Class struggle

Henry Aubin: It's about entitlements, not class struggle

While the head of classe espouses Occupy-style radicalization, most university kids simply want to keep their cheap tuition

By HENRY AUBIN, The GazetteApril 19, 2012

What does the student boycott across Quebec say about the future of this young generation?

Jean-Marc Léger, the head of the Léger polling firm and one of the keenest observers of public opinion, raised this intriguing question Tuesday in his regular column on social trends in Le Journal de Montréal. Addressing boomers, he said, "What is happening (on campuses) in Quebec these days is more important than you think." He presented it as part of a welcome international trend featuring the Occupy Wall St. movement and the Arab Spring. Léger offered no polling data to back up his view, but he said, "For the first time in 40 years, a generation (of Quebecers) is waking up and contesting this sclerotic society."

Is this true? Is the up-and-coming generation, as represented by the boycotters, really pushing for the most fundamental shift in society since the heady 1960s and 1970s? Is it fair to liken the boycotters to the Occupiers?

Or, rather, are the tuition protests just the opposite? Sclerotic, after all, means rigid and unchanging.
Last fall's Occupy movement unquestionably did seek to remake society, same as the Arab protesters. The Occupiers who camped out in Square Victoria sought to deconcentrate the world's wealth from the hands of the top one per cent and spread it more equitably. That would be real change.
Those Quebecers who are boycotting classes this spring and demonstrating on the streets have as much energy and determination as the local Occupiers. But do they want serious societal change?
Some do.

The ultimate aim of the leaders of the largest of the three student groups is not well known, but Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, spokesperson of the largest protest group, CLASSE, told a gathering of leftist artists, actors and writers the other day that the fight over tuition is, in effect, but the foot in the door for a far larger cause.
That cause is class struggle: "The people who want to increase tuition ... the people who impose a health tax, the people who set up the Plan Nord, the people who have put the Aveos employees out of work, the people trying to put the workers at Rio Tinto Alcan in Alma out of work, the people trying to keep Couche-Tard workers from forming a union, these people are all the same." He concludes: "Our strike will serve as a springboard for a much wider, deeper and, yes, more radical protest." And: "We (students) have planted seeds this spring for a revolt that might not germinate for several years."
Revealing.

We can now better appreciate why Nadeau-Dubois has been so stubborn in refusing to condemn this week's vandalism. A future struggle against the system could get messy.

But the thing is this. Many - perhaps most - of the people boycotting classes are unaware of this agenda. For many of them, the key motive is self-interest. They want to keep a good thing going - to keep tuition where it is (if not abolish it). They want to keep an entitlement. They're against change.
Léger is right. This is a sclerotic society. But, by their actions, the boycotters are not trying to change it. The great majority of them are faithful products of it. They have their tuition entitlement and they intend to keep it.

We Quebecers cling to $7-a-day daycare, free health care, free invitro fertilization, Canada's lowest electricity rates, free sex-change operations. All these services might make excellent sense in isolation from the icy reality of our public-sector debt. The students don't hear their manipulators, Nadeau-Dubois and others, mention that Quebecers' public-sector debt is one of the 10 highest in the world on a per-capita basis and that, according to the Montreal Economic Institute, it is increasing by $19,331 per minute. Yes, per minute.

Someday, after my self-indulgent generation that blithely rang up the debt is long gone, the mounting bill will have to be paid. It's to reduce that rate of increase that the government is belatedly increasing tuition. My crystal ball says that today's boycotters will probably get stuck with raising their own kids' tuition.
Léger sees the boycotters as belonging in the same category as the Occupiers and Arab resisters. But they're trying to make a better world. I see the boycotters, rather, as being closer to the syndrome of those Greeks who created street mayhem after their government inevitably started paying back its wild borrowing.

If Quebec students' resistance toward a relatively trivial tuition increase is a preview of how society behaves when the real sacrifices arrive, Lord help us.

haubin@montrealgazette.com