Out here you know dusk is arriving in springtime when the thrushes start whistling through the earthy air, but if you happened to be curious about the time of day circa 2012 in Montréal where there are more students per capita than any city in North America, all you had to do was listen for the clangs of the “casseroles.”
The evening ritual, in which tens of thousands of residents stood on their balconies and pounded spoons on pots, served as the populace’s cheeky defiance of a constitutionally-questionable emergency law that made it illegal to protest near a university and required demonstrations involving more than 50 people to get prior approval from law enforcement.
In a late-March protest, at the peak of the Maple Spring, up to 200,000 students gathered in the streets of Montreal to denounce a proposed 75 per cent increase to tuition. The months-long student strike caused a snap election that toppled the Quebec Liberal Party and ushered in Pauline Marois’ separatist Parti Quebecois. She swiftly made good on her promise to repeal the emergency law and freeze tuition.
The youth had spoken. The youth were heard. The youth prevailed.
South of the border, a bill was introduced last Tuesday to lower the voting age to 16, inspired by another historic late-March protest. Hundreds of thousands of people participated in the student-led March for Our Lives demonstration, which saw high schoolers demand firmer gun regulation after the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School that killed 17 people.
There’s a different flavour to B.C.’s protests, and maybe a little subtler flair to its student movements. (That might have to do with the fact that the province’s median age is 43, far younger than the Coast’s, which sits just below 55, but older than all provinces west of Quebec.)
Andrew Weaver has recently introduced his own bill to lower the voting age to 16 in B.C. It’s his third effort. Young people tend to be more progressive, so it comes as no surprise that Weaver wants them at the ballot box: the politician sees the potential. So did Marois. She stood with the protesters, many of whom were old enough to vote and likely helped vote her in. But their pleas for an egalitarian Quebec didn’t seem to make it into her infamously xenophobic Charter of Values, which she introduced months later. Politicians, it seems, like to move students in their direction.
That’s why I feel a little more optimistic with the quiet change underway at School District No. 46. Simply put: it’s the first district in the province to welcome a permanent student trustee to the board table. It’s not a publicly elected position, so the trustee doesn’t have a vote, but current trustee Pearl Deasey told Coast Reporter that’s OK, because it’s the power to sway the vote that counts. No casseroles, no politicking, but a voice of change, nonetheless.
