As the Quebec student protests come to a head and coverage of the events begins to be featured by prominent news organizations across the globe, international opinion remains divided over the issue. While protestors are often mocked in the U.S. for objecting to what amounts to a miniscule tuition hike for any American, there has also been an influx of support for the students, especially in the wake of the protest-limiting bill 78.
Newspapers such as The Guardian have labeled that piece of hastily written legislation “draconian”, and perhaps rightfully so. Recently the bill has garnered widespread ire from rights groups such as Amnesty International who lend their support to protestors. It was also after the bill’s passing that the numbers in the anti-government rallies rose to the hundreds of thousands, and perhaps even more significantly, saw the original group of francophone student activists joined by protestors from a range of different demographics. Moreover, the Charest government, who were widely backed against the protestors in polling before the legislation, began to lose favour.
If there has been a catalyst for the growth of the student movement and change in international opinion, one can look no further than the ill thought-out bill. But as the groundswell of support for the student movement has grown in recent weeks, the threat of losing that newfound popularity is ever increasing. The cause of this threat is not a government smear campaign nor an anti-francophone bent; rather, it stems primarily from the embarrassing and repulsive rhetoric of many student activists.
The most egregious of this talk is the likening of the Quebec student protest to the pro-democracy movements that swept the Middle East and North Africa over the past year. This delusional comparison has resulted in students and newspapers dubbing the protests “le printemps erable” (the maple spring), a moniker as puerile as it is reprehensible.
“It’s incredibly offensive,” said Stephen Saideman, a professor at McGill University and expert in international affairs, “and the academics I’ve talked to in the Middle East find it laughable.” “This is not the Arab Spring, they’re not facing the possibility of being executed, they’re certainly not being tortured” Saideman elaborated to me, and I see his point. After speaking with Syrians months earlier, the disparity between the experiences of the two groups could not be vaster.
These Quebec students have not had their fathers, brothers and uncles killed by government forces, as many Syrians I spoke with had. They are not overthrowing a government or campaigning for basic human rights, nor are they are not bravely putting their lives on the line. They are protesting, whether right or wrong, against the increase in university tuition by $1625 over the span of five years.
Avoiding this reality, and speaking in grandiose rhetoric about “fearing our government, fearing arrest, fearing the future,” as the administrator of prominent blog quebecprotest.com recently wrote in an open letter, is idiocy. Adding that the author “burst into tears” after one of the rallies doesn’t help either, but perhaps ought to be expected from a website that “runs on solidarity and utter human kindness” instead of reason.
This type of hyperbolic self-indulgence is not only embarrassing, but it is anathema to the movement that they seek to promote. As George Packer, one of the best chroniclers of the Occupy movement noted, it is important once an issue is in the spotlight that it represents itself in a way that enables it to be taken seriously and gain legitimacy in the public eye.
Just as public opinion eventually turned against much of the Occupy movement, and media started casting them as homeless people and petty anarchists, so too does the student movement need to be wary of being labeled as petulant and entitled. Thus, when Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, the most prominent student leader, laments to The Guardian about how he has had to shut down his Facebook account, it does little to eschew those labels.
If Quebec students want to capitalize on the windfall of media attention that has been handed to them after their government’s act of folly, they must address the social and economic realities of their situation, rather than comparing it to a far worse one. Quebec may be “the most corrupt province in Canada,” but it is not Assad’s Syria, or Gaddafi’s Libya, or Mubarak’s Egypt.
This isn’t the Arab Spring, but it is something, and if students want to sway the two-thirds of Quebeckers that polls show are in favour of tuition hikes, they have to find out a better way of talking about it – perhaps “The Gravy Revolution”?
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Nick Robins-Early is a freelance journalist currently based in Washington, D.C. Follow him @nickrobinsearly.
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