dollars annually, which, if allotted appropriately, could have funded the entire cost of free university education for every Quebecer.19
To justify this increase in youth indebtedness, the Liberal government, characteristically unconcerned with all but financial measures of success, made the claim that the investment in an undergraduate diploma provides a net return of $600,000 more in earnings over the span of an average lifetime.20 Yet even if we were to debate in the Liberals’ language of dollars and cents, one of the many evident problems with this argument, based on figures from 2006, is that it’s impossible to predict future earnings based on yesterday’s economy. This is particularly true in the present context of wider educational attainment, which is rapidly decreasing the value of a degree precisely as tuition fees continue to rise.21 Today’s alumni are in fact far from compensated for their inflated debt loads with salaries to match their greater qualifications. The 2006 Canadian census instead found that graduate-age Canadians (twenty-five to twenty-nine) were earning thousands less in 2005 constant dollars than those who entered the post-university job market in 1980, with young men’s earnings falling from an average of $43,767 in 1980 to $37,680 in 2005, and that of women falling by $709 despite their rapidly rising educational attainment over the same period.22
It’s been said many times, and will be said again: This may well be the first generation to be left a lower standard of living than their parents enjoyed before them. These figures, taken together, hint at exactly that and speak to a very real deterioration in students’ quality of life in recent decades: to a student population that is paying more for their studies, working longer hours to pay for it, incurring more debt and once graduated, is earning less for it — but also, to a student body whose academic performance and mental and emotional health are threatened by increasing levels of stress. It is of little surprise that a study by Statistics Canada in 2008 found that full-time students who work twenty hours a week or more exhibit greater stress levels and higher levels of absenteeism, see their academic performance suffer, and are ultimately placed at greater risk of dropping out.23 It may be naïve not to think that for the Liberals, this collateral is but a small price to pay to force more students onto the job market — and all while amassing the debt that conspires to mould them into submissive workers for many years to come.
Shackled to the treadmill: The tyranny of debt
Indeed, this is another way that raising tuition levels serves to further the market society’s most totalitarian ambitions: by narrowing students’ freedoms to pursue their own paths. We can see it just beneath the surface of the Liberals’ “earnings premium” argument, which dabbles in averages and thereby downplays the socially significant question of which disciplines purchase greater salaries and which do not. A study by CIBC World Markets in 2013 found that graduates of fine and applied arts programs actually made an average of 12 percent less than those with only a high school diploma between 2001 and 2011.24 According to the CIBC, just under half of all Canadian students choose what they call “underperforming” disciplines in the arts and humanities, where the added financial value of a diploma is marginal at best. These students, say the report’s authors, “aren’t getting a relative edge in terms of income prospects,”25 and yet tuition fees for all disciplines have continued to soar, with Canada’s currently standing at twice the average of the advanced industrial countries of the OECD.26 (Québec’s, after cancelling the tuition increase, now hover around the OECD average). Students within the arts and humanities — disciplines that encourage a broadening of one’s social perspectives and that do more to favour independent critical thought — are being squeezed, as those who reject the market’s signals to pursue their passions are punished with a much longer and more arduous path to financial emancipation. Indeed, it’s of no small import that the students who stayed on strike the longest during the spring of 2012 came from the fields of the humanities and fine arts.27
Built in to the debt system, therefore, is a more subtle and more sinister mechanism of social engineering at work, and one that so completely encapsulates the coldly monetarist mindset of the neoliberal establishment. To graduates beginning their working lives submerged under terrifyingly unfamiliar mountains of debt, the years immediately following graduation may be the decisive phase that defines their life’s trajectory. The psychological and financial stresses that bear on them as they embark on their professional development can therefore only act as pressures that conspire to funnel students down financially rewarding paths — or if the system is running at optimal efficiency, to dissuade them from ever pursuing their desires in the first place. Yet in the pathologically blinkered eyes of the current market, socially, culturally and environmentally constructive ends are most frequently assigned little value, while their destructive opposites are. Those saddled with debt are often in too vulnerable a position to risk the necessary time and effort to discover their true calling. They are quickly pushed to choose money over more fulfilling or high-minded explorations, but at high personal and collective cost indeed. For with the edges of these graduates’ individualities blunted to fit neatly into ready-made economic slots, the singular inspirations and energies of too many are withdrawn from the pool of resources channelled toward collective goods — as triumphant capitalism marches onward, its boots on the necks of the youth’s struggles for self-actualization.
This insidious impact of the debt system is far from accidental to present structures erected on its pillars. “The student indebtedness that was the economic origin of the crisis,” says the Collectif de débrayage, “can only be understood as the obligation to adopt a conduct of guilt, the obligation to work to repay one’s debt.”28 Indebted students begin their working lives as vassals, bonded to their creditors and forced to check their humanity at the entrance to the capitalist work mill in order to buy back their freedom. Yet the impacts of the debt system’s innate tyranny may even outlive repayment, as explained best by cultural theorist and critic Noam Chomsky.
Students who acquire large debts putting themselves through school are unlikely to think about changing society. When you trap people in a system of debt, they can’t afford the time to think. Tuition fee increases are a disciplinary technique, and by the time students graduate, they are not only loaded with debt, but have also internalized the disciplinarian culture. This makes them efficient components of the consumer economy.29
In fewer words, a system built on debt is an effective means of enforcing the status quo. “Government by debt is a mode of production of docile workers”30 says the Collectif de débrayage, and indeed such is the very genius of the system’s built-in resilience. Those occupied with the business of getting by are deprived the luxury of pursuing socially or culturally constructive paths, as our current market, geared only toward consumption, attaches little to no value to such endeavours. They are left little time to engage in the unproductive economic crimes of artistic creation or experimentation, to pursue their own independent projects, research or critical thinking, or — dare we defend such unmitigated hedonism — to live healthy and well-rounded lives. To the paternalist élites who demanded yet more enslavement of their youth through debt, the students found courage in their numbers to finally offer up the heartfelt riposte: We are not spokes in the wheels of your destructive economy, and we will no longer apologize for wanting more from life than this.
The unpayable debt:
A gift of environmental devastation
During the Printemps érable, Quebecers were treated to the explosive impacts of these generational inequities on social harmony. Yet most remarkable of all, perhaps, was that the youth’s pervasive sense of being victims to a historic injustice did not stop at the edge of their present and future economic precarity. Early on, the upper layer of the student revolt was peeled back to expose a seething vein of environmental discontent below. To all those willing to see, this generation had delivered the clearest sign yet of its truly global and forward-looking perspectives, and shown that the materialism often ascribed to them by others was ultimately skin-deep.
Prominent Québec author, documentary filmmaker and environmental activist Richard Desjardins was struck by the phenomenon, as he recounted in an op-ed published in Le Monde: “It’s remarkable,” he wrote, “that the student protests pertain also to the management of our natural resources. Banners and placards attest to the fact. And when on April 22, Earth Day, the two themes met, 300,000 people descended into the streets of Montréal.”31 The figure, approximate as it may be, merits repeated emphasis: nearly a third of a million people in the streets, in a city whose greater metropolitan region counts just under four million souls and in a province counting just over twice that number.32 Never had either a Canadian Earth Day protest or the city of Montréal seen protests on such a scale. Never, for that matter, had Canada at all.
The convergence of the two issues was neither spontaneous nor accidental, but both natural and in a crucial sense, deeply inevitable. As we’ll recall from the very first class-by-class visits by the CLASSE, Charest’s environmental policies were placed front and centre in the association’s arguments demonstrating the government’s guiding values and priorities. In a speech delivered to the conference Indignez-vous organized by the Council of Canadians at the height of the conflict, Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois incisively invoked the broader picture when he attacked what he deemed an ideologically cohesive governing class. His words echoed the portraits of hijacked democracy painted by the likes of Alain Badiou, Erik Swyngedouw, Colin Crouch and Stéphane Hessel — and much like them, Nadeau-Dubois didn’t pull his punches.
The people who want to raise tuition levels, […] the people who decided to impose a health surtax, the people who put in place the Plan Nord, […] the people who are trying to prevent Couche-Tard [cornerstore] workers from unionizing, all of these people are the same. They are the same people, with the same interests, the same groups, the same political parties, the same economic institutes. These people, they are one single élite, a gluttonous élite, a vulgar élite, a corrupt élite, an élite that sees education as but an investment in human capital, that sees a tree as but a sheet of paper and that sees a child as but a future employee.33
For GND and the untold thousands he spoke for, the élites’ agenda does not just offend our values or interests. It offends our humanity. To the CLASSE as much as their public face, the underlying clash was clear: between humanism and the cold exploitation of humans by an economy controlled by the rich; between cooperation toward a collective cause and a self-defeating and destructive competition between companies and consumers. With its eyes focused beyond the horizon, the CLASSE feared that a defeat in the fight against tuition increases would open the door to a wider commodification of the public good, from hospitals, to electricity production, to our natural resources.
A handful of people, accountable to no one, is in the process of ravaging these spaces in total impunity, from the Plan Nord to shale gas. For these people whose vision is confined to the next quarter, nature has no value but that which is measured in economic returns […] so myopic are they to the beauty of the common good.34
The environment had been paramount to the Indignados’ struggle against corrupt and greedy élites in Spain, and in Québec, the issue found equal resonance among a youth whose concerns increasingly span oceans and borders and reach beyond issues of material wealth.35 For the student marchers as much as for the influential figures and organizations that rallied to their struggle, the environmental and social impacts of the Liberals’ agenda led back to one single diagnosis — and to one single establishment. We saw it in the open letter from two hundred public figures that invoked the government’s Plan Nord to attack “the environmental degradation engendered by an anachronistic development model.”36 We saw it in Philippe Ducros’s rousing letter “We are immense,” in which he evoked the “victims of climate upheaval tied to our energy bulimia.”37 And we saw it as well in Guy Rocher’s letter, when the co-author of the Parent Report asked how the government could shower such largesse on the multinationals exploiting our natural resources, while simultaneously refusing it to our own youth — a juxtaposition decried as well, and with particular venom, by Richard Desjardins in the pages of Le Monde.38 All of these high-profile interventions served to greatly shape the public debate during the student spring. And all echoed the CLASSE’s critique of an economic model that is saddling this and future generations with an impossible ecological debt that surpasses only the social and financial ones now hanging heavily around our necks.
The explosion of the environment as a central issue to the student struggle came as little surprise to Jean-Marc Léger, the president of the largest Canadian-owned polling firm, which bears his name. For Léger, it was clear that the “generation gap in Québec” was a “key factor behind” the Printemps érable. “The youth focused their anger on tuition fees, but behind that, their anger is much broader,” he warned. “In my view, this movement has only just begun.”39 Léger’s eyes are wide open. The students’ challenge went far beyond the issue of tuition fees, and even beyond the Plan Nord, to take direct aim at the underlying dogma for which both are poster children. And indeed, the source of the students’ rage is not difficult to grasp. In 2011, the International Energy Agency warned that the current trajectory of the world’s governments would sabotage any hopes of limiting the average rise in the Earth’s temperature to supposedly manageable levels pegged by the scientific community at two degrees Celsius. The agency says that we are instead heading toward a calamitous global increase of six degrees or more by the end of the century.40
Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois speaks to a family-friendly demonstrations called by the CLASSE on March 18, 2012.
Decades of reports came before and more will continue to pour in, each delivered in ever shriller tones that draw an inglorious portrait of a species and its beloved “law of the house.” Naomi Klein evokes the big picture with eloquence.
Our economic system and our planetary system are now at war. Or, more accurately, our economy is at war with many forms of life on earth, including human life. What the climate needs to avoid collapse is a contraction in humanity’s use of resources; what our economic model demands to avoid collapse is unfettered expansion. Only one of these sets of rules can be changed, and it’s not the laws of nature.41
From Klein and Chomsky to former NASA scientist James Hansen and former Norwegian prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, who chaired the U.N. commission that coined the term “sustainable development” in the 1980s, the volume has now reached pitched levels. All agree: Global warming may lead to the end of human civilization, and in the not-too-distant future.42 The World Bank has warned that a four degree rise in temperatures by century’s end — a conservative estimate — will produce “extreme heat waves, declining global food stocks, loss of ecosystems and biodiversity and life-threatening sea level rise.”43 Sea levels may rise by one to two metres by 2100, leaving many island nations under water and major cities in great jeopardy, including New York, London, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Los Angeles, Miami, Mumbai, Vancouver and countless more.44 There is a grave existential threat that looms over the future of our generation. Yet when these young women and men raise their heads toward the leaders entrusted with their protection, we see a political establishment that doesn’t inhabit the same world. We see, instead, a unanimous community of scientists whose hands have been clutching and holding the alarm lever down for decades — and in the foreground, our elected representatives with their fingers pressed to mute. This disconnect, so often emitting airs of the surreal, can only be viewed as the inescapable backdrop to the youth-driven revolts that have swept the world to challenge the market doctrinaires. For after all, it is this new generation, and not the governing one, that will have to confront the impacts of a rapidly warming planet and yet daily perceives a governing élite displaying a callous nonchalance toward the future we will inherit. Our generation cannot help but harbour the hardening sentiment of being exploited by an élite that reaped the benefits of cheap tuition, a generous social safety net and more promising employment prospects in their day — and whose future was not then marred by an impending ecological catastrophe whose dangers have long ceased to be qualified by doubt. For the youth of Québec, as of the world, rarely, if ever, can a political issue be as personal or as visceral as this. “Behind that, their anger is much broader,” warned Léger. So went his next ominous words: “You will see.”45