According to CBC Radio’s French language service, the students yesterday proposed a two-year tuition freeze and a corresponding reduction in some tax credit bursary programs. Here is a news article in French that summarizes from the outside yesterday’s proceedings [1]. Readers of this note can probably find a similar account in the Montreal Gazette.

Below are two informative articles. Note the highlighted sentence in the article about the situation in the education system in Ontario: “(Premier) McGuinty has tasked his staff to look more closely at the intergenerational disconnect, and in an upcoming speech he will open up a conversation that acknowledges the fears felt by young people.”

Yesterday evening, approximately 600 people marched for one hour in the streets of Vancouver in solidarity with students in Quebec, to the tune of rhythmic clanging of pots and pans. [2]. Several of us on the march concurrred with an estimate of 600-700 people.

La Presse today reports that nightly marches continued in Montreal and Quebec City last night. There were no arrests, although one of the two Montreal marches that took place was declared “illegal” before it even began.

Some of the marches taking place now provide their itinerary to police, in accordance with municipal regulations or Bill 78. It’s not clear from afar the extent to which those choosing to cooperate with the restrictive laws distinguish between Bill 78 and the municipal regulations, and act accordingly, or their motivations to do so. Probably the municipal restrictions predate the student strike and Bill 78. (This report is not a critique of those submitting itineraries to police; I lack the necessary information to offer an opinion.)

Roger Annis, May 31, 2012

 Quebec’s manifs casseroles are a call for order

Op-ed by Jonathan Sterne and Natalie Zemon Davis
The Globe and Mail, May 31, 2012

Every night at 8 p.m., people across Quebec take to the streets with pots, pans and improvised instruments to make a massive din in manifs casseroles. Children, their parents, working adults and the elderly have joined the students to demand an end to Bill 78, which bans unauthorized public assemblies and curtails the right to protest. Premier Jean Charest’s government aimed to quell the student strike against a tuition increase by force. Instead, the protest spread. Anyone within earshot knows when a manif casserole is happening and how to join it.

These demonstrations are peaceful, orderly and welcoming because they are loud – not in spite of their size and volume. People cheer from their porches and police lead processions of marchers through the streets. Covering the past week’s protests, Canada’s English-language newspapers have wrongly cast them as disorderly. Headlines focus on arrests, and the words “mob” and “mob rule” mislead readers about what is going on. In fact, these nightly events descend from a practice that has been used to enforce community standards in francophone cultures for at least 700 years.

With their use of pots and pans, the Quebec demonstrators are taking part in the tradition of charivari, which in earlier times would see noisy demonstrations calling attention to a breach of community standards in the village or neighbourhood. The English called it “rough music,” and there were versions of it all over Europe and its colonies. Disguising themselves, young men would bang on pots and pans and ring cow bells in front of the house of, say, a widow or widower who was remarrying someone much too young. The youths were the voice of the community, given licence by their elders to restore order. The charivari was an alternative to violent exclusion, instead shaming its target into compensation or reparation. This was often a payment of money that allowed everyone to go down to the local inn for a festive drink or meal.

The charivari evolved into a form of political protest, and from the 16^th century on, there are many such examples. Older working men and sometimes women might join with the youth, clanging pots and pans against unjust officials and their policies. In 1576 in Dijon, the noise was directed against the king’s master of forests, not just for beating his wife but for cutting down the trees he was supposed to preserve for the people’s use. In 17^th-century France, charivaris targeted royal tax collectors oppressing the families of peasants and artisans.

Across the ocean in Quebec, noisy disorder was also used to bring about a just order. Charivaris flourished in Lower Canada, not only against unseemly remarriages, but against political targets. In the Rebellion of 1837, masked Patriotes brought their pots, bells and horns to the houses of government officials and demonstrated until they either resigned their office or shouted, “Vive la liberté.”

In the 20^th century, rough music got less rough. Charivaris around remarriage disappeared, and the political charivari became a form of peaceful protest. Quebec’s manifs casseroles echo Acadian tintamarre, a loud celebration of Acadian independence that dates from the 1950s. They echo Chilean cacerolazo, which arose in 1971 and resurfaced in the mid-1980s. Charivaris were heard when Argentinean banks ran out of money in 2001 and 2002, when Spaniards challenged their regime’s participation in the 2003 invasion of Iraq and when Iceland’s banks collapsed in 2008.

The older charivari tradition is also remembered in Quebec. Loco Locass’s 2003 song Libéreznous des libéraux, written for the Quebec election that year, calls for a charivari for Mr. Charest’s Liberals. At the time, it was heard as an expression of partisan politics. Today, it resounds as a call to stand up to the abuse of state authority and to repair the community by standing together and making as much noise as possible.

* Jonathan Sterne (Mcgill University) has written on sound and culture. Natalie Zemon Davis (Princeton University and the University of Toronto) has written on the history of charivaris.

 Protests unlikely in Ontario

Two solitudes, two student bodies. Why do Quebec and Ontario students live on different planets? And travel in opposite political orbits?

MARTIN REGG COHN, Toronto Star, May 31, 2012

Belatedly, local student and labour organizers will try to kickstart a day of protest across Ontario next week. But some four months after Quebec’s student movement took to the streets, no one is expecting their printemps érable (maple spring) to translate into our own trillium spring at Queen’s Park. The timing is all wrong. In Ontario, classes are out. So is class warfare.

Our students’ somnolence seems a puzzle: Tuition here is the highest in Canada ($6,640 on average); in Quebec it is lowest ($2,519). Like Quebec’s Jean Charest, Dalton McGuinty has been premier for as long as most university students can remember — since 2003. Yet people aren’t cursing McGuinty on the streets, nor clanging pots and pans about the right to protest.

Our political cultures are clearly different: Quebec’s demonstrations come against the backdrop of corruption probes that cast its political classes in the most unflattering light. Quebec also has a tradition of perennial student strikes over tuition hikes. There’s also the classic language divide: The campus of McGill University remains an Anglo island where all but a few dozen of its 38,000 students stayed in class, while their francophone confreres walked out in large numbers.

But here’s the main reason a trillium spring won’t bloom here: McGuinty had the good fortune — or political smarts — to pre-empt such protests by promising a 30 per cent rebate on tuition for eligible families in the 2011 election campaign. Even if increased fees upset students, it’s hard to rally your classmates when they’ve just received a cheque in the mail.

In politics, timing is everything. So is location. In Quebec City, a flailing Charest has brought back his old chief of staff, Dan Gagnier, to rescue his failing government. It hasn’t escaped notice at Queen’s Park that Gagnier held the same position with former Liberal premier David Peterson in the late 1980s.

Curious about how a chief of staff grapples with such a mess, I sought out Chris Morley, who has held Gagnier’s old job at Queen’s Park for the past two years. Morley’s long-distance assessment? It’s tough having a conversation with a moving target: Quebec’s student movement has multiple centres of power and decision-making. “Who are you talking to, and do they have the ability to deliver? The movement has taken on a life of its own and become a symbol for anti-government protests.”

Closer to home, Morley believes the Liberal rebate will forestall student frustration: “That’s a retail transaction that 200,000 students and their families have received.”

But even if the rebate buys the Liberals some breathing room, they recognize Ontario is not immune from Quebec’s discontent. Students everywhere harbour deep resentment over their growing debt, dimming job prospects and shrinking social entitlements. McGuinty has tasked his staff to look more closely at the intergenerational disconnect, and in an upcoming speech, he will open up a conversation that acknowledges the fears felt by young people.

Whether in Quebec and Ontario, apprehension and alienation are two sides of the same coin. Even if the politics plays out differently in the two neighbouring provinces.