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Currently viewing articles in the Social Movements category.
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Appeal from Quebec: Solidarity and legal support needed
We write you during a dark time for democratic, human and associative rights in Quebec with the following appeal for your help and solidarity. As you have no doubt heard, the government recently enacted legislation that amounts to the single biggest attack on the right to organize and freedom of expression in North America since the McCarthy period and the biggest attack on civil and democratic rights since the enactment of the War Measures Act in 1970. Arguably, this recent law will unduly criminalize more law-abiding citizens than even McCarthy’s hearings and the War Measures Act ever could.
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Charest declares war on Quebec’s students
“It’s a declaration of war on the student movement,” said Martine Desjardins, leader of the FEUQ. “They’ve just told the young people that everything they have done, everything they have created as a social movement for 14 weeks will now be criminal.”
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Quebec government bludgeons student strikers with emergency law
Quebec premier Jean Charest announced May 16 that he will introduce emergency legislation to end the militant student strike, now in its 14th week, that has shut down college and university campuses across the province. The students are protesting the Liberal government’s 75% increase in university tuition fees, now slated to take place over the next seven years.
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Government ends negotiations with Quebec’s striking students
On Wednesday, April 25, Education minister Line Beauchamp abruptly ended the negotiations with the student leaders to which she had reluctantly agreed two days earlier — before they had even got to the key issue of the $1625 fee hike. She refused, once again, to negotiate with the CLASSE, the largest student union, which represents about half of the 180,000 students now on strike in Quebec’s post-secondary colleges and universities. That effectively ended the negotiations, since the other two student unions refused to break their united front with the CLASSE and fall for the government’s blatant attempt to divide them.
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Massive student upsurge fuels major debates in Quebec society
A crowd estimated at 250,000 people or more wound its way through Montréal April 22 in Quebec’s largest ever Earth Day march. They raised many demands: an end to tar sands and shale gas development, opposition to the Quebec government’s Plan Nord mining expansion, support for radical measures to protect ecosystems, and other causes. And many wore the red felt square symbolizing support to the province’s students fighting the Liberal government’s 75 percent increase in post-secondary education fees over the next five years. The Earth Day march was the largest mobilization to date in a mounting wave of citizen protest throughout the province.
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The Student Movement: Radical Priorities
The student movement in Quebec is an incredibly important development, with implications that reach well beyond provincial borders, rekindling the political imagination to a degree not seen since the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s. This is the most troubling and dynamic period in recent Quebec history, and the possibility that this energy will foster fundamental social change is very real.
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Why anti-pipeline organizing isn’t just another protest
The argument here is pretty simple: the creative, grassroots, solidarity-building efforts going on in pipeline organizing differ from conventional environmentalism, and that’s a great thing. The how of anti-pipeline organizing looks much different when people move beyond traditional strategies of environmental organizing and campaigning.
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The Enigma of David Harvey
David Harvey does not look at capitalism as simply an economic system with geographic consequences. Drawing directly from Marx’s dynamic mode of thought, Harvey looks at capitalism as a highly intricate and interconnected social and productive system and offers remarkable insights by looking at it in this dynamic way.
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Uneconomic Growth
The idea that economic growth can not continue indefinitely, or even for more than a few generations, is as old as economics itself. The classical economists — Smith, Ricardo and, of course, Malthus — each offered reasons for thinking that the human population would eventually outrun the capacity of nature to provide for much more than subsistence.
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Growing Alarm
Growth, conventionally defined as the ever increasing flow of goods and services on the market, is a mantra that continues to be embraced by nearly the entire political spectrum, even though, in the contemporary period, the biophysical, social and economic “limits to growth” have been identified as an urgent problem for over 40 years.
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