It’s very rare that a revolutionary, either as a person or a collective, does not wish to stir up trouble—yet this is exactly the balance that the CFS (Canadian Federation of Students) has unrealistically set to strike.
I went to the protest on Nov. 2 like a good rebellious youth, holding the laminated plastic “fight the fees,” sign and chanting along to the inane babble of the crowd. But somehow I felt as if I had sacrificed my day of classes for nothing.
I eventually admitted to myself that my heart just wasn’t in it. I felt less like a populist protesting against my government than I did a prop in someone else’s political science homework, and the atmosphere of the event did not dissuade me of this impression. The chants did not grow organically from the crowd, but were pre-scripted on a little red sheet with some truly cringe-worthy attempts at rhyme and metre. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if I found out that they had been copied and pasted from a textbook. A fine example of the sort of stirring rhetoric used: “We don’t want no mac n’ cheese; hey Trudeau, drop the fees.”
Every speaker who came forward at Carleton, the University of Ottawa, or Parliament Hill seemed to be confused by what they had been brought out to talk about, and so somehow the leaders tried to change the ad-hoc protest against student tuition into a general megaphone for whatever grievance they may have had. While LGTBQ+ acceptance, Indigenous reconciliation, mental health care, and immigration are all important issues in Canadian politics they don’t have much to do with the lowering of student tuition rates, or anything that was actually written on any of the signs bobbing up and down. Decentralization was the name of the game—provide a series of distractions and ancillary issues to occupy the students’ heads, lest anyone dare talk about what we were all there for.
The authorities were delighted to encourage the crossing of so many political wires and came out with truckloads of positive reinforcement to encourage us foolish young people that we were making our voices heard. The police, never the ally of social protest, were more than willing to put up with so many students in one place so long as they kept a watch over us and we never stepped out of bounds. This wouldn’t have been an unexpected thing, police trying to restrain and control protesters, except that the leaders of the movement (who, in their yellow safety vests, would have been indistinguishable from the police if not for their megaphones) seemed to be doing the same, keeping all of the protesters on the right side of the street and firmly confined to the rectangle inching slowly to Parliament. They wanted a protest but didn’t want to create a nuisance, apparently.
In fact, the only people that weren’t playing by the book were the token communists, seen flying the red banner and crying out amidst the din of safe protests against a class-discrimination in higher education. Frankly, I was much more interested in what they had to say than any of the organizers of the event, who had nothing of substance to say. Each of these student leaders was going on about “education is a right” without actually saying why or how and instead redirecting to something irrelevant.
If these students are passing their speech-writing classes, then their professors should be fired. The entire protest was a long drawn-out attempt to inspire the sort of enthusiasm expected when a counsellor comes to visit a group of campers grinning from ear to ear announcing dining hall cleanup duty. There was no real passion, no real rebellion, and no efficacy. Nothing will change as a result of the protest and the politicians (young and old) get to claim that they’ve done something or let the students’ voices be heard. Our voices have not been heard, because these factory-produced leaders looking to buff up their résumés do not speak for us.
