Hundreds of thousands of people poured into Montreal’s streets last night to show their displeasure at the provincial government’s draconian anti-protest law, Loi #78. Watching the action on Twitter last night, it was fascinating (and disturbing) to see the hashtag #casseroles start trending after people, many of them middle-aged and older, came “armed” with pots and pans to make noise. Twitter was obviously censoring the feed last night, because the more conventional hashtags for the protests, #manifencours,#ggi, and #loi78, were not trending at all. For those of you not familiar with Twitter, the most popular “categories” of discussion are highlighted according to cities and countries, to make it easier for twitter users to see what other users are talking about, or what is “trending”. What Twitter did was remove the categories related to the Montreal protests from the trending list, so that it was harder for twitter users to see how many other people were talking about the protests. So much for free speech!
Here are some more discussions of the protests:
Peaceful Day March, Heated Night Demos
Massive Montreal Rally Ends With Police Clashes
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIO4FgXN1CY]
Quebec is showing us one mode of resistance to anti democratic government looks like. Democracy is where the people are in control of the government. There will be no need for demonstrations and resistance when we have a Democracy. If Democracy is to be created in Quebec or Canada it will be done by a non-partisan, progressive voters bloc large enough to exert the power of the people at election times and in between.
A few weeks ago a reporter from CBC asked one of the protesters why she was protesting the tuition increases. She angrily responded that ‘Quebec is supposed to be a socialist province. But they’re not acting that way!’
Well with ‘law 78′ they sure as hell are. I guess she’s getting her wish now. This is Quebec socialism at its best, welcome to the real world lady. Lol!
How socialists can live with themselves I’ll never know.
Those kids better be careful or else Lisa Rait is going to legislate them to go back to class!
Seriously, I think that what the students are doing in Québec is great. (I’m not too fond the of the violence though). I often talk with my students (high school) about higher education and why I believe it should be “free”. I think it is an investment into our society, into our future generations. But, like so many important problems, intelligent action is thwarted by politicians’ short term limits. Most politicians are not able to think beyond the next election cycle – if that.