Quebec’s Slapdash Gutting of Civil Liberties
Call me naive, but I find it flabbergasting that major amendments to Bill 78, Québec’s new law criminalizing student strikes, were passed and inserted into the official record of the provincial legislature as hastily scrawled handwritten notes.Bill 78 was drafted on Thursday, introduced on Thursday night, and debated for 21 straight hours before passage. The amendments in question were adopted on a single party-line vote, as was the bill itself. (The opposition offered a number of laudable amendments, in typewritten form, but all were rejected by the majority.)
What makes this haste extraordinary is the sweeping character of the bill, which regulates not only student strike actions but also any demonstration of any kind at which more than fifty people are in attendance. Several provisions of the bill are so vague that critics of the government have expressed doubt that they can be
Happy Birthday, Malcolm
“I read once, passingly, about a man named Shakespeare. I only read about him passingly, but I remember one thing he wrote that kind of moved me. He put it in the mouth of Hamlet, I think, it was, who said, ‘To be or not to be.’ He was in doubt about something — whether it was nobler in the mind of man to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune — moderation — or to take up arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them. And I go for that. If you take up arms, you’ll end it, but if you sit around and wait for the one who’s in power to make up his mind that he should end it, you’ll be waiting a long time.
“And in my opinion, the young generation of whites, blacks, browns, whatever else there is, you’re living at a time of extremism, a time of revolution, a time when there’s got to be a change. People in power have misused it, and now there has to be a change and a better world has to be built, and the only way it’s going to be built is with extreme methods. And I, for one, will join in with anyone — I don’t care what color you are — as long as you want to change this miserable condition that exists on this earth.”
“And in my opinion, the young generation of whites, blacks, browns, whatever else there is, you’re living at a time of extremism, a time of revolution, a time when there’s got to be a change. People in power have misused it, and now there has to be a change and a better world has to be built, and the only way it’s going to be built is with extreme methods. And I, for one, will join in with anyone — I don’t care what color you are — as long as you want to change this miserable condition that exists on this earth.”
—Malcolm X, speaking at Oxford University on December 3, 1964, eighty days before his death.