The Fight of a Generation
The Québec youth revolt in the spring of 2012 exploded from out of a heavy haze, releasing passions that threw the headlines into the homes and cafés of the province with a force unfelt since our near brush with independence in 1995. The nightly helicopters that hovered overhead and clashes in the streets between youth and riot squads became the invitation to caustic debates that split society in two once more; yet instead of a pitched dispute over Québec’s national destiny, here the two sides — pro- and anti-carrés rouges (for the red square that emerged as the symbol of the movement and its adherents) — were locked in battle over the collective inheritance that one generation would leave to the next. From a student strike that encompassed at its peak nearly three quarters of Québec’s post-secondary population, all records were swept aside as hundreds of thousands filled Montréal’s streets month after month, daily marches raged on past one hundred days, and the province’s social media generation rose up to launch the largest mass mobilization Canada had ever seen. Something broke, and had broken free.
This was no mere struggle over fees, but a social war of magnitudes. The mobilization, much as countless other student strikes in Québec’s history, was launched to oppose a $1,625-a-year tuition increase and defend the Quiet Revolution’s democratic legacy from the austerity drive of the governing Liberals. But the era of the One Percent is no ordinary time. The unprecedented wave of repression deployed by the establishment to crush the student movement shone a light on this moment at the apex of the élite’s power and laid bare the truly historic stakes at play. Over decades, the commercialist revolution of the ruling classes had slowly whittled away the collectivist foundations of Québec society. And here as elsewhere, wealth and power were concentrated in the hands of a homogenous minority that sees citizens and resources as capital in an economy geared toward corporate enrichment. Yet communitarian principles nonetheless remained deeply engrained in Québec’s national psyche and acted as a buffer against the dismantling of the commons. The Liberals were determined to break this resistance and usher in a market society where money would be the measure of one’s social and democratic rights. The youth were determined to grow this resistance and rescue their fading inheritance from the clutches of an insular and power-hungry élite. In 2012 the two worlds collided, as Charest’s bold push to complete the neoliberals’ “cultural revolution” unleashed the simmering rage of a generation and sparked a seminal battle for the soul, and future, of a nation.
The tuition hike, as supported by the older generations, was a central plank in the capitalist class’s broader campaign to entrench user-pay principles as the pillars of a new commercialist utopia. But the conversation in Québec is not the same as in the rest of North America. Here, the ideal of public education has been deeply embedded since the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, when the tuition freeze was instituted as a short-term compromise on the path to free university education. The education system born of those transformative years was the bedrock on which the reformers’ vision of a just society rested and the avenue to expanding equality which would propel the newly awakened Québécois nation into the democratic age. Since its birth, the student movement has assumed the mantle of defending this humanist vision of education, viewed as the heart of the social-democratic model that has made Québec the most egalitarian society on the continent.1
For the quiet counter-revolutionaries of the modern-day Liberal Party, education was just as central to the alternate social structure they sought to erect. Universities aligned closely with the market’s signals and principles would be the engine of their own project of social engineering: to chisel away at the collectivist culture of free public services and thereby cut loose the élites from their social bonds. From the sixties on, the idea that the rich should contribute their fair share to the funding of services stood at the core of an idea of democracy that placed greater equality as its foundation. But for over two decades, the globalized élites have waged a relentless and successful campaign to turn back the clock. Gradually, the burden has been shifted down the ladder to the poorer rungs, as governments slashed taxes for the rich and corporations and gutted the social programs that help equalize living standards. Here as across the world, skyrocketing inequalities were the obvious outcome, as the upper classes restored their power and tightened their grip over the ruling parties, the economy and the cultural and communications channels that frame public debate. With the business élites smiling behind him, Premier Jean Charest invoked the void left in the public purse by these billions in tax cuts to pursue the wholesale commodification of public services. The Liberals encountered massive public opposition, which stifled their furthest ambitions — at first. But in the wake of the 2008 economic crisis, the opportunity Charest long sought had arrived, and he swiftly invoked the false imperative of austerity to launch the boldest offensive yet.
Two centuries collide
Québec’s powerful student movement is one of the last remnants of a time when social forces could mobilize the masses to sway governments. Charest knew it well. In 2011 the Liberals locked the students in their crosshairs and declared the war open. But the shrewd and battle-hardened politician was a twentieth-century creature and soon found he had monumentally misjudged the scale of the fight on his hands. Brutalized daily in the streets by the police forces of the capitalist establishment and ridiculed in their press, Québec’s social media generation deployed its mastery of contemporary communications tools to stand its ground against repression and harness the passions of hundreds of thousands to defeat a premier who had used up his nine political lives.
Charest greatly underestimated the tenacity of his young opponents, for he could not come near to grasping the depths of what motivated their struggle. Indeed, he could barely hear them when they spoke. For this rising generation — the network generation — does not speak the governing cohort’s language of hierarchies, where order and authority are supposed to take precedence over social, democratic and environmental legitimacy. Witnesses to the abominable failure of our bought-and-sold politicians to safeguard the long-term common good, they do not speak the language of representative and electoral democracy either, which in Québec was supposed to legitimate the autocratic aggressions of a corrupt and paternalist government against its own youth. Opinion polls throughout the spring showed a slight and fluctuating majority of the electorate backing the tuition hike. But beneath the surface, a far more significant clash was unfolding that altered the moral lines of the debate: Society was sharply polarized along generational lines. Overwhelming majorities of the under-thirties opposed the government’s push to commercialize education by margins that frequently surpassed two thirds, while often the exact inverse proportion of those aged over fifty-five supported it.2 Two generations had come face to face, but only one would have to live with the results of today’s actions. And they weren’t backing down.
Perhaps most fatefully, Charest had failed to take stock of the global moment in which he launched his attack. In this new social media age, Québec’s youth are plugged into a planetary conversation where one chapter follows invariably from the last. In the wake of the Indignados and Occupy Wall Street, of the students of Chile and of Britain — all movements powered by the rising generation and its new media — the dots were strung together as the historical narrative crystallized: Around the world, the hijacking of our democracies by global economic and financial élites has sabotaged our collective capacity to look after the common and long-term good, to the point of even imperilling human civilization on this planet. The globalized establishment has fastened and rationalized an economic edifice that serves their short-term financial interests, even while its demands run against the immoveable realities of all that allows the human organism to flourish on Earth. Yet denying even the socially constructed nature of such artificial systems, they have deployed their ubiquitous structures of influence and control to erase the very notion of alternative possibilities.
And they were largely successful — until the Internet generation came of age and began building its own networked and people-powered structures to circumvent their hegemony and start to change the conversation. Raised in an age where the catastrophic impacts of corporate capitalism have become increasingly undeniable — and increasingly immediate — this generation is everywhere rising up and refusing the legitimation discourses that have enabled our élites to amass a degree of wealth and power unlike anything the world has ever known. In this “we the people” moment of the twenty-first century, the forces who speak on behalf of the future are everywhere sitting restless, awaiting the spark that may channel the torrents of unrest and at last start to beat back the neoliberal tide.
In Québec, Jean Charest’s audacious bid to strike a final coup in normalizing the wrecking-ball of austerity started the generational war, bringing to bear the threat of more financial debt and economic vassalage to add to the untold ecological debt already hanging over the heads of youth. Brought to the barricades, Québec’s students cried betrayal at the hands of the cohort of the Quiet Revolution, which had basked in the comforts of cheap education, generous social programs and a glowing future and was now poisoning the well before the generations to come could have their turn to drink. Thus exploited and dehumanized by a commercialist class that reduced them to spokes in the wheels of their destructive economy, the youth of Québec rose up to channel a new humanism where the holistic and long-term health of the many may predominate over the monetary interests of the few. After Madrid, New York, Santiago and elsewhere, Montréal had become a battleground in the global fight of our times.
The network generation comes of age
As the spring of 2012 unfolded, the strange force of the Printemps érable (“Maple Spring”) — the creative moniker launched by design students in a wink to the Arab Spring, or in French, Printemps arabe — had raised the curtain on a generation once in the cyber-shadows and suddenly in the streets. The Coalition large de l’Association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante, known by its charged and timely acronym as the CLASSE, took up the torch of the 99 percent to confront the power of the capitalist élites and declare that Le combat est avenir — the future is our fight, and the battle has just begun.3 The majority of Québec’s college and university students has long been affiliated with two old federations, the Fédération étudiante collégiale du Québec (FECQ) and Fédération étudiante universitaire du Québec (FEUQ), both closely aligned with the political establishment. But 2012 was the year these top-down and élite-based creatures of the corporate age were confronted by a new tide rising in force. For try as hard as the political and media establishments did to occult the dwindling clout of the federations at the students’ ground level, the winds blew in one direction — and they were propelling the CLASSE’s sails forward at full speed.
In the spring of 2012 we saw the vanguardist association’s vision of a horizontal and grassroots democracy become the template for Québec’s first twenty-first-century mass mobilization, as the carrés rouges engulfed the daily landscape in a scattershot explosion that mirrored the leaderless revolts of the year before. Spectacular eruptions of art and protest pierced through the lethargy of the capitalist routine to reignite Québec’s political imaginary, as the boundless creativity of Montréal’s youth was unleashed to cast the Québécois metropolis as the theatre for a revolutionary movement to re-envisage the world. In 2012, the students of Québec took on the CLASSE’s aspirations as their own: whether seen in the audacious dreams of justice inscribed on the placards held high in the streets; in the tenacity with which they held firm against six months of derision, brutality and contempt; or in the sixty thousand members of the FEUQ and FECQ who rallied to the CLASSE’s struggle against austerity and invested its structures of direct democracy to elevate the Coalition into the undisputed engine of a generational revolt. From their values and discourses to their models of communication and organization, the youth of Québec had arisen to carry forth the paradigm of a new age, where the old top-down designs of order and authority make way for a world of networked and autonomous communities, open structures of governance and grassroots empowerment.
The students of Québec followed no orders and yet did readily lend their attention to the formidable figures that provided the moral leadership to mobilize the masses. As the media struggled to tie faces to a social media-era revolt, the presidents of the FEUQ and FECQ, Martine Desjardins and Léo Bureau-Blouin, were thrust into the glare of the spotlights along with the CLASSE’s spokespersons, Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois and Jeanette Reynolds (and later a third, Camille Robert). And tellingly, it was the one with the least decisional authority — none — who wielded the greatest influence: With his uncommon force of character and razor-sharp eloquence before the cameras, the twenty-one-year-old “GND” was propelled into the reluctant role of the movement’s natural “leader,” as his incisive challenges to the capitalist order drew both the ire and admiration of citizens across the province.
Over the course of that extraordinary spring, Québec bore witness to a visionary youth that had laid the foundations for a bright new future in incubation — and recovered its capacity to be the force that once propelled society forward. For indeed, after decades of somnolence ushered in by the consumerist society of the élites, the students accomplished what was thought nothing short of the impossible: They had shaken society awake. There were the teachers, artists, economists, actors, doctors, musicians, parents, authors, nurses, environmentalists, lawyers, even seniors — all that stood incredulous before the force of the spring awakening surging before their eyes. Stirred to life by the CLASSE’s timely appeals to revive the collective consciousness, the tumultuous seas of Québec’s progressive social forces arose to rally behind the youth and leap into the breach in the neoliberals’ defences.
The student strike had become the Printemps érable and the mother of such unforgettable moments that will form a generation for life. Their memories will resonate with the love of all they fought for over those six charged and trying months, but just as viscerally, with the refusal of all that they fought so ardently against. Like the paternalism of power that refused all dialogue and tried to crush a generation’s resistance with the unbound madness of police brutality. Like the hatred and ridicule of an attack dog press whose petty lies and venom aimed to bully an awakened youth back into submission. Or like the historic excess of hubris signed by a premier named Jean Charest, whose emergency law sought to legislate the destruction of the student movement and suppress the democratic rights of all citizens in the name of removing an unruly opposition from his path.
Yet for every shiver of terror down the spine, there were the innumerable jaws dropped in awe at the indomitable spirit of a people that rose to answer the call of history. And of all the moments etched into our hearts, few can have settled any deeper than the image of the proud and irreverent Québécois, who when faced with a noose strung tight around the neck of their democracy, chose to answer back to the power: casseroles. For there on the balconies and streets of the province, and in beautiful Montréal, irrepressibly alive and free, the smiles of neighbours and strangers met as society peeked out from its commercial cocoon. And it was there, as the pots and pans of the people’s resistance echoed loudly through the nights, that the jubilant sounds of a society springing to life announced the end of a long winter. Finally, the sap of the Printemps érable had risen up from the roots and trickled down from the balconies of the province to leave the streets awash in the resin of hope reborn.
Dreamers in the wings
The remarkable story of the Printemps érable will doubtless inspire for years to come. Born as a student strike like so many others the province has known, it transformed into a historic mobilization that signalled the arrival of the social media century to Québec and the emergence of a new generation, and a new world, waiting impatiently in the wings. Those who lived through it can never forget the renewed civic imaginary signed by the young carrés rouges, whose spectacular harnessing of symbolism and imagery marked a creative effervescence — and a democratic awakening — that at times seemed fuelled by hope and heart alone. For months on end, a generation marched en masse through the streets of Montréal, night upon night for over one hundred days and at times by the hundreds of thousands, in defiance of the government, in defiance of brutal repression, and finally, in defiance of the law itself.
If Québec indeed has a history of transformative social crises, then the spring of 2012 may prove the launching point for a once-in-a-generation renewal of its collective values and aspirations. For the leaders of tomorrow, the streets and student assemblies became the living classrooms for a visceral immersion in the politics of civic action and debate, in the private and class interests behind contemporary power, and in its violent defence absorbed in state-inflicted bruises that never quite seem to heal. Through it all a generation in Québec has been indelibly marked, and the lessons learned in those uncommonly heated days of spring may slowly start to lay the foundations for a future worth inheriting.