Tag Archives: healthcare

The Op-Ed Remains the Same

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Yesterday, the Quebec student strike claimed if not its first than its most prominent casualty. Line Beauchamp, Quebec Minister for Education, resigned her post in both Premier Jean Charest’s cabinet and the National Assembly. As for Ms. Beauchamp, rest assured I imagine she has some sort of severance package to cushion her fall into the private sector, and given her age and education I would further assume that her student loan debt, if she had one, has been paid off for some time. I’m sure a teaching gig awaits at U Laval, or U de Montreal, provided she returns to school for an MA or PhD. As soon as they reopen. Enjoy your summer, Line.

This was a calculated move on the part of the Charest government. It’s akin to the Canadiens firing their head coach during a slump. It’s a distraction. It gives the scribes and pundits (entities complicit in this discussion) something other than the issue at hand to feed the news cycle for a day or two while the franchise, in this case the Quebec government, regroups and plans their next course of action before the season (ahem, semester) is lost. Randy Cunneyworth was not considered for the position, Charest instead going with Treasury Board President Michelle Courchesne. I’m assuming she speaks French.

The intermediary should have provided a moment for reflection for both sides, and perhaps a more enlightened and calm discourse emerging on the other side. But no such luck. It has been fascinating to see how Canada’s op-ed columnists and political pundits have covered this story from afar, removed both from the university experience and Quebec itself. It’s difficult for me to understand why there isn’t more solidarity, why not just students but reasonable taxpayers aren’t more concerned with how the student strike has been reflected in the media, and furthermore how the mismanagement of subsidized tuition shares multiple parallels with other forms of social spending.

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Quebec is the Canada We Should Want

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A French translation of this post may be found here.

Une traduction française de ce poste peut être trouvé ici.

When I was a kid I loved maps. I loved the element of the unknown, physical and tangible representations of places I could only imagine. When I was about 8 or 9 my parents bought me a map of the world for my wall. Each country on the map was coloured to represent the official language of each nation. I have this fond recollection of an affection I had for the Canada of that map, bold in its red and blue stripes representing French and English. It might be my first memory of pride, especially as the big red blotch below us, the USA, was simply red. It wasn’t just about language, it was about unity, and diversity, and being Canadian.

As I grew up, and visited much of the country, living for many years in a few of its corners, those feelings reconciled. But in the past few months, having left Quebec after seven years and relocating to Toronto, and after being witness to the protests of Quebec students and the offensive manner in which the mainstream media has treated them as spoiled children, that notion I had of Canada as a child has dwindled a bit. And it has led me to think that Quebec, a province so often concerned with what makes it distinct from Canada, is in fact the last bastion of what I believe Canada to be, what I was raised understanding it to be, and what I saw in my reverie as I stared into the heart of those maps as a child.

The student protest is just one element of the Canada I see in Quebec. The Globe and Mail’s editorial board wrote this morning that Quebec Premier Jean Charest’s compromise with the students was “sending a message that Quebec’s social entitlements will not last forever.” They went on to describe these entitlements: $7-a-day daycare, lowest tuition in Canada, subsidized hydro-electricity, and reasonably priced pharmaceuticals. The use of the word “entitlements” was a poor choice, but one the Globe obviously choose as a slight of those who believe that such “entitlements” are an essential part of the fabric of this nation. Here, it has a negative connotation that suggests that Quebec is Canada’s petulant child. Instead, I see these as the social necessities that are fundamental to not only the human condition, but also the success of a social democracy.

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