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51
2012 Quebec Student Protests
Article
Contention: The Multidisciplinary Journal of Social Protest
Peer Reviewed Journal
Vol. 3(2), pp. 51-64 (2015)
ISSN 2330-1392
© 2016 The Authors
Abstract
The rst part of this article reports the main events of the 2012 student protest in Quebec leading
to the government’s adoption of Bill 12. It highlights the major ideological conict generated
through the liberal managerial mutation of the academic institutions as a key to understand
more clearly the student’s claims. Rapidly, the standard strike was transformed into a massive
mobilization that produced many protests and other forms of resistance. The response given
by the government to these unprecedented acts of resistance was Bill 12, to be understood as
a symbolic coup d’état with voluntarily disruptive media effects whose aim was to make people
forget the massive rejection of a pseudo tentative agreement in relation to Higher Education
reform. The bill was also supported through the abusive and twisted use by the government
of a series of buzzwords, like “bullying” and “access to education”, which were relayed by the
media. The authors also discuss the issues surrounding the traditional conceptions regarding
the analysis of discourses, mobilizing Orwell’s concept of doublethink and the notion of self-
deception inherited form Sartre.
audrey laurin-lamothe
Department of Sociology, univerSité Du QuéBec à montréal
michel ratté
Department of Sociology, univerSité Du QuéBec à montréal
2012 QUEBEC STUDENT PROTESTS: SOME
OBSERVATIONS ON MOTIVES, STRATEGIES
AND THEIR CONSEQUENCES ON THE
RECONFIGURATIONS OF STATE AND MEDIA
DISCOURSES
Corresponding author:
Audrey Laurin-Lamothe, Email: audreylaurinlamothe@gmail.com
The authors wish to thank to Eric Muszynski, Maxime Piché and Mathieu Wade for their helpful comments.
Keywords
Quebec; strike; student; protest; debt; media; discourse; doublethinking; self-deception
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Contention Vol. 3 Issue 2 April 2016
On February 13th 2012, a Quebec student protest against the increase of education fees
started and within three months grew into a massive mobilization, eventually transforming
into a social movement, symbolized by the red squares: “squarely in the red”. The issue of the
tuition fees was only the tip of the iceberg, under which multiple other concerns were articulated,
which revealed the students’ acute understanding of the transformations public higher education
is undergoing in a “knowledge-based economy”. After remaining impassive in the face of these
students’ calls, as well as through the rise of a more general unrest in the population, the Liberal
government, led by Jean Charest, adopted Bill 12 (better known as draft Bill 78) with the aims of
restricting the right to protest and hold demonstrations. This moment highlights the transition of
a historical student strike in to an unprecedented social protest, which was impacted by an early
and cynical election on September 4th.
The rst part of this article reports the main events of the student protest leading to the
government’s adoption of Bill 12. It highlights the major ideological conict generated through
the liberal managerial mutation of the academic institutions as a key to understanding more clearly
the students’ claims. Rapidly, the standard strike was transformed into a massive mobilization
that produced many protests and other forms of resistance that were combined with refreshing
creativity, sometimes under the inuence of the “rolling news” channels. The response given
by the government to these unprecedented acts of resistance was Bill 12, to be understood as a
symbolic coup d’état with voluntarily disruptive media effects, whose aim was to make people
forget the massive rejection of a pseudo tentative agreement on Higher Education reform. The
bill was also supported through the abusive and twisted use by the government of a series of
buzzwords, like “bullying” and “access to education”, which were relayed by the media. We also
discuss the issues surrounding the traditional conceptions regarding the analysis of discourses,
mobilizing Orwell’s concept of doublethink and the notion of self-deception inherited form
Sartre.
The lost autonomy of the Universities and their Subordination to Private Management
The Quebec Policy on University Funding (MELS, 2000) reforms the founding structure
of higher education institutions by favouring universities that enroll more 1) full-time students,
2) graduate students and 3) students admitted in faculties other than the arts or social sciences.
Performance criteria are designed to increase the number of diplomas, regardless of structural
effects such as the decline in quality and admission standards (FQPPU, 2000). Universities must
submit themselves to these “performance contracts” if they don’t want to be deprived of their
funding by the Minister of Education.
At the same time, the funding allocated to research and its management has become more
important, in particular through governmental funding of targeted research and tax credits for
businesses involved in the eld of research and development, which encourages partnerships
between universities and private corporations (Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004). Development
companies have been created through these partnerships and act as commercial relays between
knowledge and its potential commodication. The promotion of research focused on innovation
and practical applications, rather than on theoretical advances, is being done to the detriment
of teaching tasks, mostly in undergraduate studies. Lecturers — who are facing increasingly
unstable employment — are taking these masses of students under their charge, while universities
abdicate responsibility for creating regular professor positions (Noble, 2002).
The consequences of this transformation in the domain of the universities’ research missions
are quite important: the social space of knowledge production is no longer the discipline, but
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2012 Quebec Student Protests
Contention
one wherein knowledge will be considered as a tool. Problem solving in the context of targeted
research often becomes the researchers’ only goal. Almost none of the knowledge produced can
be accumulated and take its place in the immanent logic of the discipline. It is obvious that the
evaluation of the researches’ advances is now based on the local partners that are involved and no
longer on the monopoly of a discipline’s peer committees.
Bills 38 and 44, which were proposed in 2009 and are currently under consideration,
consolidate this new form of university governance by requiring that a majority of members
sitting on boards of directors come from outside the university community. More than simply
deciding the nancial management of these institutions, boards of directors have the right to
examine or modify all of the pedagogical, social or scientic activities by incorporating new
administrative controls. The prominence given to external members in the educational eld
is justied by the idea that the educational community is unable to govern itself because it is
involved in a conict of interests in the management of its own institution.
These are the mechanisms by which the relationship between the institution and its
management was reversed in favor of the latter: “Whereas management was traditionally a
means to ensure the autonomy of the institution, it is now the institution that is the object of
management” (Gagné, 2005; Readings, 1996).
Students’ Claims
The rst students’ demand was to halt the increase of tuition fees, from C$2,168 to C$3,946
(£2,762), which is a 75% increase over the next ve years. These fees, which are the same in all
institutions in Quebec, don’t include all the costs of education. For this, we also need to take into
account the administrative fees, different for each university, which averaged C$624 by trimester
in 2011 and will reach C$919 in 2017 (CLASSE, 2012a). In 2016, the total cost for a student would
have been C$4,500.
Like other western countries, Quebec is confronted with stagnating wages and increasing
household debt, a situation that is particularly true for students. 65% of undergraduate students
have accumulated an average debt of C$15,000 (FEUQ, 2012) and 38.2% think that nancial
issues are the primary reason for stopping or abandoning their studies (Luong, 2010). These
debts are still lower than in the rest of Canada or in the US, but they remain worrisome, as
economic analysts are fearful of a potential collapse of the student debt bubble (Wooldrige,
2011). Moreover, nancial institutions take advantage of these debts in two different ways.
Firstly, nancial institutions benet from interest by “offering” credit cards and lines of credit
for students that are not eligible for the public programme of loans and scholarship. Secondly, the
government, via its public program, pays, for the entire period of studies, interest on the students’
loans while also covering all the risks of default. Because the government offers full guarantees
over the loans, banks are taking unfair advantage of student debt by receiving millions of
dollars in interest without taking any of the risks associated with these transactions (Grandbois,
Lefrancois, & St-Onge, 2012).
Not only are student debts an obstacle to the accessibility of postsecondary education, they
lead to an increase in the time allotted to paid work during studies. Indeed, 55% of university
students work while they are studying, which represent an increase of 30% since 1978-
1979 (FEUQ, 2011, p. ii). The average number of hours worked has also increased. It is now
approximately 20 hours per week for undergraduate students. Students who are in this situation
deplore the consequences of working, arguing that it forces longer periods of study and that it
increases the risks of failing, as well as the dropout rate.
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Despite these facts, students didn’t primarily ght for an increase in public loans and
scholarships. Indeed, during the student movement of 2005, the government transferred C$103
million from scholarships to loans. In a context where the nancialization of the economy
matters for the government, it became obvious that students would have access only to a more
preferential form of personal credit, which is in line with a consumer oriented offer of education
curriculums, addressing itself to an individualist rationality that became stronger among what is
left of the student political communities and marks their inclusion into the university community
as a whole. The claim about freezing or abolishing tuition fees, against the government’s rm
intention to increase them, enables a repoliticization of the issues in education and the possibility
for the movement to insist on the social benets of access to education, and more specically,
to higher education. CLASSE, the most critical students’ coalition, has assiduously recalled the
historic mission of the public education system in Quebec, which is based on the fundamental
right to education regardless of the ability to borrow. CLASSE argues that the economic cost of
education should be collectively shared.
The students’ associations have elaborated alternatives for the funding of universities, and
more generally public services, with the objective of criticizing the arguments of “user-pays” and
the commodication of services. Reintroduction of a capital tax for enterprises would generate
an increase in income of around C$800 million a year for the Quebec government, and the
cost for a totally free education varies between C$176 to C$405 million. In addition, CLASSE
suggests cutting the marketing budgets of universities, transferring C$142 to C$284 million from
funding research to teaching, imposing a hiring freeze policy for top managers and rectors,
freezing their salaries, abolishing their bonuses, and suspending any further construction of
“satellite campuses”, which is directly linked to the policy of 2000 and aims to attract students
outside of their traditional geographical area, thereby enabling such institutions to compete with
crowded universities in big cities (CBC, 2012).
Creative Resistance
The strike began on February 13th 2012, led by CLASSE (coalition of striking student
unions), FECQ (college students association) and FEUQ (the university students association) and
quickly gained momentum with a peak of 330,000 students on strike (the total number of students
in Quebec is 400,000), grouped in 138 associations, during the rst historic demonstration on
March 22nd. The sheer size of the student mobilization (several associations voted for a general
unlimited strike until free education is achieved) is understood by some analysts as the onset
of popular unrest, resembling the Arab Spring, Spanish Indignados, Occupy and other students’
resistances (Chile, US, UK).
A number of important demonstrations have been held. From rallies in the subway,
backwards, naked or silent demonstrations, marathons to ‘stop the hike’, and mock right wing
demonstrations, to demonstrations where the route is randomly determined (99pourcentQC,
2012), they express a new creativity and imagination. In addition, there are several surprise-
actions of “economic disruptions”, namely blocking bridges, highways, banks, private companies’
headquarters, as well as picket lines in colleges, universities and other centres of public services.
Monthly protests have been organized on the 22nd of each month since March and they are
recognized as a peak event for the movement. Over 100 nightly protests have also been held: “Night
Demos every night…Until Victory!” At the strongest moments of the mobilization, there were
more than 11 actions in a single day in Montreal, sometimes involving several thousand people.
As the importance of the movement increased daily, the stubbornness of the government, refusing
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2012 Quebec Student Protests
Contention
to negotiate and even meet the student representatives, provoked rising public disapproval. On
April 5th, the Minister of Education submitted a rst offer, which maintained the tuition hike,
but attenuated its consequences by increasing the loans and scholarship program. Actually, by
this offer, the government insisted on the fact that these policies are a kind of positive response
to the worries of the middle class, which, according to the polls, was starting to become less
enthusiastic about the government’s plans. This political opportunism was understood as being
in contempt of all students and strengthened the determination and popular sympathy for
student demands. Moreover, the students successfully demonstrated that this new offer tried to
conceal a more important tuition hike over seven years, rather than ve. After trying to exclude
CLASSE from any negotiations, and by doing so trying to divide the movement, the government
nally accepted to meet all student representatives, but never really negotiated, offering only to
add to the package a new council regarding the management of universities. The last offer was
unanimously rejected by associations afliated to CLASSE, as well as by many students that
had chosen not to go on strike. The offer was in fact rejected by an overwhelming majority: by
340,000 students out of 400,000 (CLASSE, 2012b).
Bill 12 and the Role of Mass Media
This strong reafrmation by the students was met with an unprecedented governmental
decision for a Western country facing a massive student movement supported by an important
part of the population: the draft Bill 78 (now Bill 12) is profoundly hostile to freedom, attacking
human rights, the right to association, the right to strike and strikers’ right to expression. The law
requires individuals and organisations to inform the police of the date, time, duration and route
of any protest of more than 50 people 8 hours in advance, and imposes steep nes (from C$7,000
to C$35,0 00 for ind iv iduals, and from C$25,000 to C$125,000 for orga n isations) for any viol at ion.
This bill was preceded by several juridical demands provisionally accorded for injunctions against
student associations for picket lines and occupations of colleges and universities that cause
enough disturbance to cancel courses. Soon enough, these initiatives gave the impression that
the governing party was actively encouraging them. Moreover, these injunctions had devastating
effects, especially on the institutional climate among students themselves and between them
and the employees. It is worth mentioning that judges who sided with the complainants had
obvious ties to the Liberal party. This open secret is conrmed and rendered irrelevant by Bill 12
because it supersedes the individual provisional injunctions and homogenises, universalises, and
radicalises their scope.
As we know, the general dynamic of mainstream media in the form of “stories” where events
multiply rapidly tends to obscure or even conceal the links between facts and events. We have
an exemplary case if we consider that while the media space was saturated with the scandal of
Bill 12, it was also devoid of any evaluation of the massive rejection of the government’s offer by
striking and non-striking students. The progressive wing of the population, sympathetic to the
students’ cause, was enlarged by the popular indignation toward Bill 12. Of course, there was an
increase of sympathy for students on the basis of the fact that the Bill targeted them specically.
But the mobilization was more against the bill itself. It took the form of spontaneous outows
of citizens in their own streets and neighbourhoods at 20:00 every night, hitting pots and pans
to make noise. This movement had grown tremendously and led citizens to nd solidarities that
could enlarge the meaning and scope of theses ‘illegal’ pots and pans rallies. However, the ritual
was weakened over time. Should we think that the bill appeared harmless to people who were
previously challenging it? Indeed, citizens participating in the daily protest were violating the bill,
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but they did not see the law applied to them. In fact, the clauses of the bill on demonstrations did
not seem to be enforced by the police who continued operations essentially by applying criminal
and municipal laws.
This being said, there is every reason to believe that Jean Charest’s freedom endangering
bill was not an authoritarian action convinced of the virtues of repression. Didn’t we doubt it
ourselves when we thought that the law aimed to “intimidate” rather than repress? Obviously,
such an idea was unwise insofar as the government left the police to its own with this law1
and that the police reluctance to apply it was rapidly overcome2. However, this unacceptable
irresponsibility was perhaps only the result of the fact that, by this law, the government was
primarily seeking to make work in their favour the “crisis narrative” of the media in the conict
it had wilfully provoked.
This fact did not escape the attention of the main stakeholder — that is to say the nearly
400,000 Quebec students that the government claimed it wanted to vote on the agreement
itself (Hufngton Post Québec, 2012; Radio-Canada, 2012b). Indeed, the results were massively
against the government offer. This episode is by far more important than its abbreviated media
exposure would lead us to believe, which can be no doubt largely attributed to the circulation
of rumour, maintained for over a week, that the introduction of the special law generated. This
rumour obviously was confused with the speculations of journalists and experts invited by the
media. The narrative structure of the media being saturated by the proliferation of events since
the dramatic confrontation between police and students on Friday, May 4th, these speculations
where carried on against a background understanding within the media that the special law
was unavoidable, but at the same time impossible as an “effective” measure (Gagnon, 2012)
— understand: as the equivalent of the War Measures Act of October 19703. To bring to reality
the unlikely law, within the limits of its legislative framework, as an emulation of the federal
war measure law, made it possible to crush the political character of the whole crisis in the
media. The government was better off with a widened outrage whose unanimity with the news
headlines would reset the “storytellers”’ counter to zero, than to continue playing the role of a
government driven by a “rationally motivated” political determination. The Charest government
therefore allowed itself rst and foremost the enormity of a symbolic media coup: it attempted
and succeeded in making us forget the massive vote against its offer to settle, the result of which
it claimed it wanted to hear as a democratic government! The government knew that the new
media story would only appear to its “silent majority” as a necessary evil: could this majority hold
it against the government that the agreement was a compromise, or be worried about the massive
rejection from the students of what could pass as a compromise when the government has the
guts to propose such a law?
The media apparatus succeeded in transforming this event into something that could be
silently interpreted by some as a necessary evil whereas for others the bewilderment that the
improbable would happen left them shocked as if from a natural disaster: the advent of an
1 The Minister of Public Safety Dutil specically asserted that its application was at the discretion of the police
(Bourgault-Côté, 2012).
2 The political proling of those wearing the red square was particularly remarked (INCLO, 2013; LDL, AJP, &
ASSE, 2013). But we must not forget the repression of political demonstrations of fall 2012 by the Montreal police, even
after the repeal of Bill 12, under Montreal’s bylaw P-6, an offshoot of the repealed law.
3 The War Measures Act of October 1970 is known as the federal act, which suspended the civil liberties with the
ofcial objective to nd one government minister and one British diplomat kidnapped by the Front de liberation du
Québec (revolutionary terrorists who hoped for the emergence of a nationalist-marxist revolution in the province of
Quebec) (LaPierre, 1971).
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2012 Quebec Student Protests
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unreasonable evil left them speechless or else made them express extensively and insistently the
feeling that they could not believe their own eyes. In the media, the “new story” impresses itself
by this automatic rhetorical device. The vast majority of journalists nd themselves wanting to
redeem the fact that they peddled the rumour of the “impatience” of the government and its
“silent majority” and that they peddled the rumour of a special law by freely imagining it rather
than through serious investigative journalism. Journalists simply let happen a turning point which
they knew was imminent in the story because they were directly involved. The coming into force
of the two-pillar law — the restrictions on fundamental freedoms that outrage a new segment
of the population independently of the student cause AND the unilaterally deferred return to
“normality” plan imposed on the institutions and students — therefore had the effect of a natural
disaster, the effect of an immense power, whereby we no longer seek to understand the immanent
causal structures because the closure of the never ending conict story was interrupted by the
abrupt beginning, largely recognized as such, of a new story that rapidly appeared, in contrast,
quite transparent and without a plot.
Police
Even if the police didn’t enforce the vast majority of the draconian measures of the bill,
it continued to improperly apply criminal law. It should be noted that for the past 10 years the
Montreal police has been condemned by the United Nations Human Rights Council and Amnesty
International for its mass arrests during political events. In the last few years, some police watch-
dog citizen groups denounced the creation of an investigative unit of the Montreal police named
GAMMA, (acronym for surveillance of marginal activities and anarchist movements) in the
division of organized crime (which therefore has the right to partial secrecy) and dedicated to
the accumulation of information on political activists of “radical movements”. Montreal police,
who brutalized many students in occupations and many other events, also held for weeks in the
media that the overt criminal acts (the destruction of street furniture, the smashing of windows,
etc.) during street actions were carried out not by students, but enacted by radical political
factions. However, the police were not able to make any relevant arguments to defend that case.
It is obvious that the protests had become an opportunity for the police to justify and even
demonstrate the necessity of more GAMMA. The subtext to “more GAMMA” is more arrests of
extremist “vandals”. The differentiation between students and so-called “extremists”, as it was
made in police spin and repeated by senior political gures, was quickly recognized as irrelevant
by much of the mobilized people. Top government ofcials understood this and they started to
require from the student movement that it condemn violence. The answer was that all criminal
acts are condemnable and there are courts to evaluate if crimes are committed and condemn
their perpetrators that being the case. This was matched with the CLASSE reafrmation of the
historical importance of civil disobedience to the advancement of social justice.
This media struggle around the issue of violence took place at the same time as the
government congratulated police for their “work”, even in connection with operations that
have caused serious injuries and mutilations to the demonstrators. The complacency of the
government towards the police has allowed it to think it had carte blanche: from February until
July 22nd, there were 3,316 individual or group arrests, mostly without any criminal charges, but
often accompanied by a ne of around C$500. Since February, the police became more and
more arrogant, menacing and brutal. Amnesty International and the UN have, on a number
of occasions since the start of the strike, strongly petitioned the police to respect the rights of
protesters and called upon the government to rein in the police, but to no avail. Unfortunately,
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all this presages the possibility of the next outbreak in Quebec, and Montreal in particular, of a
police culture quite similar to that found in police states.
The Dialectics of Doublespeak and Babel’s Tower
Certain discourse analysis techniques 4 consist in nding and examining lexical redundancies
and their transformation as clues to the ordinary usage of language, which reveal a certain thinking
habitus, implying a disjunction between speech and thought. In conformity with the postmarxist
idea that thinking itself is ideological and therefore has no autonomy, even the use of ordinary
language would render opaque the contents of the ideas it is nonetheless expressing. As such we
have lost the capacity to step back in order to remember the original meaning or to reect upon
the nuances in meaning. Dystopic literature has for its part imagined totalitarian regimes exerting
control through repression of spontaneous speech, sometimes even through the production of an
ofcial language, strategically impoverished and absolutely exclusive, accompanied by censorship
of any other language, precisely in order to break the autonomy of thinking. We hence have
here two conceptions of human alienability by and through language: one which afrms the
irrepressible submission — which tends to be unconscious — of thinking to its encapsulation
within the linguistic habitus which becomes, unbeknownst to those who express it, the marker of
a social condition; the other, which relies on the strict inculcation of linguistic expression — the
habitus here understood as a tendency towards the reex — rendering speech an act divorced
from thinking itself, or at the very least from thinking freely. These visions seem at rst glance
to converge. Indeed it is possible to imagine these two meeting at the limit, where people wilfully
adopt ready-made expressions which mean nothing to the subject, used nevertheless with the
understanding that it is the appropriate thing to say. This would be equivalent, for instance, to
the success of George Orwell’s Newspeak in eliminating all non-prescribed meanings by its very
authority. It is precisely of this reconciliation which we should be wary, as the two perspectives
begin from radically different assumptions. The ideological critique claims that it is the whole
realm of thinking, insofar as it is believed to be autonomous, as well as its pretence of reexivity
mediated by its expression which is, a priori, powerless with respect to the far deeper alienation
of man’s praxis, being not primarily based in language. However, with Orwell’s Newspeak,
called upon in no small measure by the critics of ideology and the media, we are in front of an
authoritarian institution on which is grafted a repressive force which battles the persistent use of
the remains of the living language that employs proscribed meanings because it is recognized that a
rational and free mind could reinvest those remains with dangerous spontaneity.
We believe that the heuristic hypothesis of discourse analysis as a means of identifying the
self-generated “iron cages” of language, qua unconscious marker of the submission of ordinary
language to a social state of affairs, is useful only insofar as its results are products which can still
lend themselves to critical interpretation, which itself can be a means of bringing them to life for
the good of all. It will however be sterile if it cannot be conceived, at least ideally, as a means for
self-comprehension.
4 Discourse analysis is an importa nt branch of research wit h me thodological and epistemologica l problems of it s own.
It is born from a project to correct the critique of Marxist-inspired ideolog y. At the heart of the internal controversies of
this eld of expertise is the question of the relevance or not of making the structures unearthed by structuralist theories
of language the very locus of that which is ideological. That being said, the “discourse” is still strictly linguistic within
the paradigm of discourse analysis. That analysis is pre-Foucauldian insofar as it does not go so far as to understand as
discourse all sources and forms of domination or to understand as discourses a variety of non-linguistic practices which
instantiate the hidden or explicit expression of domination. For more details and additional nuances, cf. among others,
Dominique Maingueneau (2012).
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Of course, Newspeak, instituted through authoritarian means, and the repression of the use
of the living language, are coordinated to ultimately extinguish free thinking itself. But it does
not stop there. Central to the conception of Orwell’s Newspeak is the idea that the alienation of
language cannot succeed only through control and direct oppression of speech. It must break the
integrity of each of those who would use speech by making them understand that false speech,
from the point of view of reason or truth, also allows them to act with relative freedom in a daily
life infused with terror — and consenting to this duplicitous use of language consecrates the
compromise of language as a means to emancipation. The coercive character is transmuted by the
implementation of doublespeak — which is a type of linguistic expression which consists in saying
logically, perhaps even existentially, incompatible things — in the continuum of daily speech,
not due to being unconscious of it but through indifference to this state of affairs. Doublespeak
is merely the objective aspect of doublethink. The contradiction of doublespeak can be seen as an
indication of structural self-censorship of the expression of thought. With the conceptualisation
of doublethink arises the idea that a cognitive tool can disarm, for the subject themself, the problem
of their inconsistency as a rational subject. Once again, it is not chiey through self-illusion
that the subject’s crisis of rationality is disarmed, but through self-deception, through what we
might call, as Sartre did, “mauvaise foi” (bad faith), acceptance of which is primarily a way of
discharging one’s blame with respect to oneself rather than with respect to anyone else, since
bad faith towards another assumes in any case bad faith towards oneself, which is to say, self-
deception. This bad faith is grounds for not only the capacity to maintain incompatible thoughts,
but to believe them to be true just at the opportune moment (Chapman, 2009; Martin, 1984;
Nelkin, 2002). That is specically what the circumstances command when we are under the
yoke of a brutal form of authority — it is a question of survival. But it is no doubt even easier
to bear this bad faith in cases where it leaves the interlocutor indifferent. Some have interested
themselves in the fact that the Orwellian idea of doublethink came to be prophetic of the form that
interactions took within the high-surveillance dictatorships in the Eastern bloc. We, however, are
not to be envied, living as we are in a “democratic” society where, paraphrasing Woody Allen,
governments merely pretend to be concerned with the voice of their citizens. We, for our part,
certainly live in a regime of bad faith structurally borne by the entirety of the communications
of our political representatives and more seriously by their communications in times of crisis.
Luckily for us, if there is a neoliberal double talk, it is not the fully-edged doublespeak. As it is
not the language of a totalitarian regime, it cannot claim to extinguish the open-ended meanings
of other languages. In fact, it continues to draw upon those languages, insofar as it will not
hesitate to borrow from the still-living common language to prot from the meaning that the
daily media will dispense and eventually subvert. Here are two remarkable examples.
a) Bullying
On February 15th 2012, Line Beauchamp, then Minister of Education, Leisure, and Sports
(MELS), announced by press conference a plan of action to ght intimidation at school. Fresh
in the minds of the public was a teenager’s suicide in the fall of 2011, that of Marjorie Raymond,
which had been front page news for many weeks since the media, with the help of the public, had
for the most part been convinced that the single cause for the suicide had been the “intimidation”
that the teenager had allegedly suffered in school and online5. Despite the tragedy, this was a
5 This story was handled in a cavalier manner by the media, who thought to have identied the cause of Marjorie
Raymond’s suicide: intimidation suffered at school. An article by the journalist Joanne Bérubé in the fall of 2012 reveals
that in fact it was rst through rumours on social media (50,000 comments on social networks in the rst 24 hours
following the teenager’s death) that intimidation became the sole cause of the suicide. The appearance of Marjorie’s
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gift to the government: what could be better than a “simple” problem in the world of education,
moreover caused by its users rather than the government’s technocratic initiatives!
The government could not pass over the opportunity to fell two birds with one stone: they
decided to act before the tragedy spread from the case of Marjorie Raymond to those of the
striking students. Indeed not a week went by before the Minister hastened to “call for calm”,
all the while denouncing the acts of “intimidation” allegedly committed by the striking students
towards their peers, namely during the general assemblies. These accusations were repeated often
throughout the months of strikes and protests (includ ing on April 17th when a handful of students
from the University of Sherbrooke sought to le an injunction against the striking students).
The rst thing to observe is that “intimidation” is a fairly weak term, certainly vague6,
perhaps inappropriate, to designate what was suffered by the teenager if it led to her suicide.
Even the term “bullying”, which designates precisely a type of intimidation which does not shirk
from connotations of humiliation, coercion, threats and harassment, would require an additional
qualication connoting terror if it were to lead to suicide. No matter: the word “intimidation”
became the banner to which the media ocked when speaking of the unacceptable and fatal evil
which the government, taking upon itself the role of the father gure, claimed in order handle
the situation responsibly. It voiced its opinion not only about what makes schoolyards dangerous,
but also on the assemblies of student unions from the colleges and universities. The government
knew full well what it was doing when it was “outraged by the unacceptable intimidation” of the
students who are not in accord with the strikers7. The ostentatious expression of the unacceptable
character of “intimidation” sufced to raise the spectre of tragedies, after which it was no longer
necessary to validate the testimonies of intimidation, nor even to make the distinction between
the “object lessons” that some received in the context of emulation paired with the authentic
democratic spirit of the student assemblies, and the terrifying and fatal “bullying”. This is why
anyone who claimed to have been intimidated in an assembly needed to be listened to as a victim
who was not only calling for help but also courageously denouncing the generalised terror
exerted by the pro-strike students. The media, always anxious to x their own mistakes, fell over
themselves to give a public voice to these students in order to save them from the impending
tragedy, and save the population from the worry that this evil which preys upon their progeny
may be trivialized through silence.
There is no equivalent here to the newspeak dictated by the State. In the incessant turbulence
of the contemporary media landscape, with the lightning rod of public sentiment connected
directly and instantaneously to social networks, every day offers the possibility that the least
mother on TVA’s television show Mon topo “validated” intimidation as the cause of death for the journalists from
other media, while some other journalists, after an investigat ion, arrived at opposite conclusions (which later were
corroborated by the coroner’s inquest a few months after the event): the suicide was revealed to be the consequence of
many possible factors; intimidation being only one among many causes (Bérubé, 2012).
6 The legal meaning of the term “intimidation” is itself very broad—“whoever, unjustly and without legitimate
authorisation, [acts] with the motive of forcing another person to refrain from doing something that person is legally
allowed to do, or to do something that person is legally allowed to refrain from doing”—and the degrees of criminal
severity so varied as to allow charges to be laid from a simple summary conviction all the way to indictment in front
of a judge. Let us not forget that criminal law also implies the principle of presumption of innocence, and that it is
the criminal intent that must be proved beyond reasonable doubt. This is why the law describes, in article 423, typical
behaviours that are more suscept ible to justify an accusation (threats of violence or wrongdoing aimed at the person
or members of the person’s family, threat of proprietary damage, shadowing, prevention of movement, etc.) (Canada).
7 Intimidation had already been identied as early as the fall of 2011 by the CLASSE as one of the accusations that
would come from the government ( Poirier St-Pierre & Éthier, 2013, p. 142). The authors add nothing more, but it is
obvious that this follows from Marjorie Raymond’s suicide on November 28th 2011.
61
2012 Quebec Student Protests
Contention
verbal expression becomes the heart of the “common sense” addicted media. “Buzzword” is
now the product of a storm rather than that of the spin doctors. But the latter are still present, as
we shall see with the next example.
b) Access to Education
The word “intimidation” had entered into the line of platitudes created through mass
communication redundancy. The government then used this lexeme for the simple reason that it
was already charged with the dramatic signicance of the problem of the suffering youth.
It is not only the lexemes that the media storm stir up that are invested by the government
and that can eventually be subject to an opportunistic co-optation. “Access to education” for
example, is a phrase borrowed from the students by the government for its own ends. The
government uses these words in accordance with their own semantic history that ties them to the
principle which has been the spirit of the educational policy within Quebec for the last 50 years8.
This principle orients how Quebec society intends to implement the fundamental social right
to education, which it recognizes and takes seriously. Students evoke this principle by claiming
their right to benet from it, on the basis of its historical depth and of its essentially positive
effects over the last 50 years. This points to the fact that any transformation of such a principle
of educational policy must be extensively debated before being questioned and that the specic
action of the government in augmenting tuition fees is reprehensible because it is contrary to
this principle and that, therefore, it is surely illegitimate despite being the action of an elected
government.
We can safely say that the government, incapable of clearly defending the principles that
should drive it, does everything it can to pass them off as those the students claim as their own.
But imagining such a manoeuvre could betray the plan of the government to deploy the techniques
involved in manufacturing newspeak. We must acknowledge the fact that the government is not at
all animated by the idealism of the ctional dictatorships of great literature. The reappropriation
of the phrase “access to education” to apparently say something completely different does not
aim at any authoritarian institutionalization of meaning. The purpose is to successfully make a
one-time use, pragmatically effective, of a phrase in order to recover its connotation as a social
project and to benet from general approval. The government is of course embarrassed when
the symbolic signicance of the historical-political is pointed out, but it rationalizes the situation
in the following way: why couldn’t the recent positive impacts of this technocratic signier be
shared? This is no doubt why nothing in the reappropriation of the phrase can be claimed to
be a manipulation. Indeed, what appears as a deliberate attempt at hijacking the term remains an
attempt because the hijacking act itself fails completely — and perhaps even deliberately — by
the explicitness of the manoeuvre itself. All this allows us to put aside the idea that it constitutes
strictly speaking a classic “political exploitation”. Accepted in the common sense, this notion can
at rst glance be understood as a discursive technique used in the political eld that consists in
taking one thing — an event, a person, an idea — and to partly or completely distort its content
so that it can be integrated in a particular ideological discourse. This is not however the case here.
We must therefore resign ourselves to the idea that the theory of hegemonic discourse (Gramsci,
1999) is not the most relevant to understand the “strategic rationality” of the government.
In the following excerpt of the speech given by Jean Charest on the eve of the adoption of
8 The idea of access to education is tied to the principle of “equal opportunit ies”. The xity of university tuition was
the way that we had chosen to progressively attain free education as a measure claimed to guarantee equal opportunities
in the eld of education. We need to recall however that this does not abolish the meritocratic principle and that it would
therefore be illusory to think that all are equal once free access to education is achieved.
62
Contention Vol. 3 Issue 2 April 2016
Bill 78, on the evening of May 16th 2012, there is all we need to be convinced:
For our people, access to education is one of the essential conditions to our development
and to our economic prosperity. Our government, by its decisions and its actions,
recognizes the right to education. We believe that nothing and no one should hinder the
right of a Quebec citizen to have access to his education. […] As all Quebecois, we wish
for the pressure to be reduced on the establishments that are subject to a boycott. It is
time to allow calm to return. […] I am addressing myself in particular to all my fellow
citizens to remind you that in Quebec access to education is a right. Nobody can pretend
to be defending access to education and at the same time block the door to a Cegep or to
a university faculty. You cannot do both at the same time. Education is a prerequisite to
freedom and fulllment, to democracy, and will never be a pretext to intimidation and
violence. As a result, I announce that the bill will guarantee access to education and will
be based on the sacred principle of the freedom of each citizen (Radio-Canada, 2012a).
If the second sentence expresses the importance that the government attributes to the
assertion of its respect for the right to education — “Our government, by its decisions and
its actions, recognizes the right to education” — access to education, this universal right, this
principle guiding the institutionalization of justice for all in the eld of education, is presented
as something that can be confused with the individual right for the consumer to circulate in
and around a building where a service they paid for is provided. “The right to education”, that
is the equivalent of the right to justice, surreptitiously becomes the right to “my (your, his/her)
education” [that of each of the customers of the education system], when, in fact, they should not
be amalgamated. The right to education is established politically just as the right to justice. One
can imagine how nonsensical it would be to confuse the “right to justice” and the “right to my
(your, his/her) justice”.
But such awkwardness can exist only because the “ideological-political reappropriation” of
the phrase is not the main issue. It has only become a locutionary capsule, closed in on itself.
That is in fact why the difference between “access to my education” and “access to education”
are unimportant in terms of mass communication where “access to education” has become a
sign connoting the constructive spirit that brings hope to those who use it. Why then bother
distinguishing them? It cannot be t for the purpose of manipulation when it betrays to that
extent the perceived intent. As for the merits of the pretension that it amounts to the same thing,
this distinction can only appear as far-fetched because it lacks the essential and what is for it
inaccessible: coinciding with the long-standing meaning of the phrase.
One hypothesis then could be that this is evidence of what the members of the government
preparing the announcement of Bill 78, with the help of their wise and foxlike advisers,
“sincerely” thought: in love with the right to free enterprise, they thought that by presenting
the demands for a right to education as a demand for a right to free enterprise they displayed as
much “constructive spirit” as the Parent Commission (the government study of early 1960’ that
paved the way to the construction of a modern education in Quebec aiming at free and universal
access), while the students would be left complaining. If this was the case, we can consider as
extremely troubling the state of bad faith these people are in. It is so self-imbued that, intoxicated
with itself, it no longer recognizes its desire for conspiracy and as a result does not even think of
concealing it.
63
2012 Quebec Student Protests
Contention
Early Elections
The Bill 12 included a forced return to school, which wasn’t respected by all students, but
lead to a phasing out of the struggle. For the Liberal party, the early election on September 4th
2012 consisted of a bet that supporters of “law and order” would increase in the face of the
potential chaos on campuses. This means that this political strategy is based on the suspension of
the engagement of the state to preserve social peace. The Liberal party was now thinking that it
could take advantage of these social tensions and explosive climate.
These elections obviously show a new shift in the strategy of wedge politics: Liberals created
polarisation by implicitly inciting and nourishing a relatively controlled disturbance of social
peace using as a means a law which violates fundamental rights. We must notice that the relative
control of this disturbance of social peace implies even planning the timing of the peak risk
for the most dramatic events to happen. Should we not consider that all those features of the
government’s action are resulting in a soft form of a coup d’état?
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