Montreal cops court backlash over heavy-handed anti-student strategies

Once again the students with the lowest tuitions in all of Canada are putting up the biggest fuss over escalating tuitions.

Makes you wonder what's wrong with the youth in the rest of the dominion...

Apathy and passivity are attributes much prized in the Canada of 2015.

The student activists have been trying to hold sit-ins and marches.

The harsh hand of the law has grabbed them by the scruff of the neck, given them a good shake, and asked them to really seriously ponder the ramifications of their delusions.

To rethink the error of their ways.

Apparently previous protests went awry when masked Black Bloc "anarchists" started wrecking stuff.

Of course!

Bearing in mind that wherever you've got four or five masked Black Bloc "anarchists," you got at least three or four police informants, it's not hard to see that the Big Dogs are trying to bury a bone that they know could come back to bite them.

The Montreal protesters are asking us why access to post-secondary education should be determined by the credit rating of the applicant's parents.

That's pretty much what "getting into a good school" has come to mean.

When is a coup not a coup?

When the noddy-winky Nations of Virtue give it a nod and a wink of course.

It happened in Honduras a couple of years ago.

It happened in Paraguay just the other day.

There's a pattern when these things "happen". Look for Hillary or one of the other front-persons for the Nations of Virtue (Hague can usually be relied on to give the winky-noddy party line, as can Cameron and Harper. Sarkozy was pretty reliable but the new guy has yet to show what he's made of.)

As long as the "democratic process" was respected we're good to go.

Nod-nod wink.

And when does Arab Spring become an ill wind?

Why, when it blows into Bahrain of course.

That's a "good" dictatorship... or should I use the weasel speak "authoritarian regime"?

Nod. Wink.

Why is it that a thousand protesters in Moscow are a popular uprising but fifty thousand protesters in Montreal are spoiled brats?

Well, because those protesters in Moscow are clamoring for democracy, and as everybody knows, those protesters in Montreal already have it...

Wink, nod...

Occupy Montreal

One of the back stories on Rex Murphy's program a couple of weeks ago, when he was busying himself with throwing mud at the spoiled children who are protesting their tuition increases, was about the value of a post-secondary education.

This might have made for a more interesting program than he actually had.

Post-secondary institutions (i.e. colleges and universities) are caught in a time warp.

As institutions, they no longer have a monopoly on knowledge.

While that has at some level always been the case, the internet has evolved to a place where universities are at risk of having on-line learning cut their grass.

The old canard about having those eager young minds gathered around a wise "teacher" doesn't hold much when those first year undergrads are sitting in lecture halls with 900 other students.

This ain't Socrates sitting under the olive tree.

And good for those Quebec students for making this an issue. Education is a commodity, and why should it be withheld from some and bestowed on others?

Why does there need to be "tuition"?

The Quebec students have put to shame their contemporaries around the world who have simply swallowed tuition increases.

Britain had a few protests but nothing noteworthy when their students saw their tuition more than doubled.

Let's get real. A higher education is the right of everyone bright enough to earn one, if that's what they choose.

Montreal cops go wild with pepper spray

Video has emerged of Montreal police pepper spraying peaceful tourist types sitting on the patio of a downtown bar.

That's why there's violence in these protests. The undercover-cop "anarchists" infiltrate a peaceful demo and start the violence. The cops use that as an excuse to run wild.

It's exactly the formula that was used in Toronto at the G20 fiasco two years ago, and it's being dusted off and recycled in Montreal right now.