16 minute read
NEWS
Beyond the Strike
BENJAMIN SAVARD Contributor
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Benjamin Savard is the Vice-President of Sustainability and Equity from the Dawson Student Union (DSU).
On Friday, September 16th, over 500 students gathered at the third floor cafeteria for a general assembly. It was clear: students wanted to strike for climate justice the following Friday. The overwhelming attendance surpassed the minimum threshold of 300 students, and the motion passed within minutes.
During preparations for and following the climate strike, I’ve had several people come to ask me what the point of participating was. It’s a fair question. In the midst of large collective action, why is our individual participation necessary?
There’s a lot of ways to answer that question. Unsurprisingly, Dawson students going on strike the following Friday did not single handedly save the planet. It may even be worth asking if it made any difference at all. On October 3rd, the CAQ still managed to win 90 seats with an environmental plan full of contradictions. Were we better off just going to school as usual, and advocating for climate change in a different way?
On the other hand, strikes have historically been strong agents of change. Worker’s rights would never have come into existence without them. We often forget that tuition in Quebec would also be much higher than it is now: the 2012 student strikes still serve as a bitter warning to our legislators. Fundamentally, strikes are a powerful weapon that we’ve successfully wielded before.
So, what makes a movement succeed? What makes a movement stagnate?
Strikes and protests are advertised as catalysts of change, as some inherent power that forces the government to act. As if, in the minds of our leaders, there’s an off switch that can be triggered by surpassing a certain number of protesters whenever they decide to subsidize another pipeline. It doesn’t work that way; the current power structures are clear-cut. Within this structure, protests are heavily regulated, which diminishes the power of collective uprising. Fun fact – student strikes aren’t recognized as legitimate under Québec law, a roadblock we encountered when mobilizing in September.
Peaceful protests only have power because of the people behind them; they serve to unify us around a common goal in addition to sending a message. When participating in a student strike, we are telling the government that we want action and we’re going to fight to get it. After all, what better cause to fight for than our own future?
But for a strike to be an efficient pressure tactic, it needs to act as a threat. We may be off school for just one day right now, but fuck around and you’ll regret it. Unfortunately, François Legault is calling our bluff. There may have been 15,000 people in the streets of Montreal protesting his inaction, but again, he still holds and will continue to hold an overwhelming majority at the National Assembly. Why should he listen?
We need to keep pushing. We need to organize. A big march every year is great for spreading awareness, but it won’t solve the overarching problem of environmental degradation and systemic exploitation. Let’s follow it up with more direct action, targeting specific issues. The governments and corporations we’re fighting need to know exactly what we’re expecting from them.
Two years ago, the fossil fuel exploitation project called GNL Québec was canceled in response to strong activism that opposed it. One year ago, Université de Montréal agreed to remove all its investments in the fossil fuel industry after students went on strike and occupied one of the main buildings for five days.
The Royal Bank of Canada is the Canadian bank that invests the most money in oil. Shockingly, they also rank 5th in the world. There have been protests and actions organized specifically around RBC to push them to divest. They haven’t budged, but they’ve been spending more money on greenwashing initiatives in an attempt to save their image. This is a change that’s still happening; a movement that’s still hot. Let’s keep it up, because just marching through the streets of Montreal on the 23rd isn’t going to cut it.
To say that we can’t change the course of the following years is undeniably false. We can accomplish a just transition. But that doesn’t mean it’s a fair fight.
September 23rd was a magnificent step forward. It’s the first time in our history that Dawson students went on a climate strike.
I know some students still oppose it. I get that it was inconvenient, especially when the administration decided to put an extra day in the middle of the reading week. It’s not what we wanted. Personally, I did not show up to any of my classes on the 13th – strikes aren’t supposed to have catch-up days.
But did we do this because it was easy? While I get that some people just showed up for the pizza, I’d like to think that most of us voted to strike because we wanted to act, incite and provoke change.
Significant or not, almost five hundred students showed up to the third floor cafeteria and voted on the motion concerning the environment. That matters. It’s a win.
Let’s build on it. p p
The 2022 Provincial Election Results: Highlighting A Broken Electoral System
MATHEW ANANIA News Editor
A mere ten minutes after polls closed across the province, political analysts confirmed that the Coalition Avenir Québec would form a majority government. Similarly, in the weeks leading up to the provincial election, polls and experts predicted that the CAQ would crush all other parties in a landslide victory - and they certainly did. The required number of candidates to form a majority government at the National Assembly is 63, and on October 3rd, voters elected 90 candidates from the CAQ out of the 125 available seats.
CAQ leader François Legault and Québec Solidaire co-spokesperson Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, won their respective ridings of L’Assomption and Gouin with nearly 60% of the votes. Manon Massé, the other co-spokesperson of Québec Solidaire, won her riding of Sainte-Marie-SaintJacques with approximately half of the votes. Leader of Parti Québécois Paul St-Pierre Plamondon won his riding of Camille-Laurin with just over 40% percent of the votes. Dominique Anglade, the leader of the Parti libéral du Québec and the official leader of the opposition, won her riding of Saint-Henri-Sainte-Anne with just over a third of the votes. However, Parti conservateur du Québec leader Éric Duhaime lost the riding of Chauveau to a CAQ candidate, and is the only leader of the six main leaders who was not elected. The CAQ experienced a 16 seat increase from the previous election and will form a supermajority government, brandishing the ultimate, unopposed power. The PLQ suffered a loss of 10 seats and are going to the National Assembly with 21 MNAs. QS saw an increase of 1 seat, resulting in 11 MNAs, while the PQ lost 7 seats, and were reduced to only 3 MNAs. Although the PCQ did not gather any seats this election, their popularity increased exponentially, and they amassed approximately 500,000 more votes than in the previous election.
Québec is known for its high voter turnout rates and this election was no exception : voter turnout remained the same as in 2018, and around 66% of the electorate participated. However, if anything is to be learned from the results of the provincial election, it’s to highlight how broken the current electoral system is. Aside from it undemocratically representing the electorate, it is a threat to our democracy.
Québec’s electoral system entails the use of a single member, single plurality electoral system, widely known as the first-past-the-post (FPTP) system. Essentially, political party candidates run in specific electoral ridings, and are elected after they have garnered the most votes in that riding.
In all electoral ridings, multiple candidates run for power. Given that a majority is not needed, it is oftentimes a matter of a couple votes which separates the winning and losing candidates in a given electoral riding. Furthermore, given that the FPTP system crowns one winner, this imparts the voter with a feeling of underrepresentation in the event that their vote did not choose the winner, in addition to an incentive to vote strategically. How can a “democratic” system, which is predicated on the basis of ensuring formal equality through democratic representation, fulfill that promise by not fully representing the entirety of the electorate?
Coordinator of the Law, Society and Justice profile and esteemed political science professor, Dr. Dónal Gill posits, “the election results demonstrate a stark division between the island of Montreal and the rest of the province of Québec”. Two weeks before the provincial election, Gill worked tirelessly alongside Diana Rice and the DSU’s Vice-President of External Affairs to organize a provincial election candidate debate at Dawson. In attendance were candidates from the PCQ, Bloc Montréal, QS, Canadian Party of Québec, Parti vert du Québec and the PLQ. However, both candidates from the PQ and the CAQ declined the offer. The CAQ’s lack of campaign in the city was reflected in the results: the CAQ collected their seats from the rural and suburban ridings of the province, yet still managed to infiltrate the island in the ridings of Pointe-Aux-Trembles and Anjou-Louis-Riel. Nevertheless, the island remains historically dominated by the PLQ. According to Gill, although certain ridings in Montreal remained the territory of the Liberals, the PLQ lost the voter turnout support of Anglophones in historically Liberal ridings. This can be attributed to the PLQ’s response to Bill 96, which imparted the Anglophone community with a feeling of betrayal and unsettlement.
Gill asserts an inconsistency of the FPTP system in Québec politics: provided that the CAQ accumulates their popularity from the suburbs, they should have no say in matters relating to the city. However the CAQ government has tabled and implemented legislation such as Bills 21 and 96, which both serve to discriminate on the basis of language, ethnicity and religion. Due to seat distribution, Montreal does not stand a chance to revoke or vote against the legislation which specifically targets their demographic. Although most members of the city have demonstrated a strong opposition to Bills 21 and 96, the CAQ’s power overrides this. This begs the question: why does the ideological separation and strong opposition to the CAQ in Montreal translate into the implementation of their policies?
However, the biggest flaw and critique of the FPTP system is the disproportionate representation that results. According to our trusted expert Gill, a serious disparity is exhibited
by dividing the amount of votes cast for a specific party, by the number of elected candidates from that party. Applying this formula to the 2022 election results entails three of the five major parties being disproportionately represented.
The Montreal Gazette compiled a bar graph to depict the inadequacies of the FPTP system in the 2022 Québec elections. The CAQ received 72% of the seats by only receiving around 41% of the popular vote, while the PLQ received 16.8% of the seats by receiving 14.4% of the vote. QS maintained the second highest percentage of the vote share with 15.4%, yet only received 8.8% of the seats at the National Assembly. Moreover, the PQ gathered 14.6% of the popular vote and were the third most popular party, yet only received 2.4% of the seats at the National Assembly. Lastly, the PCQ were the fifth most popular party, and received 12.9% of the popular vote, yet they did not receive any seats at the National Assembly. Astonishingly, the PLQ became the official opposition party, while their percentage of the vote share is equivalent to the third party of the opposition, and the fourth most popular party. Ultimately, the disproportionate relationship between the popular vote and number of seats is a key takeaway from this election.
Whether it be during the provincial or federal elections, electoral reform has been addressed multiple times during the campaigning period. It began when Trudeau had promised electoral reform during his campaign in the 2015 federal elections. Legault had also promised to reform the electoral system during their campaign in the 2018 provincial election, citing that the system was “broken”. However, Trudeau and Legault have yet to deliver on the promise to reform the FPTP system. Indeed, during their first mandate, the CAQ had proposed legislation to reform the electoral system into a mixed member proportional representation system, which would have proportionally distributed 45 seats out of the 125. However, the bill never came to fruition. The unfulfilled promises to reform the electoral system can be attributed to the fact that political leaders thrive on power, and it would not make sense to reform the system which put them into power.
An alternative to the FPTP system is the proportional representation (PR) system,which strives to equally represent the electorate. PR would assign each party an amount of seats at the National Assembly based on their share of the popular vote. However, the fear of extremist and fringe parties getting a voice has acted as a deterrent to lawmakers from tabling legislation to adopt the system.
For students who feel passionately about the prospect of electoral reform, Gill adds on: “There are many civil society organizations like Fair Vote Canada and the Broadbent Institute, which are working to push for electoral reform, not just in Québec, but in all of Canada.” Gill continues: “Students can get involved in those organizations if they wish to see electoral reform.”
Despite the blatantly undemocratic representation synonymous with the results of 2022 Québec elections, many are still in support of the first-past-the-post system, often citing its convenience and convention. As misrepresented as the electorate may be, the CAQ will lead Québec for another four-year mandate. p p
Pictured left: Horizontal Bar Chart depicting vote share and National Assembly seats in Québec’s 2022 Election. Source: Élections Québec, Chart: Montreal Gazette.
The Persecution of the Uyghurs: What is Going on in China?
AYA HAFEDA Staff Writer
Like many countries around the world, China possesses many minority ethnic groups. In 2022, the most familiar being the Turkic ethnic group: Uyghurs. About eleven million Uyghurs live in the northwestern region of Xinjiang, China and are known to follow the religion of Islam.
In August 2018, a US representative at the United Nations Committee of the Elimination of Racial Discrimination had received credible claims confirming the existence of one million Uyghurs in concentration camps in the city of Xinjiang, China.
According to previous concentration camp victims, Uyghurs are forced to undergo daily atrocities: rape, forced abortions, sterilizations, physical and verbal abuse, organ harvest, invasive homestay and forced family separation, all because of their Muslim faith. On September 30th, 2022, The NY Times released an article which estimated that “around 8,500 mosques across Xinjiang had been completely demolished since 2017.” Accusations include the destruction of places of worship and tombs, targeting Muslim religious figures, banning religious books, clothing and holidays celebrations.
Just recently, on the 31st of August, 2022, the UN released a long-awaited report on the crimes China is accused of committing. This demonstrated their acknowledgement of the urgent situation following the numerous complaints on the case. Michelle Bachelet, the UN High-Commissioner of Human Rights stated that: “allegations of patterns of torture, or ill-treatment, including forced medical treatment and adverse conditions of detention, are credible, as are allegations of individual incidents of sexual and gender-based violence.” Along with many other charges, the UN has declared that “This has included far-reaching, arbitrary and discriminatory restrictions on human rights and fundamental freedoms in violation of international laws and standards.”
President Xi Jinping does not tolerate minorities who share values and customs that differ from the rest of the Chinese population. According to Jinping, the Uyghurs and Kazaks’ adherence to Islam and Turkic language was an issue to be dealt with. Jinping had previously forced labor onto them in urban and factory jobs in the city in order to avoid divisions such as dissimilar traditions. In 2014, the Chinese government began building various camps meant to assimilate the minor Muslim ethnic groups.
In response to the dismay the world felt with regards to the cruel treatment, the president said: “Incorporate education about a shared awareness of Chinese nationhood into education for Xinjiang cadres, youth and children, and society. Make a shared awareness of Chinese nationhood take root deep in the soul.”
In Canada, a motion to declare China’s crimes against the Uyghur population as an ethnic genocide passed 266-0, with not a single objection. This motion makes Canada the second country, after the USA, to acknowledge the present genocide in China. Furthermore, since July 1st, 2020, Canada adopted a prohibition similar to the United States that was enforced by the Canada Border Services Agency “on the importation of goods from any country produced wholly or partly by forced labor”.
In the United States, during December 2021, Congress adopted the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. However, in a CNN Town Hall on February 16, when asked about his input on the situation, President Joe Biden stated that “culturally, there are different norms that each country and their leaders are expected to follow”. Many critics spoke out against his statement. Nonetheless, his secretary of state, Tony Blinken, used the term “genocide” during the confirmation of the description of the Uyghurs’ ill treatments.
The European Union has also issued a ban against work and imports from Xinjian, after Commission President Ursula von der Leyen called for one. According to Executive Vice-President and Commissioner for Trade, Valdis Dombrovskis, their goal in upholding this ban is to “eliminate all products made with forced labor from the EU market, irrespective of where they have been made.” The ban has yet to come into effect.
Surprisingly, on September 13th, 2022, during the 51st session of the UN Human Rights council, 27 governments, including Russia, Saudi Arabia, Cuba and Egypt signed an official declaration of support to Chinese policies and condemned the UN’s report on crimes against humanity targeting Uyghurs. When observing crimes against humanity, it is not unusual to feel helpless and that our involvement is in vain. However, in this situation, you can help.
There exists a non-profit organization based in Montreal called the International Support for Uyghurs (ISU) located in Lasalle, Quebec. Their organization aids the oppressed ethnic group in China by proposing helpful methods, and advocating against ill-treatments. You can help by subscribing to their organization and receiving all of the latest news, upcoming events in Montreal, as well as updates, and achievements concerning the issue. The website offers three ways to help: volunteering, donating, and raising awareness. You can also read an open letter sent to all members of Parliament, including Trudeau, inciting Canada to do more in prohibiting labor work from Xinjiang and speaking about the ongoing crisis.
According to The Business & Human Right Resource Center, 83 companies were exposed for directly or indirectly benefiting from the oppression of the Uyghur people. This included major brands such as Nike, North Face, Apple, and Zara.
The reeducation camps the Uyghurs are placed in forces them to do labor work for many hours every day. We should not turn a blind eye to the deplorable conditions in laboring camps and the forced labor Uyghurs are subjected to.
