Everyone recognizes that Quebec has changed. With the last election, the Parti Québecois and the Liberals have both fallen from grace – and rather unceremoniously at that. The Action Démocratique du Québec (ADQ) saw a meteoric rise, which led them from the fringe to within seven seats of forming government. The slim Liberal lead now ensures governmental paralysis. But the last election was only a symptom of discontent, expressed in a distorted manner for reasons which will become clear.
Four years of Liberal rule, hard on the heels of eight years of the PQ austerity regime, left Quebec’s social services decimated and the working class in a state of disarray. With a full mandate for a one-day general strike within the CSN, and 90% ratification from FTQ locals, all of Quebec seemed poised to strike back against the Charest Liberals’ cuts. The tragic betrayal of the union leadership in December 2003 demoralized and demobilized the workers’ movement. On May Day 2003, there were 150,000 workers gathered in Montreal. On May Day 2007, there were a mere 5,000 workers and activists. While some of this decline can be accounted for in terms of whether the rally was on a weekday or a weekend, there has been a clear decline since the high-water mark of 2003.
It was left to the students to carry forward the movement begun by the workers, culminating in the student general strike of early 2005. This movement shook Quebec to its core and forced the government to retreat. The betrayal of the right wing was a lesson learned by the movement, as was the need for unity between students and workers.
The disappointment with the labour leadership turned the turmoil in Quebec into its opposite. Precisely when the majority of Quebecers were looking for firm solutions and a strong principled stand, the bureaucracy diverted the movement into a lull and a vacuum of leadership emerged.
The neo-conservative ascendancy in Ottawa prepared the ground for a new kind of election campaign in Quebec: one that exploited the thirst for a radical alternative to the impasse of a Canadian bourgeois party and a Quebecois petty-bourgeois faux nationalist party. The ground was prepared with a Republican-style “clash of civilizations” dialogue during the months leading up to, during, and after the election. The debate was transformed from that of the crisis of health care, education, and jobs into the basest and most vile ethnic chauvinism and scape-goating. It even had a brand name: “reasonable accommodation”, a debate over how much minority rights were “too much.” The ADQ emerged as the crystallization of this campaign, with leader Mario Dumont using the somber shadow of Maurice Duplessis as a historical model.
With the crisis of Quebec society and the bankruptcy of the labour bureaucracy forestalling class solutions, the ADQ emerged as the real winner of the election. The PQ was relegated to third place, and the Liberals were punished for their crimes against the working class. Quebec awoke to its first minority government in 139 years. Just as with Florida in 2000, and Ohio in 2004, there were reports of voting irregularities which soon disappeared from the media coverage. A great hue and cry was raised over whether veiled women should be allowed to vote.
The shifting allegiance of the ruling class exposed its hunger for a firm hand. Only a party such as the ADQ, only another Maurice Duplessis, could attempt to wipe away the memory of 1972’s abortive working-class revolt, just as Sarkozy aimed to “bury the memory of 1968” in France.
What was telling, though, about Dumont’s self-described “revolt of the middle classes and rural areas” was the billion-dollar tax cut he opportunistically stood against. A Leger Marketing poll found that 70% of Quebecers rejected the near-billion dollars in tax cuts.
The “constitutional crisis” this budget brought on saw the ADQ promise to bring down the government. There was even speculation that the Lieutenant-Governor would step in and ask Mario Dumont to form a government, should the Liberal budget be defeated – because Quebecers “didn’t want another election.”
The PQ exposed its impotence throughout the showdown, first by rejecting the tax cuts but publicly proclaiming an indecisiveness to defeat the government, then by going on the offensive…by sending only three representatives to the vote. In this way, they were able to have their cake and eat it too: vote against the budget as well as ensure it would pass.
Interestingly, the ADQ’s position was strengthened by its stance against the tax cuts, which, in themselves, were a recipe for the further dismantling of social services. Polls showed that, were an election to be called, the ADQ would form the government with 33% of the polls, with the PQ leading the opposition at 30%. The spectacle exposed the impasse of the ruling class. The “constitutional crisis” was proven to be mere wrangling by different wings of the elite, none of which had any solution to the underlying question.
Quebec’s working class and its allies must recognize the lessons contained in this episode.
Had the PQ been capable of bringing down the government in the interests of protecting working people, the ADQ would have been the first to protect the pro-business agenda contained within the Liberal budget. Now, as with the federal Liberal Party’s promises to pull out of the FTA and abolish the GST in the early 90’s, or the Democratic Party’s promises to stop the Iraq war, the rule for opposition business parties is to promise anything so long as they change nothing. Only a Labour Party, organically linked with the trade unions and the mass movement, could have defended workers: by exposing the interests of the ruling class, mobilizing an extra-parliamentary opposition in the factories, schools, and streets, and demanding that the government open its ledgers for all to see.
The real numbers would show that, above and beyond the planned abolition of the capital gains tax, and the billion-dollar squander of hard-earned taxpayer money, an estimated two to three billion dollars are lost each year to corporate tax fraud (with tacit governmental kickbacks). This exorbitant sum disproves, once and for all, the lie spread amongst students and workers, that there is no more money for reforms. The real question is which class controls the public purse.
It would cost about $500 million a year to provide free, quality, post-secondary education. But it is precisely in the sectors of education, health care, and social services where 500,000 public-sector workers are prevented from striking for better pay and higher-quality services by Quebec’s Bill 142.
The mass organizations are in a state of ferment, the extent of which is only beginning to express itself in isolated and yet by no means coincidental instances. These changes reflect an accelerating shift among the active layer of labour and student unions who have begun the work of activating the mass base. All of our experiences and lessons are regrouping in the form of more effective organization and better tactics.
This fall, Quebec will see the students hit the streets once again, as in 2005, but this time for free education and against Bill 142. Armed with the lessons of the past period, they have already begun to seek the support of the workers, who really control the functioning of government.
Far from being buried, 1972 will be rediscovered. It doesn’t always take a budget to bring down a government.
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