Petite-Patrie

   I live in a neighbourhood right in the middle of Montreal Island. Last night 10,000 people marched through the streets of the neighbourhood--as they have every night for the last week--banging their pots. We were one of a multitude of neighborhoods in Montreal that saw marches. Moreover the phenomenon has spread throughout the Quebec territory. Why do they do this?  The answer is not simple.
   Part of it is support for the student movement that has been on strike for more than 3 months now after the government of Quebec announced it would raise tuition and the students said that would exclude the poor. Part of it is also in response to the government's attempt to temper the street activity by setting rules with heavy penalties for non-compliance. Part also, without any doubt, is a more general reaction to the current Quebec government that is riddled with corruption, pressing ahead with huge resource extraction projects and cutting support to social services. Indirectly, this popular anger is also fed by the arrogance of the federal government, which is enacting a series of legislative changes that crack down on youth crime (even though it is decreasing) and on  immigrants without papers while making drastic cuts to charities, international aid and social services. One traditional symbol among the people here is the rooster (Coq). People seems to have come the conclusion that they are being plucked to the bone (like the famous allouette) and they have had enough.
   As the marches continue, the people are beginning to realize that, in addition to marching through the streets, there is need for stronger organizations. Citizens groups are springing up to take up the issues, to get those in all the political parties to join together to change this: to abolish the infamous law 78 and to support the students. A public inquiry has begun into government corruption; The list goes on.
   This is a unique and historic moment in Quebec history. Something that has not been seen since the time of the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s when Quebec took its destiny into its own hands. It is interesting that the official motto of Quebec is "I remember."  And indeed!

Change the World: I hope so!

I am tired and it is late; I have tried over many years to act in solidarity with those who suffer poverty and repression. In Peru during the 1980s I found myself in the middle of an upheaval that brought the issues right to my doorstep.  

Now, during these last weeks, Montreal, my city, finds itself in the midst of an upheaval that brings all that back again. The post-secondary students (167,000 of them) have been on strike for three months now. No end in sight. They march at least twice every day usually numbering between 500 and 1,000 and there are other events as well. We have had marches with 200,000 or even 300,000 people and yet no cracks open for dialogue about the issues. The police have been particularly brutal. In the last 10 days or so three young people have been severely injured: one with three cranial fractures, another lost an eye (and almost his life), another with several teeth missing. Yesterday the subway was closed for three hours (all lines) because of smoke bombs.

At the same time community organizations concerned about public services (health, housing, social benefits, unemployment) have held demonstrations and marches. The Occupy movement will be taking to the parks and the streets, in great numbers, starting Saturday. The Guardian newspaper in London has pointed to Quebec as the world’s hotbed of reaction to neoliberalism at this point.  The population is divided on the issues but 68% are against the current government. The government responds with repression.  We are in the middle of a mess.  Some of us are tired but not ready to cave in.

I have been giving talks on ecological economics, on the Canadian mining industry at home and abroad. I have sat in on conversations and meetings about how to save some of our grassroots and solidarity organizations and on how to protect the protests from the police and the media.

The Federal government has passed a sweeping bill clamping down on youth crime even though youth crime is declining and violence crime declining even more. But they want longer sentences and more prisons. Currently there is a law being proposed that could give up to 10 years prison to anyone wearing a mask during a protest demonstration. Surveillance of personal information and of public activity is omnipresence.

Both our Quebec government and the federal government are passing billions of dollars to multinational resource extraction companies while cutting social spending and international solidarity. For the government international aid now means giving money to multinationals, especially mining companies, to provide “social development” in the Global South.
The current leadership is without scruple, fundamentally corrupt and bought off by corporations. Everything indicates that their vision of law is ordered to the  repression of dissent among the population.
This may sound a bit rambling, but I just want to point out that Canada and Quebec are, at this point, in a rapid, very rapid, decline into what might euphemistically be called “authoritarian” government but one that is edging dangerously close to a police state totalitarianism.

Most people do not realize how their personal debt (house and car , etc.) has rendered them incapable of acting in their own interest. Most people work for companies who hold them on a leash through the spectre of unemployment. They are basically un-free and unwilling to even imagine outside the box. It’s not their fault. It’s the way life works here. They spend their days working at a job they likely are not all that interested in and their real life is confined to evenings and weekends with family and friends.  The result is caution in face of the larger responsibilities of citizenship and blind allegiance to whatever government and industry offer.

It is worrisome, but it is only one side of the picture.

The brighter side is that I am seeing a generation of young people, especially, who are finally saying no to all this, who are putting their careers, their future, their safety at risk in order to wake people up to the call for change. All the voices that have claimed the need for care for our planet, inclusion of the poor and marginalized in society, a society of sharing and of responsibility are now coming together in a vast and even global movement that is fired by values that  hold humanity and our planet together in respect and dialogue. It is a surge that learns from its mistakes and forges ahead toward its utopia, that other world that indeed is possible. It is a movement that is inspired by a force that exceeds its numbers and its strategies. It is a rising up from the dry and dead bones of a wasted civilization with a call to rebuild something new. It is unstoppable. It is a work of the Spirit that hovers over the world with bright wings!  But…. It is a generation and that means it has twenty years to do its stuff. The next generation will be different. What it can accomplish to create a renewed environment in the next 20 years will only be known later. We plant seeds whose fruit we may never see.