Fire Margaret Wente

Margaret Wente, the 37-year veteran journalist, and thrice-weekly columnist for the Globe and Mail is a serial plagiarist.

Yet, the Globe and Mail has failed to fire her after retreating from a first pathetic response which effectively dismissed the iron-clad proof of Wente's plagiarism. A first-year university student is open to expulsion if they plagiarize. If they're lucky, they'll get an F on the assignment, a stern warning and a note on their student record. Wente, as a professional veteran journalist for Canada's so-called "national newspaper" should have been fired for this.

The Globe and Mail has hit an incredible new low, and not even in its gross political standards. This is a matter of base-level professional standards and academic standards.

Yet, the Globe continues to publish ridiculous apologetics like this bullshit from Kelly McBride with the opening paragraph:

"Professional journalism isn’t facing a plagiarism problem. It’s facing an originality failure."

A journalist, including columnists, don't need to have an original thought published in their life. They simply need to cite their sources clearly. End of story.

Fire Margaret Wente.

Canadian labour at the present

Richard Seymour has published one of his occasional "big picture" analyses entitled "A few points about the conjuncture in Britain." The read is a bit dense and filled with a Marxist and Gramscian language that is hard to handle for those not familiar with it. That said, there are plenty of insights that are not only informative for outside observers of the situation in Britain, but also thought-provoking for anyone trying to grasp the situation in Canada (and especially those of us not in Quebec).

Two passages in particular are worth highlighting as they help us come closer to grasping the situation of Canadian labour.

There have been important wildcats and creative workers actions since the Harper majority was elected in May 2011: the Tory MP office occupations during the postal lockout, the Ingersoll train blockade, secondary pickets at Cat dealerships, the Air Canada ground crew wildcat and pilots sick-in, the Vale Long Harbour wildcat, and the Marystown OCI blockade/occupation. However, the passage below is true of Canada and even Quebec given the active failure of organized labour to respond to the student strike's call for a wider "social strike".

"The only serious, national resistance to the Tories' programme is coming from the trade unions. It is not being led by the rank and file. Rather, the rank and file pressures the union bureaucracy for action, but remains dependent on the bureaucracy to actually take the initiative."

No unions within Canada have established, coordinated rank-and-file-driven reform networks capable of shifting a union leadership over the short-term, let alone the long-term. Observers of the Chicago teachers strike will note the importance of CORE - the Caucus Of Rank-and-file Educators - in shifting the union towards a highly democratic, highly mobilized, highly educated union with a strategy of organizing community alliances. This does not exist in Canada, which also means that there is no rank-and-file network spanning unions either. For example, Ontario's Teaching Assistant unions are almost all CUPE locals with the exception of three PSAC locals. Not only is there no rank-and-file/reform network amongst the CUPE locals, but there is no coordination between CUPE and PSAC locals (CUPE's OUWCC has this potential but it is a resolutionary, resource-sharing body, not an activist network)

Why do such networks not exist? Why the dependence on the leadership? This is a deep historical question that has hardly been asked let alone answered by Canadian labour activists, researchers and academics. Yet, the following passage helps us to begin thinking about why:

"No one has the confidence after decades of neoliberal assault and diminishing strength and influence, to risk everything in a big set-piece dispute with the government. This isn’t the 1980s but, alas, everyone still remembers the Miners. The result is that strikes are seen by the union leadership as a bureaucratic manoeuvre to force the government to soften its bargaining stance."

Canada has no one single Miners strike in which the defeat of labour can be traced. Instead, we can look to labour's defeats in Ontario during the first term of the Harris government, or to the aborted struggles of BC teachers and hospital workers in 2003-4. Both these provincial labour movements have since slipped into a long-term period of demoralization, defensiveness and defeats. Where political constellations were different, labour in Saskatchewan and Quebec made large efforts to elect social democratic governments during the 1990s following hard struggles against first-generation neoliberals in the 1980s. However, both the Saskatchewan NDP under Premier Romanow and the two terms of the Parti Quebecois between 1995 and 2003 witnessed social democracy turning to neoliberal fiscal policies. This generated labour opposition which broke the electoral alliances in both provinces, and paved the way for more committed neoliberal regimes under Brad Wall in Saskatchewan and Charest in Quebec.

Last but not least, while Canada's IR regime prevents strikes during the life of a contract, we should treat the last sentence in the passage above as including protest actions too. This would include the Hamilton US Steel rally in January 2011, the EMD London rally in January of this year and the OFL Queen's Park rally in April. All these protests pulled at least ten thousand, but this seems to be the ceiling for such actions which are not, as the Days of Action were, part of a wider campaign.

Another view of the Dieppe Raid

It’s no secret that the Harper government is making a sustained effort to situate Canada’s military history at the centre of a new interpretation of Canadian history. To save us time reciting all the evidence, people should listen to this talk given by historian Ian McKay which is a highly informative teaser for Warrior Nation:Rebranding Canada in an Age of Anxiety. The book, co-authored by McKay and Jamie Swift, traces the transformation of official myths about our military from Pearsonian peacekeeping to the new post-9/11 militarism.

Other researchers have also been alerted us to this shift. Warrior Nation ought to be read alongside the works Yves Engler on Canadian foreign policy. His easy-to-read books, some of them co-authored, expose Canada’s ugly role abroad and knock down longstanding myths surrounding peacekeeping. Also essential is Todd Gordon’s excellent Imperialist Canada, which provides a well-developed political economy approach to Canada’s military, diplomatic and corporate interventions within our borders and beyond.

One current high profile example of military myth-making is the resurrection of the War of 1812 as a point of national pride. The official version goes little beyond celebrating the victory against American invasion, even though the invasion was directed at only two of the seven British North American colonies - Upper and Lower Canada. Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia and Cape Breton (which was a separate colony until 1820) did not experience American invasion.

Given that Canada did not exist at the time and the United States, amidst its own expansionist desires, had legitimate grievances against the British for raiding their ships and impressing British-born Americans into the Royal Navy, it would be more useful to understand the War of 1812 as a catastrophe for Indigenous peoples who allied with the British against the Americans on the promise of a vast homeland. The British didn’t keep their promise.

It goes without saying that such celebrations of Canadian military history have no interest in going beyond a shallow, and often largely inaccurate interpretation of events.

One only has to walk around historic downtown Kingston to find such problems with the War of 1812 celebrations. Big banners adorn the streetlights of Princess Street, Kingston’s main drag, declaring Kingston “Invasion Free Since 1812”.






If you take a short walk south to City Park, you’ll find a historic plaque celebrating the volunteers who saved Kingston from an invasion during the rebellion of 1837-38. When I first saw this, I was puzzled. Weren’t the rebellions domestic? Initially, yes. But a number of rebels fled to the United States after their first failed uprising. The plaque does not mention that this invasion was launched from upstate New York by Canadian rebels, backed by American republicans, and led by a Polish revolutionary who had been exiled following a failed uprising against the Russian Empire.

Whereas the War of 1812 celebrations have at least sparked some critical questioning of its propagandistic intentions in the mainstream press, and led to some fascinating interviews with researchers on CBC Radio One, such an open space is still not allowed for more recent wars, notably the two world wars. 

The two world wars are understandably central to the new militarist national history. That’s why it’s still so dangerous to offer up interpretations that might cast aspersions on the decisions of Canada’s war-time politicians and generals and especially units involving thousands of rank-and-file soldiers and airmen who "just followed orders." Consider such ridiculous cases as the new Canadian War Museum in Ottawa ceding to the demands of Air Force veterans to change the wording of a plague describing the bombing of Dresden and other German civilian targets as war crimes. Such a response was foreshadowed in the early 1990s with a veteran-led assault on the gripping CBC documentary series The Valour and the Horror, and specifically the episode Death by Moonlight.


Death by Moonlight: Bomber Command by Brian McKenna, National Film Board of Canada

Efforts to revisit Canadian military history are dismissed as “revisionism” as if no reinterpretation, let alone a new interpretation based on new evidence, is valid. History, it is often claimed, is “just the facts.” That such attitudes are so widespread is the real failure of Canadian high school history classes, not the absence of a national narrative or the overemphasis on social history instead of military history, as claimed by Jack Granatstein in his 1998 best-seller Who Killed Canadian History?

Dieppe: the myth-building interpretation

With all this in mind, the recent 70^th anniversary of the Dieppe Raid should give us a moment to reconsider the mainstream nationalist and militarist interpretation of Dieppe as a tragedy with a silver-lining. Despite the ill-fated raid on the fortified French coastal city of Dieppe on August 19 1942 by 6,000 Allied troops, mainly Canadians, the raid provided the Allies an invaluable understanding of how to pull-off a large-scale invasion of France. So the story goes.

This interpretation is summed up very well in a Montreal Gazette article authored by Bernard Amyot. Amyot is not a historian, but president of the Canadian Bar Association. What Amyot is doing writing about Dieppe is beyond me, but his analysis of the raid is not at all different from something you would find in mainstream military history books. Amyot also provides us with the claim that this raid had a unifying effect for Canadians – a claim that is also rolled out fairly commonly even if there are criticisms about the raid.

Let’s unpack the two key passages that build the myth around Dieppe:

"The lessons learned from the mistakes of this failed landing would later help ensure the successful liberation of Europe, and the world, from Hitler’s unparalleled Nazi tyranny. Indeed, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had conceived of the Dieppe raid mainly as a “rehearsal” for the greatest and most successful landing operations in history which were launched around Arromanches in Normandy on June 6, 1944 (Operation Neptune), the success of which was paid for at a terrible price by Canadian forces 70 years ago."

and

"The Dieppe raid, though it resulted in tremendous loss for Canada, contributed to uniting Canadians of all origins in fighting a common evil. It confirmed Canada’s role as an independent force to be reckoned with, not only within the British Commonwealth, but throughout the world, starting in France. It has made us a better country, a united country that proudly vies for justice and freedom — something we can all celebrate."

Churchill's agenda

Let’s deal with the first paragraph by knocking down the myth of Churchill, the alleged military and political genius - a Tory who was ousted in a landslide only two months after the collapse of the Nazi regime, ushering in the most transformative, progressive British Labour government ever.

There’s always a curious and glaring oversight when someone draws a direct line from Dieppe to Normandy. Dieppe was not followed by the invasion of France. Italy was invaded nine months before France on Churchill's idiotic insistence that it was the "soft underbelly of Europe". Sicily fell very quickly and the Allies invaded Italy at the boot and heel. But Italy’s mountainous terrain and dense towns with narrow streets provided excellent natural defenses for the fascists and a huge hindrance to mobility. Italy became a long, arduous and costly campaign – with worse casualties for infantry than even the Western Front following D-Day. Success was measured in short distances and very high losses. The Allies didn’t even reach the more open terrain of northern Italy until a few weeks before the general German surrender in April/May 1945.

Why is the Italian campaign important to raise? Churchill clearly hadn't learned his lesson from the previous war when he spearheaded the disastrous invasion of Gallipoli in which Australian, New Zealand, French, Indian and British troops trapped on a narrow strip of rocky land for nine months before being evacuated. Churchill’s “military” credentials do not hold up to scrutiny. So why was he so insistent on invading Italy – with its fascist state crumbling amidst the defeats in North Africa – before France?

Churchill's emphasis on invading Italy first (and subsequent special operations interventions Greece) was about maintaining British control of the Mediterranean as well as keeping Communist influence out. When Mussolini’s government collapsed through mid-1943, the Nazis occupied Italy and put Mussolini in charge of a northern-based puppet state. The puppet state and the Nazi occupiers were subjected to a relentless resistance campaign led by the Italian Communist Party, which, as the war approached an end, became the most powerful political force in the country. Local Communist-led armed resistance in the Nazi-occupied Balkans and Greece also helped drive out the Nazis who were increasingly at risk of being cut off from an escape route to Germany by advancing Soviet armies. The story after Nazi collapse in Italy and withdrawal in Greece was the Allied disarmament of the partisans to prevent the eradication of Nazi-sympathizing domestic elites. These domestic elites were instrumental in British and American efforts to ensure that Italy and Greece would not become Communist after the war.

Stalin, who headed up the Soviet bureaucracy and had finally drowned the Russian Revolution in blood during the 1930s, sold out the Communists in Greece in October 1944 in a secret agreement between Stalin and Churchill. The agreement carved up British and Soviet influence over various European countries. There is much talk of the Soviets imposing the Iron Curtain on Europe. But this was a mutual decision by the Western allies, namely Churchill and Roosevelt, and the Soviet Union. It was a similar process to what happened after World War One – the carving up of Europe by the victors. It was this carving up that did not jive with many local, Communist, nationalist and democratic movements who had formed the backbone of the resistance across Europe. Greece was caught in this imperial tug-of-war and from 1946 to 1949, its domestic political conflicts which did have a violent edge escalated into a full-scale civil war in which the UK and US sponsored and armed the anti-Communist side. In Italy, CIA operations warped the country’s fragile new representative democratic system to prevent the Communists from winning elections in the immediate post-war years..

Through 1943, once North Africa had been secured by the Allies, the actual liberation of Europe from Nazi occupation and the invasion of Germany itself to physically destroy the Nazi state (which in itself is more complicated than we're taught), took a backburner to British imperial and Western anti-Communist interests in the Mediterranean. Although the Western allies did liberate Western Europe (with much help from the French Communist-led resistance) and invade western Germany, the Soviet Union had carried all the heavy lifting on continental Europe. On the ground, it fought the Nazis almost single-handedly from June 1941 to June 1944, and suffered the most horrendous casualties in the war – 27 million – casualties exacerbated by Stalin’s complete disregard for human life.

Dieppe as a function of Western-Soviet relations

So what, exactly, was the Dieppe Raid's purpose? Let's dispense with the "rehearsal" argument.

If "rehearsal" was the primary concern, the Dieppe Raid was not necessary. As Dieppe happened, the Americans also invaded Guadalcanal in the Pacific. This started a three-year "island-hopping" campaign which recaptured the vast Pacific island network that the Japanese had established by seizing strategic islands (such as those with airports) while skipping over other islands to cut the supply lines to their Japanese garrisons. The necessary experience in amphibious landings that translated to the invasion of France came not from Dieppe or the unopposed landings in Algeria or Sicily, but the American island-hopping campaign in the Pacific which was nearly two years old as of D-Day.

The first of two major reasons why Dieppe happened was to allay the Soviet Union which was demanding the Allies open up a second front in Western Europe to take some of the pressure off fighting almost the entire Nazi war machine. To put matters in perspective, the Western Allies were only fighting at most 140,000 German troops in North Africa between 1940-43. From the invasion of Russia in June 1941 onward, Germany never had fewer than two million soldiers on the Eastern Front. This is one reason why the German general, Erwin Rommel, who commanded the German Afrika Korps, was constantly asking Hitler for more troops. Hitler treated North Africa as a sideshow whereas Rommel and other German commanders saw the seizing of the Suez Canal as strategically important. Despite the early victories in Russia, a deep undercurrent of opposition to Hitler emerged because of the invasion. German military commanders were not ignorant of Napolean’s campaign in Russia and its role in shattering the continent-wide empire and satellite states he had established. Rommel, the most celebrated German general of the war and an obvious military genius (unlike Churchill or Montgomery) would then join the efforts by a group of officers to assassinate Hitler. He was implicated and committed suicide in October 1944 rather than go to court.

The scale of the Eastern Front cannot be understated. It was indisputably the front upon which the entire European conflagration orbited. Even the Italians had more troops and far higher losses on the Eastern Front between 1941 and 1943 than during the North Africa campaign against the Commonwealth armies. When Dieppe happened, the Nazis were at the edge of Moscow and the Battle of Stalingrad had not even started, let alone reached its turning point. It wasn’t until November 1942 that the German armies in Stalingrad were surrounded and another three months before they surrendered. This is the military-political context for the Soviets demanding the Western allies open up a second front. Dieppe, in this sense, was a bloody PR stunt for Stalin.

Dieppe and the Canadian home front

For Canadians, the Dieppe Raid was also about placating an increasingly agitated domestic population. The fall of France happened in June 1940. Canadian troops had been stationed in England since late 1939 and had not seen any action. The public was growing impatient as war raged across North Africa as the only front being fought by the Commonwealth armies in the Western hemisphere. Political decisions had been made to keep Canadian troops together, so they were never committed piecemeal to North Africa like the Australians and New Zealanders had done. By mid-1942, almost four entire Canadian divisions were in England – upwards of 80,000 combat troops. There were thousands more Canadians in England, many of them engaged in the air war, including those in the Sixth (Canadian) Bomber Group in Britain’s Bomber Command who carried out the strategy of Air Marshal Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris. This strategy was to bomb German civilians targets – and it killed 600,000 German civilians over five years, including 60,000 in Dresden during its infamous firebombing. The extent of the Canadian contribution to the air war is reflected in Canadian casualties. Of the 47,000 Canadian war deaths, 18,000 were of those were members of the Royal Canadian Air Force.

By 1942, two years had passed with no prospect of a second front opening up and the Soviet Union doing all the major fighting. Sympathy in the West, including Canada, for the Soviet Union ran very high. It was not only promoted by the mainstream press and government as a key ally, but the it was still seen by many as a progressive alternative system. Not only did the Communists play a major role in the rising labour movement, and had an MLA elected in Manitoba in 1941, two MPPs elected in downtown Toronto in 1943, and an MP, Fred Rose, elected in a Montreal by-election in 1945.

Labour tensions were also beginning to boil over amidst a regime of strict rationing and a government-enforced culture of suspicion that ranged from the innocuous “loose lips sink ships” rhetoric to the geographic dispersal and internment of Japanese-Canadians and theft of their property. While the home front's popular commitment to the war effort cannot be denied, it was interwoven with a series of deep-seated social grievances, many of which had arose before the war in the depression. At times, these grievances expressed themselves forcefully, explosively.

It’s worth looking at Canada's labour situation in the months leading up to Dieppe. In the middle of wartime austerity and the war itself not going well, labour tensions had exploded over the Kirkland Lake goldminers strike of late 1941 and early 1942. After a few years of relative labour peace - partially enforced by the no-strike pledge of the Communist Party on the grounds that strikes would sabotage the war effort with our Soviet allies - the workers movement across the country was mobilized against federal and provincial government-backed repression of union rights at Kirkland Lake. While the strike went down to defeat, it galvanized a new workers movement that would escalate its struggle through the 1940s and force the government to codify a system of tripartite industrial relations involving unions, employers and the state.

Other political tensions also rose rapidly. In April 1942, the federal government held a plebiscite on conscription in which Prime Minister King sought popular support to flip-flop on his anti-conscription promises made at the outset of the war. Only 25 years earlier, a conscription crisis had gripped Canada and in Quebec, the memory of anti-conscription being shot dead in Quebec City’s streets by Anglophone soldiers was not forgotten. Conscription, even with the plebiscite passing, fuelled significant anger in Quebec. While 83 percent of Anglophones voted in favour of conscription, over 70 percent of Francophones opposed it.

This political opposition to hardship on the home front and lack of progress on the war front was confirmed in a 1942 Gallup poll showing the CCF ahead of both the Liberals and Conservatives with a plurality of overseas soldiers supporting the CCF. This marked a serious and sustained effort by the ruling Liberals of Mackenzie King to begin taking very seriously the need for implementing social reforms to diffuse popular anger and prevent social upheavals like what happened between 1917 and 1919.

Saskatchewan Liberal Party
anti-CCF poster, c.1938. Source

It was this discontent that played a massive role in informing the Canadian government's decision to commit troops to the Dieppe Raid as well as to the invasion of Sicily in September 1943, thus dividing up the Canadian Corps. These domestic divisions and tensions continued through the war, reflected most forcefully in the radicalization and ballooning of a new workers movement alongside a strong Communist Party and most acutely, a huge swing of support behind the still young socialist party, the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation. The CCF became the opposition in BC in 1942, narrowly lost the Ontario election in 1943 and took power in Saskatchewan in 1944. Political polarization was such that Canada witnessed its government and business-initiated Red Scare reach full-steam after the war even before the Americans, amidst one of the most extensive strike waves in Canadian history.

To conclude, let's not make Dieppe something it is not. It did not unite Canadians except in grief. It was a waste of life designed to recover lost political support at home and throw a bone to the Soviet Union. It is not something to celebrate.

A response to the Globe's pro-scab editorial

In response to a horrible anti-union editorial by the Globe and Mail, I wrote this letter to the editor. It wasn't published, but I'm not surprised.

re: "B.C. teachers who put students ahead of labour dispute are heroes" (editorial, May 10, 2012) 

If the BC Teachers Federation is to be criticized for sanctioning those members who choose to break the union principle of solidarity during a labour dispute, where is the Globe and Mail's opposition to the devastating financial sanctions associated with the BC government's Bill 22; a bill which violates the right to strike and collective bargaining? 

Furthermore, how can one laud those teachers who choose to ignore the BCTF work-to-rule campaign because of the benefits to students, without praising the BCTF's demands for smaller classroom sizes? It is the BC government, not the BCTF, that is seeking to curtail the ability of teachers to improve working conditions including those intimately tied to learning conditions.

The student strike gets grim, but may end soon

The student strike seems to have taken a nasty turn even as the three student federations, including the demonized CLASSE, remain in negotiations with the Quebec government.

The student protest at the Quebec Liberal Party meeting in Victoriaville escalated beyond anything we've seen in this massive 12-week student strike. Reports say seven students and four police were injured by rock-throwing. It's worth noting that the Liberal Party meeting was taking place next to a building site, so there's an element of staging to all this. Let's not forget the police cruisers conveniently abandoned in the heart of Toronto's financial district at the G20 protest in June 2010 (just sitting there, not even properly parked, in the middle of the street...)

Cop cars conveniently abandoned at King and Bay, the centre of Canada's finance district

Let's also not forget that this incident may have been provoked by rock-throwing police provocateurs. Remember the rock-wielding SQ cops caught in "black bloc" gear at the G20 Montebello protest a few years ago?



But the rock-throwing isn't the full story. A cop car was driven into the crowd of protesters at which point the cop was pulled from the car and beaten by several protesters. The cop got away, but SQ riot police responded by pummelling a student who is now in critical condition and is having eye surgery (a student lost an eye earlier in the strike courtesy of a police stun grenade).

One of the students beaten by police in Victoriaville and who is in critical condition (photo from Facebook)

The whole affair ended with well over a hundred arrests including, apparently, at least two busloads of students on the way back to Montreal from the action.

Several weeks ago, the question of violence was brought forward through mass arrests, heavy-use of tear gas, pepper-spray and batoning against protesters. A number of protesters have turned to property destruction and playing cat-and-mouse with the cops in the streets of Montreal.

The Charest government and its media allies have predictably condemned this as the actions of students, and used it as a phony pretext to break off talks in late April with CLASSE, the student coalition which initiated and continues to spearhead the strike, if they didn't condemn the violence. This blatant attempt to divide CLASSE from the two more conservative student federations, FEUQ and FECQ, was a repeat of what happened in the 2005 strike. But it didn't work this time as FEUQ and FECQ withdrew from negotiations after CLASSE's exclusion.

CLASSE's democratic structure prevented an immediate response to Charest, with its spokesperson Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois stating that he could not speak out because he had no democratic mandate to do so. Charest and the mainstream media obviously couldn't grasp this concept of democratic accountability:

On Wednesday Beauchamp issued an ultimatum calling on the CLASSE to change its tune by the end of the day. "I will sit down and discuss with people who have clearly condemned the resort to violence," the minister said. 

In response, Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, co-spokesperson for the CLASSE, recalled in a telephone interview that two weeks ago, when Beauchamp proposed proportional payback of student loans and extending credit to students from families with incomes over $60,000, she called on the students to hold secret ballots. Now she is asking the CLASSE to change its position without even consulting its membership, he said. 

"Not only is it a lack of coherence but a lack of respect as well for student democracy," Nadeau-Dubois said. "We will not trample on our own democratic procedures to please this government." 

The CLASSE practises "direct democracy," Nadeau-Dubois explained. That means the decision would be made at its weekend meeting at CÉGEP Maisonneuve by delegates from the 60 campus associations making up the CLASSE. 

"Certainly a decision will be made," he added. "If Minister Beauchamp is serious about resolving the strike, she should stop her diversions by imposing superficial conditions."
In a statement, the CLASSE noted the government remained silent when a student protester lost an eye in a confrontation with police and Nadeau-Dubois said student violence is a result of the government's refusal to even acknowledge there is a strike, calling it a "boycott" of classes, and refusing to meet with students.

Eventually, CLASSE did respond at a meeting of student delegates who voted unanimously to condemn violence against people (see the full resolution here). They stuck by their guns yesterday and condemned the violence against individuals, both students and police, along with the two more conservative student federations, FEUQ and FECQ.

Fortunately, the violence in Victoriaville has not led to the Charest government breaking off talks with the three student bodies, and at 3pm today, all three student organizations tentatively agreed to a deal with the government. Details will be made public at 8pm. CLASSE will rightfully be taking the tentative agreement to its membership for a vote.

Regarding the violence, nothing can justify what the police did to the student in Victoriaville and the cops and Charest's government need to be held to account. I really hope the student pulls through for a full recovery. What a fucking horror.

That said, those throwing rocks at cops should speak up and be accountable for their actions. By this I mean providing a political explanation for such actions given the common knowledge of how brutal the SQ is. And how such actions jive with the democratic strike votes that have been at the heart of the scale, involvement and tenacity of the strike for these past 12 weeks. At what point do we take democratic responsibility for the tactics we employ at protests? Did the student beaten by cops and other students at the demonstration get a say on how the police would be confronted? If everyone votes to take on the police with rocks, fine, but if that's not the case, then what does that mean for the principles of direct democracy and mass participation in social movements?

From Pearson Air Canada workers to CEO of Air Canada

The Dam Bursts? The Air Canada wildcat

In the evening of Thursday, March 22, federal Minister of Labour Lisa Raitt disembarked at Toronto's Pearson Airport to three Air Canada ground crew slow-clapping her in response to her back-to-work legislation against the Air Canada ground crew, baggage handlers, mechanics and pilots on March 14.

Air Canada suspended the three workers as Raitt called them "animals" in the process. Shortly thereafter, Air Canada around 150 ground crew began a wildcat strike and took to marching through Terminal 1 (domestic) chanting "Fire Lisa Raitt" and demanding the suspensions be lifted. By Friday morning, dozens of workers at Pearson and across Toronto joined the protest which had grown to over three hundred. More recent videos show a CUPE 966 Flying Squad bus at Terminal 1 and support from CAW workers as well.

The wildcat then spread to Pierre Trudeau airport in Montreal, Jean Lesage in Quebec City, and Vancouver International. In terms of disruption, National Post reports 77 cancelled flights at Pearson, 15 in Montreal and 4 in Quebec City. Leading Tory cabinet minister and President of the Treasury Board Tony Clement was held up on the tarmac at Halifax for two hours on Friday morning as well and when he arrived at Pearson in Friday morning he was heckled by workers.

Raitt couldn't make up her mind about what to do. On the one hand, she appeared to backing out of the dispute stating that it was a matter between the workers and Air Canada, even though she was responsible for back-to-work legislation against unionized workers of a privately-owned company threatening a lock-out. Then she also made pretty clear threats stating that if the Industrial Relations Board declared the wildcat "illegal", individual workers would fined $1000/day and the union $100,000/day.

Union reps from the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, representing ground crew, baggage handlers, and mechanics, also weighed-in, urging workers to go back to work. Whether this was to save face publicly given the financial threats of a CIRB ruling, or a more pernicious effort to curb rank-and-file militancy, is unclear at this point.

It appears that as of early afternoon this Friday - less than 24 hours after Raitt landed in Toronto - the wildcat is over. The three suspensions have become suspensions with pay. Workers have returned to work although apparently a handful are still out. Mainstream media is reporting that 37 workers were fired for the action and also immediately reinstated, but this is disputed by an on-the-ground report that they were merely disciplined.

As the wildcat seems to be coming to an end, Lisa Raitt's riding office in Milton, Ontario has now been occupied and police are now on the scene. People have called in, filling her voicemail with angry comments and slow clapping to the point that the voicemail is now full.

Updates and links will be provided as more information emerges. I'll also try to provide some preliminary analysis dealing with the context of the wildcat and the balance of forces between the federal state, employers (private and public), unions, and rank-and-file workers.

Most information is from online coverage in the Toronto Star, CBC and National Post, and a union organizer who got to Pearson on Friday and has contacts among the ground crew.