In Quebec, a premier surrenders to mob rule

Even capitulation, Jean Charest found, was not enough. He’d stood by while striking students had blocked and intimidated others from attending classes. He’d done nothing while cars were torched and shop windows were smashed, while Paul Rose, the FLQ terrorist, was feted, while court orders were ignored.

After weeks of escalating mayhem, he’d agreed to stretch the increase in tuition fees over seven years, rather than five. When this failed to stop the violence, he’d moved the Quebec Liberal Party’s annual conference to Victoriaville from Montreal, for fear of the “demo-action” of “general rage” the students had promised. And after the students pursued him there, after billiard balls and chunks of asphalt had been hurled at police, after one cop who’d been separated from the rest was beaten savagely — punched and kicked and whacked with sticks as he lay helpless on the ground — the very next day, while the tear gas hung in the air, he cut a deal.

The terms of the deal need not detain us here. Suffice to say Quebec’s universities would no longer manage themselves, but would be subject to an ungainly committee of labour, business, university and student representatives, charged with finding the savings to finance a partial rollback in fees: not tuition fees, note. Just “administrative” fees, the ones that come out of students’ left pockets.

ROGERIO BARBOSA/AFP/Getty Images

Students protest hikes in tuition outside Le Victorin Hotel, where Jean Charest was giving a speech Friday at the annual Quebec Liberal Convention in Victoriaville.

But the precise terms are irrelevant, because the deal no longer exists, students having voted massively to reject it. Well of course. Why wouldn’t they? For the premier to have agreed to negotiate, under such circumstances, could only be interpreted as an invitation to demand more. It was a capitulation that held within it the promise of further capitulations.

“Negotiations,” of course, is a little joke. In most negotiations, one side promises x in exchange for the other’s promise of y. In the present farce, the government promises to give the students more money, in return for which the students promise to … accept it. Or not, as the case may be. Unsatisfied with the government’s offer to pay 83% of their tuition, they demand the same 87% as before. As a fallback position, they will accept 100%.

I shouldn’t say they have nothing to offer. What they have to offer is violence and lawlessness. Which is what this is about. It isn’t about the poor: the enriched bursaries that accompany the fee increase ensure nobody on low income would pay another nickel. It isn’t about accessibility: a smaller proportion of Quebecers attend university than elsewhere in the country, notwithstanding fees that are a fraction of the national average. It isn’t even about students, really, two-thirds of whom are not participating.

‘Who could resist such intoxicants? Who at any age, let alone 21?’

Rather, it is about how we distribute resources in a society. Much has been made throughout this business of Quebec’s “progressive” traditions, or the government’s alleged intransigence, as if this could explain the decision of individual demonstrators (a minority, to be sure) to beat people up or attack their property. No. It is learned behaviour. They do it because, experience has taught them, it works. Not only does it invite the admiration of certain radical professors and sections of the media. It confers power. It frightens others into doing what you want.

Who could resist such intoxicants? Who at any age, let alone 21? Watching Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, “spokesperson” for the most radical of the student groups, give a speech — a CBC crew followed him around — you can almost see the blood rush to his head. “Monsieur Charest!” he shrieks, one hand stabbing the air. “You are SURROUNDED! You have only ONE OPTION! BACK DOWN!” His eyes are ablaze. It is May 1968, and he is in France, leading a general strike.

Only he isn’t. He isn’t even leading the strikers, let alone the public. Yet here he is, barking orders at the premier.

A civilized society distributes resources in two ways. One is through the market, based on mutually beneficial exchange. The other is through the state, based on need: the only moral basis of redistribution.

But the coercive power of the state is all too easily diverted into other, less savoury schemes of redistribution: on the one hand, by lobbying, connections or outright bribes; on the other hand, by threats, whether of the lawful, pressure-group kind, or the unlawful, violence-and-mayhem kind. In either case the aim is the same: to enlist the state to extract from others what we could not persuade them to give us freely. This has nothing to do with need, and everything to do with raw power.

‘The coercive power of the state is all too easily diverted’

We have had plenty of both in Canada, and in Quebec in particular: the students are in a rich tradition of union thuggery, which is not altogether unconnected with the corruption that, it is now acknowledged, has put down deep roots in the province’s politics. And as its fiscal straits worsen, this sort of conflict can only be expected to multiply.

That is the issue. What do we want — a society in which we exchange with each other, voluntarily, and look after each other when we fall; or a society based on taking from each other, with the most ruthless or determined taking the most? Will we make these decisions at the ballot box, or in the street? By persuasion, or force? Within the law, or without it?