Tag Archives: activism

Student lobby groups need a reality check

You gotta love student politics in Quebec. We have the lowest tuition fees in Canada, the highest taxes, and Montreal has the highest number of students per capita.

Yet this province seems to be the largest battleground for student protests in North America. They protest tuition fees, which are too high because they’re above zero (some protests involve CEGEP students, whose tuition fees actually are zero). They protest government cuts to loans and bursaries. They protest the colonial capitalist imperialistic racist empire bent on … evil of some sort.

And, of course, they protest each other.

Five student associations from Concordia, McGill and Dawson are suing each other over control of the Quebec chapter of the Canadian Federation of Students. Concordia’s graduate association is planning to pull out of the organization over this dispute which has seen two competing executives appointed. (UPDATE Sept. 13: The Concordian — yeah, I know — has a detailed story on what’s going on)

“Regional” (read: not Montreal or Quebec City) groups at UQTR, UQO and UQAR are threatening to leave the Fédération étudiante universitaire du Québec (FEUQ) over their concerns the group is too Montreal-centric, and create their own lobby group to represent just their interests.

Currently there are three post-secondary lobby groups in Quebec. In addition to FEUQ (considerd the grown-up group because they sit down and negotiate with the government) and CFS-Q (considered almost renegade by its parent national organization and with little weight in Quebec because it only represents the two anglophone universities and an anglophone CEGEP), there’s ASSÉ, the Association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante, which is a newer, more militant group that accepts nothing short of free education for all.

To give an example, the Concordia Student Union has been a member of all three organizations over the past few years, paying student money to three redundant organizations. They recently dropped ASSÉ (which was the cheapest of the three but also the most ineffective), and now pay money only to two.

And yet despite this, Jean Charest was returned to power with the clear intention of raising tuition, and fees are going up. FEUQ is threatening strikes, but they’ve already lost the battle. The public voted for tuition increases, and a few hundred students choosing to waste their money by not going to class isn’t going to get anyone to change their mind.

All three groups need to take a moment to figure out why they’re losing (even many students don’t support their positions — though I don’t see too many of them lining up to donate money to the universities), and change their strategy before they become even more irrelevant than they already are. Once that happens, student unions will start pulling their funding and the Quebec student activist movement will implode.

UPDATE (Sept. 25): A judge decides to keep the offices off-limits to both groups until the issue can be reviewed further. The SSMU is happy, while the CSU is not.

Grownups’ turn to protest at Con U

The labour situation at Concordia just got a lot stickier, with a vote by its support staff union 95% in favour of authorizing a strike. They’ve been without a contract since 2002 and want pay increases.

If the strike occurs, it’ll be the first major test of president Claude Lajeunesse, who has so far presided over a university that has been uncharacteristically out of the headlines.

OUTRAGE!

Fake outrage is always fun to look at. Political operatives look at anything done by the opposition, put it through as many filters as possible and seek the flimsiest excuse to call something outrageous.

Then they draw up a press release, send it to the media, and hope it sticks.

Of course, in today’s media, rewriting press releases as news is fast, easy and therefore commonplace. So a lot of them start sticking, even if they don’t pass the smell test.

  • Guy makes political statement with profanity, for the sole purpose of getting noticed by the media? OUTRAGE!
  • Political ad has random letters for half a second spell out “PTORN” over two lines, which looks a bit like “PORN”? OUTRAGE!
  • Police keeping an eye on your protest? OUTRAGE!:

“…helicopters, shining bright lights, flew at a very low altitude, at the level of treetops, where the camp was being held.  This act demonstrates but one strategy to discourage the direct opposition put into place against the SPP summit.”

When they start finding real people who are actually outraged about these things without the cattle-prod prompting of political campaign directors, they can start thinking that it’s newsworthy.

All blog but no bite

Some local bloggers are flogging what’s called “Blog Action Day“, where on one day (Oct. 15), every blog around the world features a post on a particular subject (in this case, the environment).

This may shock and amaze you, but I’m taking a somewhat cynical view of this.

First of all, it’s not like the environment needs to have awareness raised about it. It’s the cause célèbre du jour, for crying out loud. It’s like trying to raise awareness of Facebook.

Secondly, it’s kind of gimmicky. Like that Live Earth concert that was more about music than the environment. I have a feeling this will be more about bloggers than the environment.

It’s well-intentioned, and I wish them well, but I just don’t see it doing anything concrete to help the environment.

Voulez-vous protester avec moi?

The Montréal Français group is organizing a protest this Sunday, starting at 1 p.m. at Mont-Royal metro. They’re celebrating the 30th anniversary of Bill 101 and want it strengthened, specially in light of a recent court decision that ruled an extension of that law unconstitutional.

Oh to live in a province one day where people can speak French without fear of government repression…

SQ cops to it: They were undercover after all

Montebello cops: PWNED!

The Sûreté du Québec are admitting that they did use undercover police officers at the protests in Montebello. The article doesn’t make it clear that they’re referring to the same officers in this video, which has gained traction in the press lately.

But the official SQ statement on the matter makes it clear: They’re cops.

Though I still agree with some that say the evidence was far from conclusive, with the amount of media attention this was getting it was just a matter of time until the government was forced to respond.

Now come the fun questions: Are all the extremist elements of these protests actually undercover cops? Are some of the more recognizable activists (*cough*Jaggi Singh*cough*) actually cops? Were these guys just holding rocks to keep their cover or were they actually expected to throw them at their colleagues? (CP says they never threw any rocks and that’s how their cover was blown)

The biggest question, of course, is what is the point in all this? The police had previously acknowledged that they used under cover agents to tell what plans were in advance. But what’s the point of planting someone who’s going to throw rocks? And if just throwing rocks at armored police isn’t such a bad deal, why are protesters tear-gassed, pepper-sprayed, arrested and beaten for it?

Assault by police

In the meantime, union leader Dave Coles should file a complaint of assault against this officer for a shove about 48 seconds into the video.

UPDATE: Great minds…

UPDATE: Oh Aislin

UPDATE (Dec. 6): Months after the fact, for some reason, the Globe and Mail looks back on this video and the people in it.

Protesters gone wild!

The protests in Montebello this week had one major difference from those in Quebec City in 2001: YouTube. Videotape evidence is the great truth-teller in a world where denials are cheap. It’s what turned Rodney King from just another crazy-talking black guy exaggerating a routine police matter into a media sensation and a giant black eye for the Los Angeles Police Department.

Militant protesters who see police brutality as the norm rather than the exception are increasingly using video cameras to safeguard their rights and prove the police are out to get them while they plant flowers peacefully.

One of the videos out of Montebello shows an interesting idea that seems to be gaining popularity: That those violent rock-throwing mask-wearing protesters are actually under-cover police officers and government agents ordered to provoke a violent altercation between police and protesters to give police an excuse to move in and start beating people up.

Today I received an email from a group which includes Jaggi Singh (who himself has been quietly accused by some paranoid crazy-thinking friends of mine of being an undercover cop), and it links to the video with some conjecture:

Is there a cover-up of the police agents that are revealed in the above video? Were the police trying to create divisions between protesters by provoking an incident?

The video itself shows three such protesters, one holding a rock, provoking the police. What’s interesting is that they’re being stopped by other protesters — some normal-looking suit-wearing Council of Canadians/union leftists, others peacenik hippie mask-wearing-but-not-rock-throwing chant-yellers — and both groups are accusing them of being police officers.

Some other Montebello videos:

Montebello, welcome to your 15 minutes

The press is all over the summit at Montebello, partly because George W. Bush seldom visits this country, and partly because the protest is expected to be on a scale similar to what happened at the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City in 2001.

So far the protests have been peaceful. Things like a caravan starting here at 8:30 this morning are well-planned photo ops to get the media on-side. And left-wing papers like Hour have been supportive, writing about them in a good light. The Globe, meanwhile, has a piece from Maude Barlow of the Council of Canadians, denouncing the meeting’s lack of transparency. Le Devoir is also on their side, suggesting that three conservative leaders (even by their countries’ standards), combined with executives of the largest corporations in North America might not have everyone’s interests at heart.

And there’s always the NDP. And The Dominion.

Of course, not everyone’s a hippie or hippie ally. The Gazette has a long editorial accusing the left of being paranoid, and trusting that the three amigos are not made of pure evil. It (only half-fairly) paints the environmental and labour lobby as obstructionists who oppose all progress just for its own sake. While it doesn’t take a stretch of the imagination to see that happening, I’m not one for believing that these corporate leaders wouldn’t similarly object strenuously if a policy being considered hurt their bottom line in even the most minute way.

The editorial then curiously uses the example of the harmonization of pesticide regulations to make the point that being screwed over by the U.S. is good because it raises awareness about how we’re being screwed over by the U.S.

Antagoniste also wonders what everyone’s complaining about.

Other Montebello-related tidbits from the papers this weekend:

Finally, La Presse’s André Noël gets the award for lamest story lead related to this issue:

Connaissez-vous le PSP? Oui, bien sûr, il y a la PlayStation Portable de Sony. Mais soyez francs: connaissez-vous le Partenariat nord-américain pour la sécurité et la prospérité?

Hell no, we will go

This Week in Me is a Justify-Your-Existence interview with Mandeep Dhillon, a rabble-rouser with No One Is Illegal who’s among the busloads headed to Montebello (map) this weekend to protest the Three Amigos and their Security and Prosperity Partnership, an area Stephen Harper is gung-ho about.

I’ll remember it more as the first interview I conducted that my batteries in the voice recorder actually lasted through. I interviewed her just after Tuesday’s CN protest, after the cameras had left and everyone was about to head home.

I’m sympathetic to many of the arguments about public transparency and native rights and police brutality. Unfortunately I find the language used by Jaggi Singh and his ilk to be off-putting at best.

We’ll see on Monday whether the fears of Montebello’s residents — that protesters who can’t get near the fortress of doom resort where leaders are staying will instead just smash windows of local businesses — are justified.

Off the rails

I was at a protest today. It had two purposes mainly: to denounce a CN lawsuit against a protester who blocked their tracks, and as a run-up to this weekend’s massive protest in Montebello, where leaders of the three North American countries are meeting to discuss trade and security.

I’ve been to a lot of protests as a reporter (I worked at Concordia during the first half of this decade, after all), and at some point they all kind of blend in together. There’s Jaggi Singh, being vague about whether he supports rampant property destruction in protests. There’s the references to Palestinian occupation, whether or not Palestine has anything to do with the protest at hand. There’s the demonization of the local police, who are standing quietly to help clear traffic out of their way as they march. And there’s the fact that half the time the media covering the event outnumber the protesters.

The protest, organized as always by a loose coalition of left-wing activist groups (No One Is Illegal, People’s Global Action Network, etc.), started off at Central Station, which for about an hour today became the safest place in the world. A media scrum quickly built up around blowhard Jaggi Singh and someone else the media couldn’t care less about. After a press conference that lasted way too long, they marched to CN’s headquarters down the hall, demanding to be able to deliver a letter to CN CEO E. Hunter Harrisson.

Naturally, that wasn’t going to happen. Instead, they promised to send their director of public relations. Except they couldn’t find her, apparently. So then they promised to send a representative from that department, who would accept the letter but not answer questions. Then they pulled a little bait-and-switch and sent a member of the security department to pick up the letter. The protesters wouldn’t bite, and that ended that. A slow march to Dorchester Square, some more megaphone chanting and everyone dispersed.

Afterward, I spoke with one of the people behind the megaphones (I wanted to speak to someone other than Jaggi Singh). You’ll get some insight from her in Saturday’s paper.

The protesters’ cause isn’t crazy. They want CN to drop a lawsuit against a protester, and they want international negotiations to happen with public input. But when they start chanting “no justice no peace”, it’s hard to imagine too many passers-by thinking “yeah, I agree with that.”

It makes me wonder: Should we separate moderate-left causes which can gain popular support (like, say, the 2003 anti-war protests) from the radical-crazy-left anarchist/communist everything-is-about-Palestine-and-native-rights window-smashing “fuck la police” riots, so that the message of the former isn’t dragged down by the public’s repulsion to the latter?

UPDATE: Video of the protest has been posted to YouTube.

The other Cavendish extension

We keep hearing about the Cavendish extension, a long-awaited road link between Ville-Saint-Laurent and Côte-Saint-Luc which will solve a lot of motorist (and public transit) headaches and get some traffic off the oversaturated top of the Decarie Expressway.

But at the other end is a similar connection waiting to happen. This one is much shorter and doesn’t cross any tracks, but residents are complaining of the same problems.

Cavendish extension onto Toupin Blvd.

The issue, as the Chronicle explains, is pure suburban greed. Residents in the northern part, a middle-class neighbourhood of western Cartierville with some very affluent areas, are panicking at the thought of cars taking their boulevard. I’m not quite sure where all this traffic is supposed to go. To the west is the Bois de Saraguay, followed by Highway 13, and to the east is Sacré Coeur Hospital followed by Laurentian Blvd. But hey, outrage doesn’t have to be logical, right? Maybe they just don’t like ambulances on their street.

We’ve seen all this before. James Shaw Street in Beaconsfield, where residents oppose a connection to Highway 40. Broughton Road in Montreal-West, where residents ludicrously complain of giant nonexistent trucks barrelling down the twists and turns of the residential streets to reach a far-off Highway 20. Not to mention at least some opponents of the other Cavendish extension.

Their logic is simple. They have no problem using the streets other people’s homes sit on to drive their SUVs to and from work. But if those other people want to use their streets, suddenly it becomes a child safety issue. Their street deserves protection. Their street must remain a dead-end. For the good of their children.

In case you couldn’t tell by my sarcasm, it’s hypocrisy pure and simple. Greedy suburbanites who want the government to legislate a de facto gated community and have the entire world built around them.

Fortunately, the borough sees right through their arguments. Next time you want to live on a street without traffic, make sure you choose one without “Boulevard” in its name.

UPDATE (Sept. 23): A follow-up story from the Courrier’s Catherine Leroux

UPDATE (Sept. 28): A video posted to YouTube shows traffic on the street, but except for some drivers failing to make complete stops at stop signs, nothing particularly incriminating.

When justice fails, block public transit!

If you’re planning to take a train from Central Station next Tuesday at noon, you might want to arrive early, ’cause there’s some protestin’ goin’ on. No doubt disrupting the populace during their inter-city and commuter train travel will magically cause CN to drop lawsuits, George W. Bush to forget about a planned economic summit, and for everyone to start calling North America Turtle Island again. You know, in solidarity.

Just because it’s Facebook doesn’t make it news

Why is “someone expresses opinion about recent events on Facebook” always considered news? Yeah, there are Facebook groups (actually I found only one that has more than a few members) denouncing the rumoured Immigration Canada decision to discourage the traditional Sikh family names Singh and Kaur for new immigrants (a decision which the government clarified later wasn’t actually the case). But there are more members in the group demanding that the Spice Girls do a show in Montreal.

When was the last time a paper petition with 500 signatures got this much attention?

The media is always biased when it doesn’t agree with you

It’s funny how groups on the political fringes make sweeping generalizations about newspapers being biased against them are quick to promote those newspapers’ articles when they are in agreement. (Though, at least some admit they’re “surprised” when a newspaper takes a public stance that is not, you know, evil)
Don’t get me wrong: There are legitimate criticisms of CanWest news coverage, but they are almost always heavily exaggerated in the minds of the grassroots activists out there.

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Get ready for a revolution (but don’t hold your breath)

Some anonymous radical leftists are calling for “5 days of decentralized direct action and economic sabotage” during the North American Security and Prosperity Partnership summit in Montebello, Quebec in August:

This is a call to action against the companies and governments who govern our lives through law and capital. Since the beginning of the invasion process, capitalism and state governance have perpetuated colonization on the lands of Turtle Island. This process has not stopped. Instead, it takes new forms through the neo-liberal agenda and continues under the authority of the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP).

From August 17th to the 21st we encourage decentralized direct actions and economic disruption for the purpose of making the SPP and our resistance against it widely known. During these five days, we hope to hear of actions that will inspire further resistance to this under-the-table plot. We encourage a diversity of tactics, and propose sabotage as a potentially effective means of revolt.

Now, for those of you who don’t speak activist-ese, some definitions:

  • Turtle Island: North America. It’s a term the Crazy Left uses to make it seem as if they’re in touch with native issues. Because their primary concern right now is the name given to the continent.
  • Decentralized direct actions: Uncoordinated guerrilla tactics that no central figurehead can be arrested for.
  • Economic disruption: Vandalism. Smashing store windows, knocking down McDonald’s signs and tipping over mailboxes. Actions that don’t have any major economic impact but allow young adults to vent their unfocused adolescent outrage.
  • A diversity of tactics: Violence. Against things, against people, it doesn’t matter. Anything is fair game.

And these people wonder why we call them crazy.