Concert blasts anthems of the Quebec student movement as Montreal's first major festival of the season wraps up

Loco Locass in action

RY Montreal Bureau

The closing weekend of the FrancoFolies de Montréal, the first major festival of Montreal following the Grande Prix Forumla One race, saw audiences go wild to Quebec musicians Loco Locass and Algonquin rap musician Samian. The activist hip hop group wrapped-up their show with chants, flag waving, casseroles and then welcomed the spokespeople of the student movement on to the stage to preform together an extended version of their hit song  Libérez-nous des libéraux (Liberate us from the Liberals) for over fifteen minutes.

The Youtube of this high-energy close of their act is below, and if you are interested in a front-row view of the show, click here.  The inclusion of Samian, the group said, was not just to again join forces with this  outstanding young artist but also showed that Aboriginal struggles and rights must be part of the Quebec perspective for sovereignty.  Samian, who helped host last November's Aboriginal People's Music Awards, has preformed across Canada and internationally and recently become an outspoken voice against the Quebec government's Plan Nord and its impact on First Nations communities.

It appears that the Charest Liberal's are already trying to silence certain pro-student groups from the some of the huge music and cultural festivals that entertain the people of Quebec during the summer. Nevertheless, political comments and slogans, the ubiquitous and supposedly subversive red square, and even a few pots and pans have regularly sneaked on to stage at the ten day FrancoFolies.

Read the full article »

Why don`t the Communists just link forces with the Radical Left Coalition?

Members and friends of the 'party that forgot to die' (see below) at a public meeting of the KKE

J. Boyden

The political assessment of the Communist Party of Greece (which we posted here today) deserves some introduction for our readers in Canada. Afterall, as Greece heads towards Sunday elections, all eyes seem to suddenly be turned to the volatile situation in the Hellenic Republic.

UPDATE: View the election results in graphic form and read the assessment of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Greece.

Progressive-minded people in Canada are optimistic. After years of hard struggle with countless general strikes and mass rallies, maybe these elections will hand a victory to political parties that identify with the left? Maybe they will demonstrate a different direction from austerity and economic crisis to the world?

There is also a certain renewed anxiety in the voices of the ruling class.  “We cannot have a Greek election determining the future of the global economy. That’s not fair to anybody,” Canadian Prime Minister Steven Harper said recently. Today, Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney referenced Greece and the European situation to warn of more mass unemployment and 'recession` over here.

For the working people of the world, and the capitalist class, it seems the stakes are high.

Read the full article »

The road to a people`s Greece

Members of the Communist Party of Greece at an rally last week

The Greek bourgeois Establishment sees this weekend's electoral battle as an opportunity to give itself a facelift.

This is because the traditional governing parties are in decay. The right-wing New Democracy has absorbed a smaller right-wing party, the Democratic Alliance, and MPs from the nationalist Popular Orthodox Rally and is seeking to promote itself as a "centre-right pole."

But on the centre-left, the previously dominant Panhellenic Socialist Movement (Pasok) has been decimated and its position is being taken by the Coalition of the Radical Left (Syriza).

Syriza is made up of forces that left the Communist Party (KKE) in the splits of 1968 and 1991 and "divorced" themselves from the communist movement.

Many of these forces are characterised by their support for the imperialist European Union. There are also Maoist and Trotskyite groups and forces which have come to Syriza, chiefly from within Pasok.

Syriza says it is struggling for a "left government" which will relieve the very serious problems faced by the Greek people but without coming into conflict with the EU or Nato, and while keeping Greece in the eurozone.

It was no accident that the Greek federation of industrialists was in favour of a government with Syriza's participation.

Read the full article »

Damn it, man, stop wasting my time and money with this friggen' democracy crap!

Conservative Finance Minister Jim Flaherty to the NDP: "You waste all that time in the House of Commons last night, and then do this waste of time on the rolling voting [standing up slowly to vote], which accomplishes nothing except wasting taxpayers money in the House of Commons –  because it’s expensive to run the House of Commons –  and then have the nerve to say we want to have Question Period... This is, like, chutzpah, right?"

On the Federal Budget debates, quoted in the Globe and Mail

Read the full article »

English-language resources about the Quebec student strike

• MUST READ: Translating the Printemps Érable

• Fight Tuition Increases

• Why Strike?

• Stop The Hike - La CLASSE

• Mediaswap

• Geograds

• MobSquad

• McGill Graduate Students for Free Education

• Unrest in Quebec - William M. Burton

• Open File Montreal 

• The Maple Spring - Rabble.ca

Read the full article »

Students and feminists rise up in the Quebec student strike

Marianne Breton Fontaine

At the beginning of the Quebec student strike, the movement did not merely demand increased accessibility through a reduction in tuition fees.   There was, from the outset, a principled opposition to the policies of user fees and privatization.   But there is also a direction to this movement which is profoundly anti-oppressive and pro-feminist.

Afterall, in practice the increase in tuition fees would affect women, and especially working class women, more severely than most other sections of society. Now, the student struggle in itself has become an platform to promote feminist debate.

Read the full article »

The noise on the street is the sound of struggle!

On s`en casserole! 

J. Boyden

Over the past two months the picture of Quebec is of a people in motion, a river of struggle and solidarity.  That river surged and burst its banks in May with the passing of the repressive Law 78 (read more here, here and here). While June has seen (as everyone expected) a slow-down in the intensity of protests, the resistance has not gone away.

Nor has the police repression abated, evidenced by the arrest of Amir Khadir, member of the Quebec National Assembly for the left-wing coalition party Quebec Solidaire, of which the Communist Party of Quebec (PCQ-PCC) is a member. Khadir was peacefully marching in a casserole protest.

Almost the next morning, around 6:00 am, police raided his house, snatched his student activist daughter and her boyfriend out of bed and paraded them in front of TV cameras, down to the station in hand cuffs.

According to the CLASSE student coalition, wearing the sign of the student and anti-austerity struggle, the red square, for the past few days during the Grand Prix Formula One race has meant your are an open target to have your bags searched each time you enter the subway and sometimes on the street. Le Devoir newspaper did an investigation into this claim and found that, not only were their unidentified journalists with red squares searched, but if they ask questions they were be detained at the police station.

But the spirit of the people has not been dampened. And that resilience is best described through stories about the casserole.

Read the full article »

Israel's war on footballers

Palestinians in Nablus play football handcuffed in solidarity
with Sarsak, whose picture is emblazoned on their t-shirts

On June 3 Palestinian national football team member Mahmoud Sarsak completed 80 days of a gruelling hunger strike.

He has sustained his protest even though nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails called off their 28-day hunger strike weeks ago.

Palestinian prisoners in Israel face a common reality of unlawful detention and widespread mistreatment.

But Sarsak's fate can be viewed within its own, unique context.

The football player, who once sought to take the name and flag of his nation to international arenas, was seized by Israeli soldiers in July 2009 while on his way to join the national team in the West Bank.

He was branded an "illegal combatant" by Israel's military-judicial system and was imprisoned without being tried or even charged.

Read the full article »

Cuba seeks to boost alternative energy production

Havana, June 11 (IANS/EFE)  - Cuba is intending to increase its renewable energy production by 12 percent over the next eight years in a push for "energy security and sovereignty", an article posted on the official Cubadebate web site said.

"If today only 3.8 percent of the energy generated in the nation is obtained from renewable sources, in the next eight years we aspire to get to 16.5 percent," Cubadebate said, citing official energy industry figures.

The island will try to attain this objective using mainly forest biomass and sugar cane, as well as solar, wind and hydraulic energy.

The sugar industry will be "the main support" for the plan and by 2013 the potential exists to increase energy production from biomass by 10 percent, Cubadebate said.

Over the next year, authorities are forecasting building a wind energy park to generate 50 megawatts in eastern Cuba, while the government is studying the idea of installing eight new such parks throughout the country by 2020 with a total potential power output of 280 MW.

Read the full article »

Part 2 - The ideological choice of the government is for increased tuition fees

This is Part 2 of the CLASSE negotiating committee`s report on the break-down in talks with the Quebec government. Check out Part 1 of this report to see the earlier description of the participants in the negotiation, the first days, as well as links to the French-language original. Please note that this document has been edited and with some explanatory notes. The headings and translation are by RY magazine with special thanks to Roxanne Bélanger.

Back to the table, back to tax-talk

Wednesday at 3h30 pm we go back in our beige room with the government. Michelle [Courchesne, Minister of Education] tells us again that an increase of $0.00 is impossible. Instead, there is a proposal for a kind of tuition hike freeze. This means keeping the 2007 hike, with a further increase of $100.00 per year.

CLASSE states that we didn`t agree with this increase back in 2007 and our position hasn't changed.  [The Minister of Education] also refuses to make any changes to the IQEE (Incitatif Québécois d'Épargne-Études or in English, Québec education savings incentive]

Read the full article »