Category Archive

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 coherently interpreted — and when asked about these provisions, government officials waved them off with airy expressions of confidence in police and judges’ judgment.

This is big stuff, in other words. A major, controversial law in a delicate area. And it was written and passed on the fly.

You can’t look at these scribbled documents, festooned with false starts and marginal insertions — documents which, again, as of this morning make up a part of the official public text of a law which is even now in force in a province of eight million people — and have any confidence in the sobriety of the process that produced them. You can’t look at these amendments and believe that their authors took the fundamental questions of freedom of speech and assembly at stake with any kind of seriousness.

It’s an embarrassment.

“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.”

—Malcolm X, speaking at Oxford University on December 3, 1964, eighty days before his death.

Quebec’s legislature, shaken by the province’s ongoing student strike, is now debating passage of an emergency anti-protest law that the chair of the Quebec bar association calls “a breach to the fundamental, constitutional rights” of its citizens.

The legislation, known as Bill 78, would mandate an end to the strike, impose extraordinary restrictions on demonstrations and impel local student associations to prevent their members from engaging in illegal protest. It would impose harsh fines for violations of provisions one legal experts say “are written so vaguely they’re impossible to respect,” while threatening student activists with the dissolution of their student unions in the case of non-compliance.

Key provisions of the bill as presented to the legislature:

• All classes at campuses currently participating in the student strike will be immediately suspended, with the remainder of the spring semester delayed until August.
• It would become a crime for an individual or organization to “directly or indirectly contribute” to the blocking of a campus, with those terms left undefined in the bill. Organizations would be held responsible for the actions of their members in this regard, whether those members were acting with organizational sanction or not.
• Student associations and federations would be required to “employ appropriate means to induce” their members to comply with the law.
• Student associations and regional federations that violated the law would have their funding and use of campus facilities cut for one semester for each day of campus closure.
• Campuses whose student associations were shuttered under this provision would not be permitted to establish interim associations while the suspensions were in place.
• “Any form of gathering that could result” in an interference with the functioning of a college would be banned at all campuses, and for a 50-meter radius surrounding them.
• Organizers of any demonstration larger than ten people would be required to submit the time, location, duration, and other information to the police eight hours in advance. The police would have the authority to amend any of the proposed parameters.
• Organizers of such demonstrations would be held criminally liable if the demonstrators deviated from police-approved parameters, as would associations participating in such demonstrations, even if they were not the organizers.
• Students who violated the act could be fined as much as $5,000. Representatives of student groups that did so could face personal fines of as much as $35,000. Organizations violating the act could face fines of up to $125,000.All such fines would be doubled for subsequent offenses.

Wow.

3:20 pm update | The president of Quebec’s largest faculty union says the implementation of Bill 78 would make the province “a totalitarian society.”

3:40 pm | An open letter from a group of prominent Quebecois historians says Bill 78 “calls into question the principle of the rule of law.” (Link in French, Google translation here.)

3:45 pm | According to activist Kevin Harding, Quebec’s education minister was asked this afternoon whether wearing the red square fabric swatches that have been adopted by activists as a symbol of the student strike would constitute a violation of Bill 78. Her reply? “I trust our prosecutors and judges.”

That’s not a no. That’s quite pointedly not a no.

5:20 pm | Multiple reports on Twitter say the law has passed, and that it wasn’t even close — 68-48. Fasten your seat belts.

6:20 pm | It’s not immediately clear when the law will go into effect, but if it’s anytime in the near future, I expect large-scale mass defiance of the demonstration-notice provisions in the first day. In other news, tweets from @GadflyQuebec indicate that there were some amendments to the bill prior to the vote, but that the core provisions remain intact. More when I get it.

6:55 pm | According to this, ten amendments were made before the bill’s passage, including one that raised the threshold at which a demonstration needs to be cleared with the police from ten participants to fifty. (Link in French, Google translation here.)

Saturday | According to the website of the Quebec legislature, Bill 78 was put into effect yesterday night. It’s still not completely clear what the final text of the law is, though, because as of now the formal public version of the bill includes nine pages of hand-written amendments, some of which are considerably less legible than others. As I noted in a follow-up post, this is an embarrassment.

On Monday evening a group of Indiana high school seniors snuck into their school. Armed with stationery supplies and a borrowed key, they proceeded to redecorate the place. Nobody was harmed, no damage was done. They just slapped up a few thousand Post-Its.

The pranksters included the school’s valedictorian, salutatorian, and senior class president. The key came from the mother of one of the students, who was a school board member and was aware of their plans. A custodian kept an eye out to make sure things didn’t get out of hand. The group even planned to take down the Post-Its themselves.

But when school officials arrived the next morning, they suspended all six for trespassing, and moved to fire the custodian (also the mother of a student, as it happens). When supportive students staged a gym sit-in protest, another 57 were suspended.

I’ve always found this kind of trespassing charge ridiculous, and more than a little chilling. A school (or a college) is a community as much as it is an institution, and these students’ acts were grounded in that sense of community — the sense that the school is their school. When administrators use the language of trespass to punish behavior like a prank or a demonstration they do casual violence to that vision of community.

This particular story, I’m glad to report, has a mostly happy ending. After students, parents, and alumni protested, the six pranksters’ suspensions were revoked and expunged from their records. The plan to fire the custodian has been abandoned. The 57 protesters’ suspensions were reduced to a single day’s after-school detention.

And with a little luck next year’s seniors will pull an even better prank.

John Scalzi put up a hell of a blogpost yesterday. Titled “Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is,” it uses a videogame analogy to explain the concept of white male privilege. It’s great stuff. Go read it.

Done? Cool. Because I had a thing or two to say about the comments.

One common theme among Scalzi’s critics is the idea that white guys used to have it good, but affirmative action has put an end to that, and now the deck is stacked in favor of women and people of color. Here’s a snippet of a representative argument (from commenter bpmitche) to that effect:

In the case of academia, for instance, the admittance guidelines often restrict the number of applicants who will be accepted according to their stated race and their declared major.

For instance, let’s say that the Engineering program at Cal Poly is only going to accept 450 students in a given year; of those 450 openings 200 are set aside for whites, 100 for blacks, 100 for hispanics, and 50 for asians. There are also gender standards – let’s be generous and assume that the goal is pairity between admitted student genders. Now, let’s look at our pool of applicants: although Cal Poly gets applicants from all over the country, there are some demographic truths involved here. First, white males will be the overwhelming majority of applicants to the Engineering program, based simply on the racial demographics of the US (wikipedia). Out of any given 1000 applicants to the Engineering program 637 of them will be white, 163 will be hispanic, 122 will be black and 48 will be asian (with a total of 30 “other or mixed”).

Bpmitche goes on from there to report admission rates for various demographic categories to the nearest tenth of a percent. (“as a white male, your chances … are at best 31.8% … for a black male or female, 81.9%; for a hispanic male 61.7%, female 60.9%; and 100% for both asian males and females.”)

Damning, right? There’s only one problem with this analysis. It’s completely made up.

To start, race-based affirmative action in California’s public universities is illegal, and has been since 1996. Under the California state constitution, the state may not consider “race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting.” Period. At Cal Poly, admissions officials aren’t even told applicants’ race or gender.

And even outside of California, the kind of quotas this guy describes are illegal nationwide, and have been since the Supreme Court’s 1978  Bakke decision. Since 2003, moreover, it’s been illegal to give college applicants any quantifiable numerical advantage in admissions on the basis of race. (Colleges are still allowed — though not required — to consider a student’s race on a case-by-case basis, for now.)

Bpmitche also errs in assuming that applicants to an elite engineering program will reflect the demographics of the country as a whole. If that were the case — if people of all races and genders were getting the kind of preparation and training that would render them viable candidates for admission to a school like Cal Poly — then any sort of affirmative action would of course be absurd. But they’re not.

Finally, there’s the issue of Cal Poly’s engineering school’s demographics, perhaps the simplest relevant fact to uncover. Bpmitche estimates that about 45% of the school’s students are white, while the true number is above 60%. He figures the school’s Latino enrollment at 22%, when in fact it’s just 13%. And black students, who bpmitche likewise estimates at 22% of the school’s enrollment, amount to just 0.9% — just 47 students in a school of more than five thousand.

And this, ultimately, is why folks like bpmitche think they’re oppressed.

It’s because they have literally no idea what the facts are.