"There is a difference between breaking the law and having a law created to break you."
These words, taken from a speech given during a teacher's strike in 2005, could apply to countless movements and actions in the last hundred years, and recently with #Occupy, numerous high profile strikes and even the Arab Spring, we can see this in full effect. Simple freedoms, like that of assembly and free expression, when pushed so that they actually have force behind them, are swiftly suppressed, even in our more "democratic" societies. I'd like to turn some attention, again, back to the province of Quebec and a law that deserves some more attention, if nothing else.
The bill is summarized at the end of this article, or you can read it here, but I will provide a bit of a summary as well. First, some background. Students in Quebec are currently over 14 weeks into a strike against a planned tuition increase. Although the province has a long and proud history of student action, this movement has proven to be the longest and the largest, with over 300,000 students on strike at its height, and demonstrations of hundreds of thousands marching through downtown Montreal.
As the strike has progressed, so has the tension, and some of the almost daily protests have ended badly. In the past months, thousands have been arrested and many more have been tear gassed, pepper sprayed, struck with batons or even shot with rubber bullets. Court injunctions have been granted giving individual students access to class, but almost every one has been met with a blockade of striking students, and most schools that are on strike remain closed.
All this, however, is context. This week the government of Quebec has proposed a law to deal with this tension in a very particular way. The legislation would cancel the session for all striking college students, to resume in August. It would also prohibit the blocking of classes and make illegal any gathering trying to do so.
More striking, and more frightening, is the part directed against public demonstrations. ANY group of 10 or more is required to give police at least 8 hours notice, as well as the location, route, time, date and duration of all activity. Any individual who violates this can be fined from $1000 to $5000 dollars, which increases for repeated offenses. Student associations involved in this sort of activity can be fined anywhere from $25,000 to $125,000, and can lose all funding and space if it fails to comply with the law.
The enormous problems here mostly speak for themselves. I'd like to point out, though, that for the past 24 days there has been a march every night, often of thousands of people, that violates every condition placed. Nearly every single time, these marches have been peaceful, the exceptions being when the group was first forcibly "dispersed" by the police. None of these marches have been organized or called for by the student unions, or any group for that matter.
This law may be intended to break the movement by intimidation, but I can't see it doing anything but the opposite of that. When you criminalize political activity and demonstrations you turn what were the largest protests into the largest acts of civil disobedience in the nation's history.