As the year winds down and I search for good news, it is heartening to find a few public figures who say tough things. One of them is Claudette Carbonneau, president of the Quebec union federation, the Confération des syndicats nationaux (CSN.) Often considered the most militant union group, the CSN has often taken strong leftish positions, but this time Carbonneau is scathing in her attack on the rise of the Right in Quebec.
The recent scandals involving the Quebec Liberal Party, various elements of the construction industry and political fund-raising have increased cynicism in the public and created a fertile field in which Right wing forces to sow their ideas, Carbonneau said in an interview published in Le Devoir. But the solutions proposedby the Right such as disengagement of the government and privatization of health care are not likely to be accepted by the Quebec public, which has said repeatedly in surveys that when faced with cuts in services and higher taxes, it would prefer the latter. Certainly the CSN will fight these right wing ideas, Carbonneau said.
That's good news. So is the fact that Amir Khadir, the physician-politician who is the only Québec Solitaire member of the Quebec legislative assembly, has won more than one popularity poll recently as the most respected public figure in the province.
With examples like that we can't quit fighting, can we?
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I'm very heartened by all these good news posts - seeing the degree of environmental destruction and breakdown of the social safety net, it is all too easy to fall into the futility of despair (including web addiction).
The major media here (not only the scab Journal de Montréal, but the far more "respectable" La Presse, have been doing everything they can to savage Amir Khadir, Québec solidaire, the FFQ and the World March of Women. Lysiane Gagnon's latest column calling Khadir a fanatic and insinuating that he is an anti-semite (of all things) is just the most recent example. Khadir responded, but the RLQ demagogues are jumping on him, often in racist terms, insinuating that he is a covert Islamist (I know his family - they are highly-cultivated and rigorously secular Iranian progressives).
It is important for progressive people to speak up, even in the so-called mainstream media.
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