Quotation

The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle.… If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.

– Frederick Douglass

Foreword

Naomi Klein

The Maple Spring in Quebec ushered in the biggest social mobilization this country has seen in decades. Its consequences will be felt for years to come in Quebec, but it will influence the rest of Canada only if those outside the province better understand what made it unique. This book, written by one of the country’s most inspiring young leaders, does a great deal to help.

In early 2012, Quebec’s students went on strike against massive hikes to university tuition fees. But instead of simply protesting the latest round of increases, the student movement told Quebec what they stood for: free, universal education, which they saw as a precondition for any just society. They also showed persuasively that the barriers being erected for poorer students were a reflection of a wider pro-corporate agenda, the reversal of which would be necessary if they were to achieve their goal.

By making a non-reformist, ambitious demand, their protests lit a spark in the province and opened up a broad debate about what kind of society Quebecers actually wanted. Outside the province, many of us watched as the movement unleashed an incredible wave of creativity and militancy. There were the witty videos, the gorgeous art, the poetry and music. There was the omnipresent red square – a must-have symbol of solidarity, which I eventually spotted even in the streets of Toronto. Most iconic, however, were the unforgettable images of hundreds of thousands of people, young and old, regularly crowding the downtown streets, many of them banging pots and pans on their balconies and in their neighbourhoods.

Through 2012, we watched as the students dreamed in public. We read in their manifesto how they envisioned the key features of Quebec life – not just education, but also health care, culture, energy, the land and rivers – protected and nurtured as a common inheritance, not gripped and disfigured by the logic of the marketplace. They exhorted us to think generations ahead, echoing the Indigenous worldview that long predates our country. It was this vision more than anything else that captivated Quebecers and so many of us beyond its borders. This was more than a mere “demand”– it was an expression of a rising cultural shift, an altering of the sense of what is possible.

These students were born around 1990, in the years when market fundamentalism reached its full ideological ascension; they have no memory of life before neoliberalism reigned supreme. All their lives they have heard that “history is over,” that there is no alternative to unrestrained capitalism, that they should be satisfied with the perks of this atomized existence, happily distracted by their gadgets. But Quebec’s students decided to flip their given script on its head. “We know now that history never ends,” Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois writes. “There is always a springtime waiting in the wings.”

Radical movements like theirs are invariably mocked and vilified by the political establishment, and for a very good reason: they can accomplish what that establishment fears most. They can make people believe change – broad, sweeping change – is possible. Most dangerous of all, they can win. In September 2012, after six months of political turmoil, the student movement helped oust Quebec’s Liberal government. The newly elected Parti Québécois quickly repealed the tuition hikes, as well as a draconian law introduced by the Liberals to crack down on protest.

The English-language media’s coverage of these events, however, left many Canadians poorly informed about what had actually transpired. This book is an excellent corrective, an eloquent tour of the heady months of 2012. Nadeau-Dubois recounts the astounding attacks the students endured – high-profile pundits comparing them to terrorists, legal intimidation, police violence. And he shares an insider’s firsthand knowledge of the behind-the-scenes preparation that went into the making of the Maple Spring.

In an age when we need to rapidly recover the know-how of creating mass movements, the Quebec students have a lot to teach. At their height, such moments of widespread awakening and radicalization can feel like magic. Yet, as Nadeau-Dubois describes so vividly, they are hardly created with fairy dust – they are built by organizations, through tiring, often mundane work over many months or years. This story also shows that, despite the allure and power of social media activism, there is still nothing to compare to patient, face-to-face organizing. And it demonstrates that direct democracy – which many of the students practiced in general assemblies – can catalyze remarkable transformations, sweeping thousands who have never identified with activism into the life of a social movement.

When these tactics were combined with the students’ bold vision of the far more equal world for which they were fighting, it proved unstoppable. Ata time when so much needs fixing in our country, with unimaginably high stakes, these are lessons we would all do well to learn.

May 2015

Preface to the
English Edition

Quebec at the Crossroads:
The Roots of the 2012 Students’ Spring

Whoever does not link the question of education to the social question as a whole is condemned to fruitless dreams and efforts.

– Jean Jaurès

The book you are about to read was drafted during the months that followed one of the largest citizens’ campaigns in the history of Canada. It tells the inside story ofa social conflict that, for more than six months, saw the Quebec student movement stand up to the provincial authorities in response to the government’s decision to increase university tuition fees by 75 per cent. Readers are no doubt aware of the global context of this movement. In the majority of developed countries, the 2008 financial crisis had served asa pretext for the introduction of more radical neoliberal economic policies; everywhere, austerity measures gave rise to considerable social strife. The protesters of the Occupy movement in the United States and elsewhere, the indignados of Europe, the students of Quebec – each group in its own distinctive way refused to foot the bill for a crisis caused by the greed of the powerful.

Yet the mobilization of Quebec’s youth took place against a particular background, one that warrants a fuller explanation. Quebec’s cultural and political ecosystem is different in many ways from that of other parts of North America. This book, then, which details the events of the spring of 2012 in La Belle Province, should be situated within the wider environment. It is my hope that readers outside Quebec – those for whom the English translation is primarily intended – will benefit from this historical overview, for I am firmly convinced that this movement holds important lessons for social movements throughout the world.

The Actors

From February through August 2012, Quebec students waged a strike against the government of the Liberal Party of Quebec (PLQ), led by Premier Jean Charest, a veteran of Quebec and Canadian politics, who was in his ninth year as head of the provincial government. He had begun his political career in Ottawa in 1984 as a Member of Parliament for the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada and was soon appointed to the Cabinet by Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, becoming the youngest federal minister in Canadian history. Charest made a name for himself during the 1995 Quebec referendum campaign, where he played a prominent role in the camp opposed to independence. His accession to the leadership of the PLQ is believed by many observers to have coincided with that party’s final break with the remnants of its social-democratic legacy. Indeed, he came to power in 2003 promising to carry out an ambitious “re-engineering of the state” and committed, in veiled terms, to abandoning Quebec’s welfare state. His administration would be attended by confrontations with the labour movement and corruption scandals. When the student strike was in the offing in the winter of 2012, Charest was already under serious suspicion as to his personal role in those scandals. A few months earlier, he had been forced to retreat on the contentious issue of shale gas development in the St. Lawrence River valley. His power was on the wane, but everyone knew that this old warhorse of Quebec politics still had a few tricks up his sleeve.

On the opposite side, student resistance was being organized through three major provincial bodies. As spokesperson for one of them, the Coalition large de l’Association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante (CLASSE, the broad-based coalition of the ASSÉ, the association for student union solidarity), I became known to the general public. As its name suggests, the CLASSE, which had been set up in December 2011 in preparation for the coming clash with the Liberal government, was a temporary coalition of student organizations assembled around a permanent body, the ASSÉ, founded in 2001. That year, a handful of Québécois cégep (junior college) and university student associations had decided to found an openly progressive, Quebec-wide student union that would draw on the democratic and action-oriented models of the alter-globalization movement and radical unionism. From the outset, the new student association demarcated itself from the two other province-wide student organizations, which the left regarded as too close to the Parti Québécois (PQ) and lacking in militancy. In 2005, a few years after Jean Charest’s Liberals took power, the ASSÉ went all out and launched a general strike against a controversial reform of the province’s system of student loans and bursaries. As a result of this successful struggle, the ASSÉ – despite some ups and downs – steadily grew in strength. In the fall of 2011, when it was becoming clear that an unlimited general strike was unavoidable if the Liberals’ tuition hike was to be stopped, the ASSÉ decided to open its ranks to non-affiliated student associations and to those affiliated with other province-wide organizations, in order to establish a broader coalition for the duration of the impending struggle. The CLASSE was born. It soon numbered one hundred thousand, with members from more than sixty student associations throughout Quebec. Over the next few months, the CLASSE emerged as the main agent of mobilization, representing between 50 and 70 per cent of the striking students. The length and tenacity of the movement was in part the result of the CLASSE’s role in the students’ common front, whose other components were the Fédération étudiante universitaire du Québec (FEUQ, the Quebec university students’ federation), with Martine Desjardins as president, and the Fédération étudiante collégiale du Québec (FECQ, the Quebec cégep students’ federation), whose president was Léo Bureau-Blouin. The two federations represented the pragmatic, cooperationist tendency within the Quebec student movement; however, both of them joined the campaign and were at the centre of the negotiations with the Charest government.

The Setting

When the movement was just getting underway in February 2012, both camps were aware that what was explicitly at stake – the tuition fee increase – was rooted in a more fundamental clash of values. From the very beginning of the mobilization, the determination of the Liberal government was manifest. This resolve can be attributed in particular to the political circumstances surrounding the outbreak of the strike. The announcement of the tuition fee hike was part of a clever reframing of the Liberal plan to “re-engineer the state,” now dubbed a “cultural revolution” by Finance Minister Raymond Bachand, the premier’s right-hand man. The new label was hardly an exaggeration. The Liberal government’s intentions were clear: to reorganize Quebec’s public services according to the user-pay principle and to the detriment of the progressive tax policies typical of social democracy. The tuition hike was presented in the 2010–11 budget as a key element in an ambitious fiscal plan that involved the pricing and privatization of public services in Quebec.

The highly symbolic nature of the decision to raise tuition fees goes a long way to explaining why it triggered the “Quebec Spring.” Low tuition fees are at the heart of what is referred to as the “Quebec model” of social solidarity. Still today, it is among the public policies that distinguish the political culture of Quebec from that of other North American jurisdictions. Furthermore, the student movement has long been one of Quebec’s most powerful social movements; for over forty years, it was at the forefront of the struggle to make higher education more accessible, first to francophones and then to the children of working people. The spring 2012 mobilization was the tenth major student walkout since the 1960s. Most of those actions had resulted in complete or partial victories. By increasing tuition fees, Jean Charest’s Liberals aimed to achieve a twofold objective: to demolish a strong political symbol, and to permanently cripple popular resistance to their neoliberal project.

In using the expression “cultural revolution,” the Liberal minister displayed a remarkable degree of sincerity, because for Jean Charest and his cabinet, it was all about breaking with the political legacy of another revolution, the one known as Quebec’s “Quiet Revolution.” While this notion continues to nourish debates and reinterpretations among historians, it is most commonly defined as a brief but intense period of economic, social, political, and cultural upheaval in Quebec society in the 1960s and 1970s. The historian Denis Monière encapsulates it this way: “The era of clerical and political conservatism and of social and intellectual inertia gave way to an era of progress, social and cultural change and the revalorization of the political and of nationalism.”1 Thus, the Liberals’ 1962 election victory under the leadership of Jean Lesage and the memorable slogan “masters in our own house” was followed by a raft of reforms affecting almost every area of Quebec society: education and health were secularized and nationalized, a network of public universities was created, public health insurance was introduced, a number of state-owned companies were established, hydroelectricity was nationalized, progress was made toward gender equality, the welfare state came into being, laws protecting the French language were passed, the pro-independence movement arose, and so on. Ironically, the first journalists to recognize how swiftly and radically Quebec was changing were from English Canada. In fact, the expression “Quiet Revolution” originally appeared in an article in Toronto’s Globe and Mail. In sum, when Jean Charest and his ministers spoke of “re-engineering the state” or “cultural revolution,” they basically sought to dissociate themselves from the social democratic legacy of that earlier revolution.

The attacks against the Quebec model of social solidarity were not a bolt from the blue. Jean Charest’s coming to power in 2003, as already noted, represented an acceleration of the turn to the right that Quebec’s political elites had initiated in the aftermath of the 1995 referendum. Following the traumatic defeat of the “Yes” side, Lucien Bouchard (a former Conservative Member of Parliament won over to the cause of independence a few years before), newly chosen to lead the Parti Québécois, made the rapid attainment of “zero deficit” his top priority when he became premier of Quebec in 1996. To that end, he carried out a series of colossal cutbacks in public services. His relentless accountant’s approach provoked a groundswell of protest, particularly in the health sector. Nurses went so far as to launch an illegal strike to defend their employment standards. The PQ’s swing to the right significantly damaged the party’s longstanding ties with social movements, especially labour unions. All this added momentum to an already existing trend on the left: a growing number of progressives were organizing outside the party founded by René Lévesque. At the same time, the alter-globalization wave swept through the province, reaching its high point in 2001 with the mass demonstrations against the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City. It was in the wake of these events that the ASSÉ was created. A few years later, progressive elements disappointed with the PQ joined with labour activists and feminists in founding Québec solidaire (QS), which went on to become the first authentically left-wing party to win a seat in the National Assembly. The events of 2012 should be seen as the culmination of the headway made by Quebec’s social movements over the previous fifteen years, in parallel with the rightward shift of the province’s political elites, both Liberal and Péquiste (PQist). The widespread exasperation that people expressed by banging on pots and pans can be ascribed at least in part to the conformist managerial mentality that has stymied Quebec politics since the 1995 referendum defeat.

This was the multifaceted backdrop against which the drama of the 2012 spring played out. The main protagonists were, on one hand, a government determined to accomplish the neoliberal revolution conceived ten years earlier, and on the other, a student movement in peak condition, nourished by the democratic practices of the alter-globalization movement and radical unionism. When the strike began, both sides were aware that Quebec was at a crossroads.

The Events

The campaign officially began on February 12, 2012, once the threshold set by the CLASSE – twenty thousand students with a strike mandate – had been crossed. Initially, the mobilization was confined to a few university departments in Montreal and Quebec City, but very quickly it snowballed beyond any of the Coalition’s forecasts. After only two weeks, the strikers’ ranks had increased more than sixfold: 132,000 cégep and university students had walked out. On March 22, the campaign reached its first peak, with over three hundred thousand students on strike and about an equal number of people marching in the streets of Montreal; later that same day, the government issued a statement saying that it was “not impressed.” Over the ensuing month, owing to the Liberals’ stubborn refusal to negotiate with the student organizations, tensions continued to mount on the campuses of Quebec. Opponents to the strike swamped the provincial courts with requests for injunctions; dozens were granted, forcing classes to resume, but the vast majority of them could not be enforced. Meanwhile, more and more citizens were joining the weekly protests, and the CLASSE came out in favour of turning the campaign into a broad-based citizens’ movement. The struggle was dragging on dangerously, but the strike mandates did not falter. The government hardened its discourse, relying on the media’s negative coverage of the movement and striving to marginalize it vis-à-vis public opinion. The situation had reached an impasse.

On May 4, during the Liberal Party’s convention in Drummondville, the accumulated tension exploded when a demonstration called by a coalition of community and union groups degenerated into a skirmish with the Sûreté du Québec, the provincial police. Twelve people were hurt, two of them seriously. A young Montreal student was blinded in one eye. For a few hours, a troubling report spread through the movement of a young cégep student who had died from his injuries. Fortunately, this proved to be untrue. While the fighting raged, I, together with other student representatives, was in the middle of a negotiation marathon with Liberal ministers in Quebec City. The next morning, with the tragic events in Drummondville making headlines, the minister of education and the three student organizations announced they had reached an agreement in principle. Over the following days, the students, revolted by the police violence and the Liberals’ meagre offer, overwhelmingly rejected the proposed agreement at their general assemblies. One consequence of this rejection was quite unexpected. Ten days on, Line Beauchamp, the minister of education and vice-premier of Quebec, resigned all her positions and announced that she would be withdrawing from active politics for good. The news sent shock waves through Quebec’s political scene and dealt a heavy blow to Jean Charest’s government. The woman the premier chose to replace Beauchamp was one of his long-time associates, Michelle Courchesne; she immediately summoned the student associations to a fresh round of negotiations. At the same time, rumours began to circulate of a special law being drafted by the government in order to end the walkout. On May 17, three days after the new minister’s appointment, Jean Charest tabled Bill 78, which was passed the very next day under the title An Act to enable students to receive instruction from the postsecondary institutions they attend. The law was composed of three parts. First, it turned the students’ strike into a lockout by suspending the sessions of any establishments on strike at the time of its adoption and by imposing a timetable for the resumption of classes in mid-August so as to “restore calm” on the campuses. Second, the law forced administrators and faculty to dispense courses and strictly forbade anyone from directly or indirectly hindering normal campus life. Third, it obliged organizers of any gathering of more than fifty people to inform the police, at least eight hours in advance, of the event’s date, time, duration, and location or route, in the case of a march. The law moreover gave the police the extraordinary prerogative to modify that route. The last two sections of the law also provided for exceedingly hefty fines. The heavy-handed piece of legislation left most political commentators aghast, including those favourable to the government’s position on tuition fees. While the bill was being debated in the National Assembly, popular support for the student movement was being expressed in concrete ways. Starting on May 19, tens of thousands of citizens marched in the streets each night, banging on pots and pans to protest the malicious law. The noisy demonstrations soon took on huge proportions. In the end, the only effect of Jean Charest’s strong-arm tactics was to energize the mobilization even further.

On May 21, shortly after the enactment of Bill 78, the CLASSE concluded its weekly convention by publicly stating that it would disobey the law and by inviting the population to join in a demonstration of civil disobedience to be held the next day at noon. The response was overwhelming. On May 22, the one-hundredth day of the strike, more than 250,000 people marched in solidarity with the students, in open defiance of the special law. Four days later, five hundred lawyers wearing their courtroom gowns paraded through downtown Montreal to show their indignation at the passing of this repressive law. Also that day, negotiations resumed between the new education minister and the student movement – to no avail. After three days of deliberation, the minister declared that she was abandoning efforts to reach an agreement with the strikers. Behind the scenes, we understood what this meant: the province would be going to the polls.

Our intuition would be confirmed on August 1, when Jean Charest called an early general election for September 4. The news threw the movement off balance, and, one after the other, student associations voted to go back to school. The night of the elections, the verdict came down. Jean Charest and his government were defeated. Pauline Marois was chosen to lead a Parti Québécois minority government. There was no mistaking the import of her first act: she officially cancelled the tuition fee increase and abrogated the special law. At the same time, she declared that a summit on higher education (Sommet sur l’éducation supérieure) would be held, in her words, to consult those directly concerned on the best policy to adopt with regard to tuition fees.

Since 2012

At the time of writing, more than two years have elapsed since the end of the students’ campaign. Today, its overall assessment and the lessons to be drawn are still under discussion. The re-election of a majority Liberal government in the spring of 2014 has led many to express serious doubts about a mobilization that had been regarded as “historic” and to wonder whether it had all been in vain.

I myself am naturally inclined to be prudently optimistic. I understand the disappointment felt by a number of activists. Some of them believed, often justifiably, that the campaign of 2012 could have been the catalyst for qualitative social changes. My studies in sociology over the past few years have helped me to put such expectations in perspective; societies are complex organisms whose evolution is necessarily slow.

Yet, with regard to the accessibility of higher education, the students’ campaign won a clear victory. The Liberals’ goal, it should be recalled, was to raise university tuitions by 75 per cent and to index them to the cost of living indefinitely. The Quebec-wide consultation organized by the Parti Québécois during its brief tenure led to the indexation of tuition fees to families’ disposable income. Of course, this is not a step toward free education. But to deny that this is a gain would be to judge the movement very harshly indeed. There is, after all, a huge difference between a spectacular increase and conditional indexation. Over the coming years, tens of thousands of young Québécois will be able to enter university. This is no small matter. The mobilization of 2012 will have succeeded in safeguarding Quebec’s unique approach toward access to education. Today, higher education remains more accessible in Quebec than anywhere else in North America.

The Liberals’ return to power was disconcerting for many people, including me. Despite a painful defeat in September 2012, the current Liberal government has shown an astonishing level of determination in relaunching the neoliberal revolution that the student movement had originally halted. As expected, the Liberals’ official position on university funding is to support indexation. A great deal of political courage would have been required to take on the student movement once again. But on a host of other issues, the austerity offensive of Philippe Couillard’s government represents a more radical, accelerated version of the political changes initiated under the leadership of Jean Charest: increased childcare fees, a major overhaul of the health system, the reduction of public health prevention measures, assaults on pension plans, cutbacks in the civil service.

As I write these words, it is difficult to foresee whether or not the response of ordinary Quebecers will be as radical as the Liberals’ austerity plans. One thing, however, is clear: this time, there can be no question of the student movement marching in the streets alone. Faced with the brutality of the austerity measures, the people of Quebec are turning to the labour movement, without which it will be impossible to prevail. At union meetings, there is already talk of following the example of the students who mobilized in 2012 and, like them, of standing in defiance.

Montreal, November 2014

1 Denis Monière, Le développement des idéologies au Québec: Des origines à nos jours (Montreal: Éditions Québec-Amérique, 1977), 320. [This and all other quotations from French-language sources are rendered in our translation, unless otherwise indicated. – Trans.]

Acknowledgements

Thanks, first, to my former colleagues of the CLASSE executive: Jean-Michel Thériault, Élise Carrier-Martin, Philippe Éthier, Guillaume Legault, Philippe Lapointe, Maxime Larue, and Guillaume Vézina. One of the reasons for the success of this great, beautiful strike was undoubtedly its solid and experienced Quebec-wide team, including, in particular, the executive. This has not been noted often enough, especially within the student movement. Thank you, dear friends. Thank you for the camaraderie and for your patience. Thank you for your confidence, which at times I did not deserve. Thank you for supporting and defending me in the dark hours, for putting me in my place when I had it coming, and for being demanding when that was called for. I will forget the long meetings, and I will forget our shouting matches, but I will never forget the pride I felt at being among you during this first great battle of our generation. Thank you, Jeanne, for having shared with me a difficult and thankless job.

Thanks to Renaud, my “spin,” my friend, my brother. I would never have survived this dream without you. Thanks to Cloé, for being there, for listening, for understanding in my moments of doubt, anger, sadness, and exhaustion. Thanks to Gabrielle, Anne-Marie, Ludvic, Keena, Julien, Benoît, and Joëlle, my partners in mischief, my comrades-in-arms and in revelry. Thanks to Arnaud, my loyal friend for so long, who reminds me, when necessary, of the importance of being present for people, for the ones I love. Thanks to Rico, my friend and mentor, lover of Quebec and its inhabitants, for his vitality, his guidance, and his appreciation. Thanks to Simon, for the advice that often got me out of a tight spot. Thanks to Christian, for the hope. Thanks to Évelyn, Étienne, and Gabrielle, who responded so generously to my public appeal for financial support. Thanks to Marie-Claude, Frédéric, Léda, Jean-Philippe, and Jean-Sébastien, for those endless nights at the Bistro brainstorming the title for this book.

Thanks to Keena and Julia for their research assistance. Thanks to Alexandre for the proofreading. Thanks, in particular, to Mark, my guide on this first, perilous, and liberating publishing adventure, for finding the words when I faltered.

Finally, for this English edition, I wish to express my gratitude to Jessie Hale for her editorial work and to everyone at Between the Lines. Thanks to Lazer Lederhendler, who not only beautifully translated this book, but above all captured the spirit and the essence of my words.

Chronology

February 20121

March

April

May