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Electoral Cynicism and the Strike
Blog posts reflect the views of their authors.
The timing of the provincial election reaches the depths of cynicism. The Charest Liberals are banking on their firm stance against the student strike to retain their fleeting grip on power.
Voters will witness police clubbing students and some teachers on picket lines early this August, and elections will soon follow.
Never mind that the Liberals are helping to ship deadly asbestos to developing countries. Never mind the widespread corruption and collusion at the highest levels of government. Never mind that Quebec is pedaling the Plan Nord and a shale gas extraction method known as “fracking,” with all their devastating environmental consequences. Forget all that. The students need disciplining.
The great irony is that students are trying to raise precisely these concerns. The largest Earth Day rally in Canadian history took place this April 22 on the streets of Montreal. A delegate from CLASSE went to the Rio+20 Peoples Summit in Brazil, where international leaders at the official summit again failed to make meaningful progress to curb global warming. Yet none of this will make the electoral radar.
Rather than revitalizing democracy, the elections are a sign that the well of electoral politics is drying up. The possibility for widespread direct democracy beomes very real in these conditions.
About the poster
Matthew Brett (Matthew Brett)
Montreal, Quebec
Member since May 2011
About:
Matt Brett is an anarchist, activist, writer and assistant publisher at Canadian Dimension magazine.
207 words
Comments
Really... what did you expect
Submitted by anabraxas on Tue, 07/31/2012 - 17:58.
Really... what did you expect from some corporate puppet like Charest???
If he gets to be flamed in August and loses his elections due to his dictatorial handling on the strike, they'll just replace him with another corrupt guy with a faceless Party machine that's only there to pass the policies dictated by global finance, and rape the land even more. Damnit, François Legault is already flirting on CLASSE's Twitter page... they let him do this!
"Electoral cynicism"? Yeah, go ask Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois about electoral cynicism... he and his gang seems to have their hands all busy with it.
There can be no "direct democracy" unless some revolution or coup happens... and this, my friend, cannot be achieved with "casseroles", nice slogans and countless civilized marches downtown. Look at History a bit.
This is the world of Austerity, face it. An inhuman and anti-natural society where corporate oligarchies are running the show. The sooner you face its harsh reality, the better you'll know where and how to fight it. Of course... if you really wanna fight it.
Who knows?
Submitted by bernans on Fri, 08/03/2012 - 10:07.
No party is in a position in the polls at the moment to form a majority government. Students and non-students alike are more mobilized than they have ever been. QS will be in the CBC-TQ debates bringing a well-argued pro-strike position (although TVA is freezing them out). Who knows what will happen?
bernans, true change can come
Submitted by anabraxas on Tue, 08/07/2012 - 07:15.
bernans, true change can come only through our own self-organization. Although still now thin and timid, developed mainly through the neighborhood assemblies and student groups, this is the way people can put power back into their hands, and back to street level, instead of once more giving it all away to a bunch of despots who pass laws and
QS running the government? Not unless they are backed by the globalist hierarchy/global finance. We are under the NATO bloc, and if you see how NATO is treating socialist regimes elsewhere, that's quite unlikely the higher power are gonna allow a true leftist (and additionally independantist) government to happen.
Take another "nice risk" like in the mid-'70s, where an entire popular movement got recycled by the State for then being ruined by elitist political processes and austerity measures?
No, with the actual strike, we have an opportunity to at last create another kind of management, without the need for elitist government above our heads. Why sweep all that momentum away by voting for a Party that will "sugar the pill"?
Down with elections, power to the streets!
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