Is this the effect of the pandemic? Compulsory confinement for long months? Of the collective mood “Dehors November” as Dédé Fortin said so well? I do not know. What I do know is that I have never experienced this feeling before today as I have been teaching young adults for 18 years.
“Power, Democracy and Freedom” is the first college politics course. We see the main institutions of liberal democracy, the different regimes, ideologies and ideological vehicles: parties, movements, social debates. Together, this session, we have seen the federal election returning Justin Trudeau to power almost identically to the situation before the dissolution of Parliament, for $ 600 million taken out of public money. We dissected the waltzes-hesitations, then the refusal, at the same time of François Legault and Justin Trudeau, to consider a better representativeness of the popular will by integrating elements of proportionality in our majority voting system. We have seen the tumble of Annamie Paul, former head of the Green Party, and the rise of a certain populism through the percentage of voters for Maxime Bernier. We watched our Canadian representatives at COP26 and this same government trying to make the buyout and expansion of the Trans Mountain pipeline acceptable.
We laughed, together, at Yves-François Blanchet also trying to make the third link project in Quebec green.
We talked about the flooding in British Columbia. The shortage of labor, the aging of the population. We are talking about the new variant which is already in Ontario.
The session ends. We are trying to understand the effects of neoliberalism and its counterpart, austerity, on social services. On CHSLDs, on education, on the health of each other.
How to deal with neoliberalism? How to overcome it? Are we going further to the right? Are we going further to the left? Should power be placed more in the neighborhoods, at the municipal level (because as a bonus, we had to dissect the municipal elections this session!) At the regional, national, federal level?
Let’s go, I said to myself, with a little hope by presenting an ecosocialist documentary to make clear the effect of ideas on reality. tomorrow, a film produced in 2015 by Cyril Dion and Mélanie Laurent, brings together new initiatives in terms of food production, energy and carbon neutrality, active transport and understanding of the territory, resilient economy (to counter the Black friday), democratic representativeness by including the drawing of lots for a portion of the legislative power, a social project through the writing of a constitution, education with vision and resources outside the partisan arena.
“How did you find this visual document? I asked them. Utopian? Realistic? Exciting? Is this a solution for the world of tomorrow? How to think about a just transition? How to think about the link between citizens and nature and not just the all-powerful individual of the anxiety-provoking Old World?
“We should have done this long before, ma’am. It is now too late. “