Defying a government ban on striking and threats of harsh penalties, 7,300 members of the Montreal Teachers Alliance set up picket lines at 210 primary and secondary schools November 19–21.

"For all the women and all the men who teach, this profession is underpaid because it's a job where women predominate," a union flyer explained. "The time has come to render justice and to think about the future of education. On November 21, the law on pay equity must apply."

This is the date set by the provincial government for implementation of pay equity in legislation adopted in 1996. The law uses complex, unjust, and arbitrary criteria to determine how jobs held by women are to be compared with jobs in other areas. Despite this, the teachers should be paid at least Can$7,000 more a year. But the government has denied this increase and is also claiming that teachers work only 36 hours a week. It has postponed its final decision for yet another year (Can$1 = US 63 cents).

On November 20 more than 1,000 teachers, many of them young, rallied in downtown Montreal, closing a major boulevard for more than 90 minutes. The next day 200 union members picketed outside the school board building.

"The strike was an experience that gave us confidence and allowed us to see ourselves in a different way," said Josée Séguin, a teacher at St. Clement's primary school, in an interview with the Militant. "We marched from school to school. We received support from workers at a large factory we visited as well as from parents of our students. We handed out leaflets to nurses at a hospital. We were getting our point across because so many people honked their car horns as they passed by the school board picket."

A November 20 meeting of Local 500 of the United Food and Commercial Workers union called for support of the teachers. Thousands of members of the local who work in large supermarket chains, particularly as cashiers, are also involved in pay equity procedures.

The stakes in the teachers' fight against discrimination are also underscored by a November 29 press report on the implementation of a 1989 law in Quebec that mandated affirmative action measures by businesses in the province. The article said that only 1 percent of businesses covered by the law had met targets for the hiring of women, Blacks, Native peoples, and others.

"Despite the fines and the other repressive aspects of the government's response, it was right to go out on strike," teacher Sandra Prémont told the Militant at the school board protest. "Striking might be controversial but there is no other way to make ourselves heard."

Among other actions in the province was a demonstration November 24 by 600 members of the Canadian Auto Workers, a full one-half of the workforce at the General Motors assembly plant in Boisbriand, north of Montreal. The unionists denounced the company's decision to close the plan--the only car assembly factory in Quebec.

Two days later, members of the Public Service Alliance of Canada who work for the Postal Service voted to authorize a strike, while several thousand members of the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees who work in men's clothing in Montreal are gearing up to oppose major concessions they expect the bosses to demand. The union contract expires November 30. Unionized airline workers laid off by the bankrupt carrier Canada 3000 have held several marches demanding wages owed to them and government action against layoffs.

Montreal university students demonstrated November 29 to demand the Quebec government respect its promise to inject $200 million into education, while on the same day 500 demonstrated in Quebec City demanding the construction of social housing. Transit workers in the city of Laval on November 30 refused to collect fares to back up the demand for the reopening of their contract.

In the largest such demonstration in Canada to date, 4,000 marched in Montreal November 17 demanding an end to the war in Afghanistan. Sponsors of the action included the Quebec Women's Federation, the Muslim Council of Montreal, and the Confederation of National Trade Unions' Montreal Central Council. On the same day 1,500 marched in Toronto.

The Montreal marchers also took aim at the repressive "antiterrorist" law C-36, which provides for detention without charges, compulsory testimony and the denial of the right to silence, and wide powers for electronic surveillance. The federal government has presented another "public security" bill legalizing the establishment of zones under military control. It also permits the declaration of a state of emergency in the absence of war.

Victims of the government's dragnet of immigrants since the September 11 attacks have begun to speak out.

Mohammed Attiah is pursuing a lawsuit and human rights complaint against the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. He was fired from his job at Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. after he was questioned by the federal cops. Through a public legal battle the 54-year-old Canadian citizen, proved he was a target of racial profiling and won back his job. His lawyer pointed out that had Bill C-36 been law at the time, the "evidence" against him would have been secret.

More than 200 people demonstrated November 22 in Montreal against the decision of the government-owned French-language television network Radio-Canada to suspend one of its longtime journalists, Normand Lester, after the publication of his new book, Le livre noir du Canada anglais, (The Dark Side of English Canada).

The book is a sharp condemnation of Canada's history of oppression of the Quebecois, Native peoples, Acadiens, and others. The demonstration was called by the Quebec nationalist Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste Youth Council.

It is no accident that all this resistance is taking place in Quebec, the largest oppressed nation within Canada. There is deep-going discrimination against the Quebecois as shown by recent figures for the new megacity of Montreal. The privileged English neighborhood of Westmount has a budget more than three times that of the working-class French-speaking Villeray.

It is not just the defense of Normand Lester that has a clearly Quebec nationalist character. The fight of the teachers to defend their dignity and that of the student youth, and the protests against the closing of the only auto assembly plant in Quebec are all seen as combating the second-class status of Quebecois in Canada.

Calls by the federal government for special powers and military zones remind many in Quebec of the military occupation of Quebec in 1970 when Ottawa used a kidnapping by a nationalist group as a pretext to assault the nationalist and labor movements, sending in the army and rounding up hundreds of innocent people.

A representative of the Quebec government has voiced opposition to the proposed law C-42 saying it will be used to sanction an occupation of Quebec in the event of a declaration of independence.

Al Cappe is a meat packer and a member of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 500 in Montreal.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home