The following article draws attention to an important issue that has been largely overlooked in the Quebec student strike.

The author, Pierre Graveline, is a well-known journalist, editor and publisher, and is currently the executive director of the Fondation Lionel-Groulx. A former official with the Quebec teachers union, he is the author of a book on the history of education and teacher unionism in Quebec.

I have translated this article from the Quebec on-line newspaper L’aut’journal.

“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.”

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.

Quebec college and university students are now in the 13th week of their militant province-wide strike while voting by overwhelming majorities to reject a government offer that met none of their key demands.

The opposition between the government and an important social movement like the student movement is reminiscent of a game of chess. Two organizations face off, each unravelling complex strategies both to confound their adversary and to reach their objectives.

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.

As this leadership race draws to a close, it is far too glib to claim that Canada’s New Democrats have, once again, failed or will fail working people and their families. That has been the mantra of so many, “right” and “left” that we have come to believe it ourselves. We are, as long time New Democrat Gerry Caplan put it fiercely in the Globe & Mail not long ago, in the midst of a world-wide class war. And our principal left(ish) electoral party seems weak, disorganized, and devoid of fresh thinking. Are we letting the 1% define us?

The year 2015 is a long-time away but, considering the many difficulties the NDP has to overcome to win, it is hard to understand why candidates who obviously care about the country would totally rule out the possibility of a coalition government.

So after 50 long years of being on the receiving end of Canada’s archaic first-past-the-post polling, Québec had finally rewarded us with a resounding mandate–probationary, yes, and totally out of the blue–but resounding just the same. After half a century of political intercourse of our two solitudes, the NDP had hit the spot and united the left forces in both nations under one banner!

On the morning after Election Day, supporters of the Conservative party were able breathe a sigh of relief that their troops were not defeated and replaced by a Liberal-NDP coalition. Conversely, the news that Stephen Harper would be heading-up a majority government came as a cold shower to those hoping that a progressive coalition would lead the country into a new day.