#phillippe couillard

[fycanadianpolitics]

Quebec Liberal Party fundraisers allegedly pocketed huge payouts in government real estate deals

Suspicious payments allegedly funnelled through foreign banks may have ended up in the Bahamian bank accounts of Quebec Liberal fundraisers and the former head of the Crown corporation managing government buildings, Radio-Canada's Enquête has learned.

[fycanadianpolitics]

Confusion, skepticism reign over protest rules for Quebec students

ASSÉ has the right position here. The government and Fondation 1625′s (please the note the hilarity that the Globe and Mail had to seek out some random-ass group w/ only 2200 Facebook likes and zero student associations) view that student strikes are undemocratic and illegitimate because students are essentially consumers and the university a business is a shit position to take, and reflective of the ongoing corporatization of education.

However, seeing students and the university as having a somewhat employer-employee relationship should absolutely not lead students to advocate that the government implement a bureaucratic union model. It seems very likely that he heads of CÉGEP want clear rules and contracts with strike clauses for students to sign because this kind of model could easily moderate student demands and a shift away from the radical direct democracy that a lot of the movement is in favour of.

This is not to say that there’s no value in clear rules on striking. It could provide some more legitimacy to student strikes, and for that reason the current government is unlikely to implement it. However, future governments may find it very advantageous to implement, and you can guarantee that they will do so in a way that allows for the criminalization and delegitimization of any strikes that do not fit the strict bureaucratic model.

One of the most inspiring things about the student movement and strikes has been its commitment to grassroots and direct democracy (hence the impeachment of the ASSÉ executive). Historically, labour rights have been won through combative strikes and struggles in the street, not through the law, and it’s rare for the power of the state and law to empower radical action. Students should be careful in what they wish for, or they may end up like many of the bureaucratic workers unions they currently criticize. 

For weeks, some of Quebec’s university and CÉGEP junior college students have been “on strike” to protest the provincial government’s austerity measures.

Quebec Education Minister François Blais insists students don’t have a right to strike and other opponents have dubbed the movement an undemocratic boycott, not a strike, a position that has inflamed the passions of those who have walked out.

The provincial federation of CÉGEPs says the way to end the disruptive and sometimes violent walkouts is to give students the right to strike and, along with it, to establish clear rules.

“The fundamental problem right now is that the rules vary widely from one school to another and even from one faculty to another,” Bernard Tremblay, head of the Fédération des CÉGEPs, said in an interview. (CÉGEP is a French acronym for Collège d’enseignement général et professionnel, Quebec’s unique system of pre-university colleges and technical programs.)

He added the heads of the province’s 48 public CÉGEPs are unanimous in wanting standard rules, including secret ballots and mechanisms that ensure all students can vote to strike. Without strike-related legislation, which sets out the rules in labour disputes, tensions arise when some students set up picket lines and others decide they don’t want to respect them.

Protesting students are targeting cuts to public funding, and they have been joined by community groups and activists from the health and education sectors. But there are divisions, as some student groups are opposed to the movement, dubbed Printemps 2015.

Guillaume Rousseau, a law professor at the Université de Sherbrooke who has studied the history of student strikes, said a lack of clear rules creates a “grey area” that is the source of much tension. The result is usually that a group opposing the protest seeks an injunction and then the situation escalates, which is what happened last week at the Université du Québec à Montréal, when police moved in to enforce an injunction and masked protesters responded with a violent rampage.

Prof. Rousseau said the solution is to have students sign a contract with their institutes of higher learning, one that includes a strike clause alongside the current mandatory student fees.

Student groups are also divided on the value of right-to-strike legislation.

Andra Florea, communications secretary for the Association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante (ASSÉ), one of the more militant student groups, said that while right-to-strike legislation might be useful in theory, students are “extremely skeptical” of the motives of those who are promoting this approach. She said the current strikes are democratic and legitimate and the talk of legislation is a distraction.

A spokesperson for the Confédération des associations étudiants et étudiantes de l’Université Laval (CADEUL) said the devil is in the details. CADEUL currently supports the call for right-to-strike legislation in principle, but it was due to meet Sunday night to flesh out its position.

Fondation 1625, a student group that opposes the movement, takes the position that students are purchasing a service from CÉGEPs and universities and they should be afforded consumer protections, not be treated like unionized employees.

This echoes the government position. In his comments rejecting the call for legislation, Mr. Blais invoked the “right to study” of students, much like some employers who oppose strict labour laws speak of the “right to work.”

In fact, the underlying issues mirror those that exist between employers and unionized employees in the larger work force.

Mr. Tremblay, who represents the CÉGEP association, said what makes student associations unique is that there is already legislation, dating back to 1983, which accredits them as the official representatives of students and allows them to collect mandatory student fees, roles that are identical to labour unions.

“The only thing missing in that legislation is the right to strike. That’s the unfinished business,” he said.

[fycanadianpolitics]

In Quebec, a clash of generations | Ricochet

On Thursday, April 2, tens of thousands of students swept through Montreal’s streets demanding an end to the austerity offensive of the governing Quebec Liberals. In response, Treasury Board president Martin Coiteux reassured the angry youth that the government was doing it all for our own benefit. Ah well, thank you, dear minister. Had we known, we would have stayed home.

A few days earlier, education minister François Blais thoughtfully suggested that university administrations expel two to three students a day in the interests of “calming the ardours” of certain activists. “You do that with children when you want to correct their behaviour,” explained the minister in his most earnest impersonation of Father Knows Best.

These are not gaffes or mere maladroit expressions of otherwise sound intentions. They are windows into the deeply rooted paternalist culture of the party in power. What the Liberals still fail to grasp is that this exact authoritarianism was one of the major forces that fuelled the expanding revolt in 2012, as the wildly opposed democratic cultures of two centuries collided head-on. And they still fail to grasp that political legitimacy, for the social media generation, derives less from the authority of artificial electoral majorities than from continuous deliberation and fierce debate among equals.

This rising paradigm of horizontalism is what propelled the many youth movements that have swept the world since 2011 — from the Indignados to Occupy Wall Street — and is a central tenet of the student federation ASSÉ, which has doubled in strength since 2012 to now rival the floundering FEUQ with nearly 80,000 members.

Students in the crosshairs

For all of a second or two following Philippe Couillard’s election as premier, there lingered a faint hope that his government would adopt a more stately and high-minded tone than that of his predecessor, but it now seems you can’t teach an old Liberal dog new tricks. This tendency is troubling on many fronts.

As Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois has eloquently written in these pages, we are presently in the midst of a frightful escalation of youth-bashing rhetoric — an escalation that this government is doing nothing to calm, and whose flames it may even be fanning.

Some questions to consider: What kind of society bullies its youth, if not one that devours its own future? What kind of government prefers to browbeat an awakened generation back into submission, rather than listen to the straining voices of those who will inherit the consequences of today’s actions? And what kind of premier opts for the arrogance of authoritarian decrees over the respect and dialogue required to ensure the maintenance of intergenerational harmony?

In 2012, the Liberals of Jean Charest were widely accused of setting fire to the social peace by responding to a historic youth revolt with denial, intransigence, and violent contempt. So far, the ominous signs from this government suggest that not a single lesson has been learned. This is unsurprising, perhaps, when you understand the depths of their dogmatic convictions.

The ghost of Thatcher governs us still

The fundamental moral failure of our leaders is their refusal to accept the emergence of a generation that simply does not think like them. We are today witnessing the political cultures of two eras entering into mounting conflict, yet the political establishment refuses to cede an inch of its influence to the rising cohort. The gravity of this ethical offence should not be understated, for where the youth may not have the numerical force of a democratic majority, we, as the inhabitants of tomorrow, do have a moral right to be heard.

To be clear, I do not for a second doubt the sincerity of Martin Coiteux or this government when they claim to be acting in the best interests of the youth. That is their belief, premised on a neoliberal and commercialist value system that measures worth only in material wealth, at the expense of our health, education, and even the planet’s capacity to support human life. The social and ecological debts being left to future generations figure nowhere in their ledgers.

Indeed, where we see the hard limits of the ideological myopia at work is when the students counter the government’s Thatcherite “there is no alternative” rationale with concrete and costed proposals that would decrease the debt. They would do so not by taking an axe to our social fabric, but by strengthening it, not by further enriching hoarders at the top and aggravating historic levels of income inequality, but by cutting these grave disparities in the interests of spurring economic growth from the bottom up.

We can raise taxes on corporations, which currently sit at a paltry 27 per cent (combined federal and provincial) — 15 points lower on average than in the United States. We can reinstate the capital tax on financial transactions, which existed for decades before Charest abolished it in 2007, much to the satisfaction of the major banks that raked in acombined profit of $32 billion in 2014. We can reinstate more tax brackets so that the ultra-wealthy contribute their fair share, as they did for long decades when economic growth was both robust and widely shared. (Currently all those earning above $102,000 pay the same provincial rate). We can reduce tax credits for the wealthy and fight white-collar tax evasion with the energy and seriousness it demands. We can implement a publicly funded pharmacare program to save hundreds of millions of dollars on the purchase of pharmaceuticals through economies of scale.

Dogmas over dialogue

We can debate the merits and limitations of each of these proposals, just as we can debate the benefits of Keynesian deficit-spending versus rigid austerity doctrine in the present economic context. Yet this requires a government that is both moderate and mature enough to acknowledge that their prescriptions are conditioned by their own particular worldviews, and that they hold no right to a monopoly in deciding the future that others will inherit.

Instead, Quebec has a fiercely ideological government that speaks at and over the youth rather than speaking with them, that adamantly refuses to see the legitimacy of their considered alternatives, and that shows no interest whatsoever in seeking to understand the sources of their simmering anger.

Indeed, behind claims of “deficit zero,” the government’s latest budget actually holds a surplus of $1.6 billion, which will be used to pay down debt with no public debate.

The aging political establishment is guilty of no less than seeking to dominate the future. Yet all that they can ultimately accomplish is to render the inevitable changing of the guard more turbulent, and to once again drive a wedge through society by pitting one generation against another, with all the dreadful consequences this entails. Regardless of whether you agree with the students, the Liberals’ dangerous incapacity for dialogue is something no Quebecer should countenance. A state cannot govern against its own youth.