Red-clad students board subway cars during the morning rush hour on the orange line of the metro. One per car, they stand silently looking straight ahead. When the car stops they get out, position themselves at equal intervals along the platform so that when the metro pulls out of the station passengers see a blur of red.

Red, the colour of radical movements, has been taken over by the students, who wear red knitted or crocheted squares, or squares of red felt, attached with a safety pin. Or just a plain old square of red duct tape.

Music students perform a professional calibre Sacre du printemps by Igor Stravinsky to cheer the protesters, a piece that sent the Paris establishment into paroxysms of rage when it was first played in the spring of 1913.

Students build red cubes, using them as part of a piece of street theatre at the Earth Day demonstration, the biggest demonstration in the history of Canada and Quebec.

Videos, installation art, signs brandished by philosophy students in Latin and Greek. Fine arts students make picket signs with wonderfully detailed portraits of Quebec politicians.

Poems, songs, videos and music clips. If the purpose of an education is to learn how to think creatively, then the education system is working.

For 40 years, older people have lamented self-absorbed, apolitical youth. Now that so many have taken their ideas to the streets, many of those same observers are outraged, calling them spoiled, pointing to their iPads and Starbucks coffees as evidence. The unemployment rate for young people is at 14 percent and most of them end up burdened with huge debt when they graduate. Many students work while studying – 20 or more hours per week. They may have a Starbucks coffee from time to time. So what?

Supporters of the Occupy movement in New York speak admiringly of the Quebec student mobilization.

The Occupied Wall Street Journal, the newspaper of the movement, writes: "A deep democratic movement, something most of us have never seen and scarcely imagined, turned a small park near Wall Street into the centre of a global storm. Everybody knows the deck is stacked. But it turns out not everyone is willing to put up with it."

Beautifully written, and who would have thought that the Quebec branch of this worldwide mobilization, with 300,000 people in the streets, would have become the most stupendous of all? Quebecers in the streets are united, with the world marching. Everyone knows something is profoundly wrong – with the economy, with the environment, with the political system, corrupted with cash.

André Pratte, chief editorialist of La Presse, who is in favour of the tuition fee increase, compares the upheaval to May 1968. Students around the world protested against the war in Vietnam and demanded a voice in their education. In 1970, four students were shot down and killed at Kent State University in Ohio. You have probably heard the song by Canadian Neil Young that starts with the line, "Tin soldiers and Nixon’s coming…"

When it was all over, students had a say in the running of educational institutions.

Quebec’s student strike perplexes, annoys, thrills. Montreal writer Elise Moser says she supports it for three reasons:

a) The more accessible education is, the fairer, more stable and richer a society is, because we can develop the resources of all our people, not just the thin layer of entitled wealthy who can pay for education. That seems obvious, doesn’t it?

b) The strike is not just against a tuition hike, it’s for a much broader vision of an equitable society.

c) The investment in an undergrad degree produces much higher economic returns to the state than an equal amount in subsidies to industry.

On March 22 at least 100,000 people protested peacefully in the streets of Montreal against the tuition fee hike. That was the first sign that something really big was underway. In another song of the 60s, Bob Dylan sang, "Something is happening here, and you don’t know what it is, do you, Mister Jones?"

The tuition fee hike amounts to a 75 percent increase over five years – $325 per year for five years. About $325-million in all. The cost of the fiasco of a new building constructed by the Université du Québec à Montréal called L’Îlot Voyageur: $500-million. So why the insistence on the fee hike?

Ideology. An election promise. The need to be seen to be fiscally responsible.

After the World Trade Center attacks, social activism declined. The gap between the 1 percent and the 99 percent grew. Now over ten years later a new generation of activists is looking around and saying, "Wait a minute, this system is not so great. The neo-liberal model led to a worldwide financial crisis that brought the world economy almost to its knees. Just what is so great about the status quo?"

It has always been easier to stand back, cross your arms and do nothing. To go along with things as they are. But the reason we have public education, votes for women, public healthcare, libraries and paved roads is because people who didn’t just go along with the status quo built systems that defended the interests of the people.

They were called names too – "communists," "anarchists," "agitators."

I was struck by an interview I saw with a government minister who said she doesn’t like demonstrations. No one likes demonstrations, Minister. It’s just that sometimes demonstrations are the only tool people have to make themselves heard.

Let the last word go to filmmaker Hugo Latulippe, excerpted from the poem he wrote called Nous sommes des millions published in Voir:

"Puis, raillé nos enfants insurgés.
Minimisé l’envergure du geste, la largeur des idées.
Minimisé les milliers d’entre eux dans la rue.
Grave erreur."
[...]
"Nous sommes arrivés à ce qui commence.
Le feu a pris pour de bon.
Nous sommes des millions."

"NATO, NORAD, ICC, end Canada’s complicity!" shout some of the grown-ups. "What is NATONORADICC?" I ask.

The horses move in on the crowd. We leave. "Jesus Christ," my dad says, "that should not be happening. Those police officers have no business going after the demonstration." "Non," says my mum. "Il vaut mieux s’en aller."

Demonstrating for peace is an old tradition. Of necessity it often involves children.

Children were everywhere on Sunday, April 22, 2012. Children, parents, fresh-faced young and old people. A respectful, good humoured, wildly varied crowd that politely stopped at the traffic lights. The same kind of crowd that carefully avoided trampling the tulip beds in Dominion Square a month earlier, when over 100,000 students marched through downtown protesting tuition fee increases.

On Sunday, marchers were organized to form a huge human tree, or hand, spread across the street and the park next to Mount Royal. It ended with a concert by some of Quebec’s most celebrated performers, including Pierre Lapointe, Ariane Moffatt, Gilles Vigneault and Diane Dufresne, who closed by singing Ne tuons pas la beauté du monde. The concert was a smoothly produced showcase organized by one of our most talented directors, Dominic Champagne.

The biggest demonstrations I have ever been in have been in the last month here in Montreal. One was for more accessible education a month ago on March 22. And one was for Earth Day, on April 22, a call on the Quebec and Canadian governments to respect the Kyoto protocol, to slow development in the north, to freeze shale gas development until more is known about the possible ill effects.

There were 48 Innu women who walked 1,000 kilometres from Maliotenam to protest against the proposed plan to open up Quebec’s north.

The coverage in the print media of the demonstration on Sunday is telling. Le Devoir ran an artistic panoramic photo by Jacques Nadeau of the crowd in the shape of a tree with a huge headline and subhead that read, "Un grand cri du peuple – une manifestation d’une ampleur sans prédédent pour la Journée de la Terre," quoting organizers putting the numbers at 250,000 to 300,000 people. La Presse ran a similar photo with the headline "Une forêt humaine – marche historique pour le Jour de la Terre, environs 125,000 personnes (300,000 selon les organisateurs de l’évènement) ont convergé hier vers Montréal pour former un arbre géant." The Gazette ran a big street-level photo of the crowd, captioned "Marching for Mother Earth, huge crowd rallies peacefully for environmental issues," and said there was an estimated 250,000 people, ten times what organizers expected.

The newspaper of record in English Canada made no mention of the demonstration in the print edition of the paper I received at my doorstep the next day. Instead The Globe and Mail talked about hockey, and cuts to Statistics Canada. Le Journal de Montréal ran the story of the demo inside on pages 2 and 3, headlining it, "Une manif calme… enfin."

The Globe and the Journal seem to have completely missed the story. There is something going on. One can only imagine how many people would have gone to the Earth Day demonstration if the weather hadn’t been so raw and cold. There is a deep feeling that something isn’t right. That the political class is not listening to the concerns of a big segment of the population.

A huge peaceful demonstration is a major achievement. One that caught the Charest Liberals completely by surprise, I am sure. There hasn’t been anything like this in 40 years. Maybe that explains Charest’s tone-deaf joking about sending students to work, way up in the north, while a handful of angry students fought with police outside the Palais des Congrès last Friday.

No one really anticipated the size of these two huge demonstrations, including the people who organized them. There have been many smaller demonstrations over the past few weeks, and hundreds of people have been arrested. Violent exchanges between police and a handful of masked protesters have nothing to do with these huge peaceful demonstrations.

Groundswells of protest arise at key periods of disaffection and frustration with the status quo. Ignoring them is a very short-sighted political strategy. The civil society is a formidable force. Most of the time the civil society is a sleeping giant. That giant is showing serious signs of awakening.

Student journalists have historically been the thorn in the side of university administrations. From the ranks of student journalists through the decades have emerged some of our best reporters and documentary filmmakers. Apparently, less so now.

Investigative reporting has been called "the journalism of outrage." It is the uncovering of wrongdoing, laying bare secrets which are supposed to remain secret. It is traditionally the affliction of the powerful.

It is not all that popular these days. Fewer and fewer news organizations dig up original stories. Real digging costs money, gets you sued and annoys potential supporters and funders.

But in a sense, a free and vigilant press is at the core of our democracy. It has a bedrock place in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

This week in The Chronicle Herald, journalism professor David Swick wrote about why it’s important: "You care about press freedom because you care about many things. Food, animals, education, crime, the Internet, water, war: Important decisions on all of these are being made by a government (or corporation, or NGO) near you. If that government can keep you in the dark, and do whatever it likes, it might. Solid information allows you to keep an eye on the powers­ that be. If you are armed with information, the powerful are much more likely to consider your wishes."

Keeping democratic institutions requires investigative journalism. Revelations from investigative reports like the ones being done by the Radio-Canada television program Enquête are the oxygen that keeps our system alive.

Never mind that some people will say, "What’s the point? The whole system is corrupt and these stories don’t tell us anything useful." Or as one high-ranking television manager told a colleague, "Why don’t you do positive investigations?"

News is what is new, not what is normal or frequent. News is what is exceptional and out of the ordinary.

Corruption and kickbacks are not the norm. They are the exception and that is why they are news. The fact that our system is being subverted to line some people’s and political parties’ pockets needs to be covered.

These kinds of stories keep us all honest. They remind us that temptation is all around. The point is to correct the problems that are laid out in the reports, not to turn away in disgust and do nothing. The point is to fix the political system.

Stories like the one broadcast last week on Radio-Canada about the engineering firm Roche and connections to the Quebec Liberal Party have to be done. It is to the credit of Radio-Canada’s managers that the story went to air, and that similar ones will be done. Enquête has become a hotbed of revelations as the brown envelopes pile up at the door. Marie-Maude Denis and Alain Gravel are folk heroes for their work in laying out the backstory of what goes on in the backrooms of the province.

(It has been suggested that Quebec is more corrupt than other jurisdictions. Not true. Transparency International says Quebec is less corrupt than the Atlantic provinces and that Canada ranks about 10th overall behind various Scandinavian countries and way ahead of the U.S. in terms of corruption.)

Far from doing taxpayers and voters a disservice, journalists are saving the system from its own tendency to cut corners and reward its friends.

Nowhere is this more true than in the robocall affair. It is old-fashioned investigative journalism at its best. Two reporters at the Ottawa Citizen have been digging in the dirt like happy groundhogs. We owe Glen McGregor and Stephen Maher a bouquet of thanks for their splendid digging.

And they are still at it. Even while NDP robocall critic Pat Martin was forced to apologize to a robocall company, the journalists were reporting this week that they are getting closer to Pierre Poutine. This is the derisive and offensive code word a conspirator took to cover his tracks. Who is it? Apparently the reporters have in their sights a Tory staffer who dipped into the Harper databank of non-Conservative voters too many times. The staffer then tried to erase his computer access. It is a possible smoking gun.

Potentially the robocall affair is the most dangerous event in the history of Canadian democracy. Elections Canada reports that hundreds of ridings were affected. It is quite possibly the difference between a majority and minority government.

The Tories claim they have a mandate to transform the country in their image. They claim they should be allowed to ram through radical changes to old age security, making Canadians wait until they are 67. They claim they have the mandate to ram through the F-35 fighter jets, even though they lied to Parliament and to the people about their true cost. They claim they have a mandate to throw Canadians in prison for the misdemeanour of growing weed. But what if they do not actually have the mandate to govern as if they had a majority?

The affair is not done, and with good reporting, we will find out. Enquiring minds want to know.

The F-35 is a lethal piece of military hardware. For people who love aircraft technology it is a thing of terrifying beauty. For a guy like my dad, an aerospace tool and die maker, it represents the apex of technology and materials.

But what is it for? Why do we need it? Does it work? No one has explained this clearly.

The F-35 is a high-speed stealth attack machine, meant to be part of a shock and awe campaign. There are a few design glitches that come with its dull grey matte finish.

So not only did the government and the military brass string us a line about how much it will cost to buy the jets – first it was $14.7-billion, now it’s $24-billion, and some analysts say it is more like $40-billion over 35 years – they aren’t even reliable.

Auditor-General Michael Ferguson, that unilingual fellow who caused such a ruckus, says the government knowingly low-balled the price by at least $10-billion.

The purchase makes no sense. Supposedly we are in a period of austerity and cut-backs to programs. Didn’t we just reduce access to pensions by planning to extend the retirement age to 67? Never mind that the cost of buying and operating a single aircraft would easily pay for the CBC cuts, Katimavik, Rights and Democracy and a national daycare program, and we would still have the cash needed to modernize the fleet of F-18 hornets.

To the average person at the checkout counter at the grocery store, the idea of buying such high-priced military equipment boggles the mind. That may be why relatively few people seem to be upset by it. It’s just too big to wrap your brain around.

One thing we have learned about big defence purchases is they are often accompanied by brown paper envelopes stuffed with untraceable cash. When the full-scale investigation unfolds about these planes, and it will, it will be fascinating to follow the money.

A LITTLE HISTORY ABOUT GIANT DEFENCE PURCHASES

Des Morton, Canada’s leading military historian, chooses his words judiciously. "The F-35," he writes me, "is a flying coffin, a single engine fighter that might not get a pilot from Iqaluit to Resolute in a snowstorm." Professor Morton expressed dismay that Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest defence contractor, has produced such a lemon.

Lockheed Martin is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, defence contractor in the world. With annual revenues approaching $50-billion, the corporation is the incarnation of General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s warning about "the military-industrial complex." Despite the fusillade of bad press over the last week, don’t count out Lockheed Martin. They have a bold history of turning failure into profits. They are expert at hiring retiring generals, paying them handsome fees and setting them loose among the defence bureaucrats.

The 1960s version of the Joint Strike Fighter was Lockheed’s F-104 Starfighter. America’s NATO allies all signed on to the project. And then the planes began to fall out of the sky. In Germany, so many planes crashed that the fighter was called a lawn dart. They said that every German citizen would soon have an F-104 sticking out of their front lawn. The aircraft became known as the "widowmaker." Out of the 200 F-104 fighters bought by Canada, 110 crashed one way or another.

How powerful is this nexus of the military and their contractors? Eisenhower came to the presidency in 1952 determined to shrink the defence budget drastically. After all, the U.S. led the allies to victory over Hitler’s Germany and Imperial Japan. So the armed forces that won that war were no longer so badly needed. Or so Eisenhower thought.

Eisenhower was also determined to get rid of the CIA. But the powerful defence lobby went to work. Eisenhower found himself thwarted at every turn, and after eight years as the most powerful citizen on Earth, the President of the United States had to admit failure. Instead of a cut budget, he left his successor, John Kennedy, this unparalleled warning:

"We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist," Eisenhower said.

In 1960, John Kennedy came to the presidency as a hawk. But by November 1963 he had evolved into the world’s most powerful dove. At the American University in the summer of 1963 he gave the most pacific speech ever uttered by an American president. The speech was hailed in the Soviet Union. Elsewhere it was called treason. At the CIA and the Pentagon, the generals and spies began talking of a coup d’état. In a conspiracy worthy of Shakespeare, many believe that JFK was murdered by his own military, with an assist from the CIA and the Mafia.

We may never discover how much of that scenario actually went down. But let no one underestimate the ability of these monstrous transformer-like defence contractors in getting their way.

Wearing that hat I went off to see the new theatrical documentary called Bully, which opens in Montreal on April 13. Bullying is part of the zeitgeist right now so it was inevitable that a documentary would finally be produced on bullying and bullies.

The film is drawing rave reviews and is being taken seriously by good people like Robert Siegel at National Public Radio and critic A.O. Scott at The New York Times. It was initially given an R rating in the U.S., apparently for the language. The producers turned that rating into a marketing moment, mobilizing the liberal press on a free speech issue. (Distributor the Weinstein Company ultimately decided to release the film unrated.)

But the compassionate, heartfelt cinema that they are praising is not the film I watched. Bully left me unutterably sad, and angry. It is deeply exploitive of the children, the parents and the teachers featured in the documentary. It ultimately disempowers viewers.

It is a close-up, personal film about five kids and their families in the deep rural United States, where people live a hardscrabble life and have done so for generations.

They are lower middle class and working class. Their lives are impoverished in every way. These are the people of The Grapes of Wrath in modern times.

Bully is the story of five of those children. Two of the kids profiled have chosen to kill themselves – one hanged himself in the closet of one of the rooms of his house. The other shot himself with a weapon belonging to his dad. We do not see the suicides but only the horrific aftermath.

The other three children are in big trouble. One is a young black girl who lives a trailer park life.

One day she gets bullied so badly it sends her over the top. She reaches for an American solution – she reaches for a handgun. It’s her mom’s weapon. On the school bus she pulls it out and, yelling in fear and anger, threatens her tormentors. No shots are fired and she is overpowered by another kid on the bus.

The local police throw the book at her, and she is incarcerated in a psychiatric facility and is finally released.

Another kid is a preemie who has lifelong health issues and is incredibly brave. He tells his mother that his only friends are his tormentors. As Marc Cassivi pointed out in La Presse, he is suffering from Stockholm syndrome. His life is a living hell but he manages to retain a sweetness and humour which is tragic.

Another character is a super bright gay girl from a fundamentalist Christian family. To their credit the family revise their hard-line anti-gay position for love of their daughter. But they cannot help her. She and they are pariahs in the community where they once led Sunday school.

And in the case of these five kids, the adults featured in the film are hopelessly inept, and worse.

A devastating scene shows a school administrator who seems like a nice enough woman, but she tells parents that the bus is fine and that the kids who ride on it are "good as gold." Well, sure they are, when she’s on board.

Watching the film unroll one wonders about the total access filmmaker Lee Hirsch got from his subjects. We discover in an NPR interview with the director that the kids and parents were likely deceived by the small camera he was employing. Many of the newest documentary tools – like the Canon 5D Mark II – are not much larger than an old single-shot film camera.

In fact no middle-class family would ever allow such an invasion. No middle-class family would ever sign a release allowing such exploitation. It’s enough to make documentary makers queasy.

There is nothing in this film about solutions. It rings the fire alarm without even suggesting how to put out the fire. "This year 13 million American kids will be bullied; 3 million students will be absent because they feel unsafe at school," headlines the film’s website. But Bully does not even pretend to demonstrate how bullying can be successfully confronted. In that way the film is terribly disempowering.

Fifty years of research tells us that solutions abound in how to confront and end bullying. With proper intervention from trained teachers and principals it is possible to dramatically diminish if not eliminate this kind of persecution.

Leadership is needed – leadership by kids and adults on a day-to-day basis signalling that this kind of behaviour is not cool. Maybe the scene was left on the cutting room floor. In the end the film deserves an E rating – E for exploitation.

Tom Mulcair is a career politician who has won six successive elections. He is smart and fast and ruthless. Ruthless is not always a bad thing. It served Bobby Kennedy well, another Irish politician. He is widely perceived to be the guy who can duke it out with Harper and his front bench attack cohort. Putting Mulcair in Jack Layton’s seat means that nationalist and separatist Quebecers can’t say "You see? They’re ignoring Quebec again."

After four ballots Mulcair beat party stalwart and life-long NDP staffer Brian Topp. It’s a fascinating gamble. Will Mulcair show the talent for consensus that Layton displayed on key issues?

Many members of the NDP are a free thinking and fractious lot, a bit like their brothers and sisters in the PQ. They have a clear bias in favour of what is fair and associate themselves with the underdog. They aren’t too keen on being told what to do by their elders.

When NDP elder Ed Broadbent attacked Mulcair publicly, many of the party faithful were irritated. "Il n’y a pas qu’au Parti Québécois qu’on a des belles-mères!’ ("So it’s not just the PQ that has mothers-in-law [those who look over our shoulders and judge]") said some Quebec observers.

In spite of the array of supportive heavy-hitters that Brian Topp and his campaign manager Ray Guardia marshalled, Mulcair won. He did it by performing a feat that his opponents thought he was incapable of: He built a cross-Canada movement, knowing he is very capable of working with others. "He’s the guy who can stand up to Harper" was the mantra heard all over the convention floor.

Tom Mulcair is an extremely competent guy, trained as a lawyer and toughened by Quebec’s language and cultural wars. His French is impeccable, and slightly tinged by the accent of Europe, where his wife Catherine Pinhas is from.

But unlike Layton, he has no attachment to social movements. He is accustomed to power. He takes a rather dim view of Birkenstock-wearing, bicycle-riding urban idealists, and of the union movement. Jack Layton was a guy who loved a demo, who rode a bike, who had fun when Rick Mercer asked to interview him and meet his mother-in-law. He also had a good relationship with the unions. Layton cast off the strictures of the politics of his father, Conservative MP Robert Layton, and joined popular urban movements.

The only strange note was Mulcair’s two speeches, especially his victory oration. They were not up to the moment, not even close. Imagine what Thomas D’Arcy McGee, our first great Irish orator, would have done. All those delegates were looking for a vision. Instead Mulcair read a laundry list of thank-yous. Obama practically swept to power on the basis of the brilliant speeches crafted by his 26-year-old writer Jon Favreau. Mulcair should make finding his own Favreau a priority.

The deep culture of the NDP is close to social movements like the Occupy movement and the student protests against fee hikes in Quebec. But that political culture could become a shadow of its past. A small circle of old boys has been running the place from the top down. They left more blood on the floor than Mulcair ever did. Many have already announced their departure.

Will that gang merely be replaced by a new gang of new old boys, and a spattering of women? Or will Mulcair take it as a challenge to build a new party that will give hope to the gathering army of hopeless and desperate Canadians, a party of the radical centre – a party that rhymes with the rhythm of its beautiful history?

For without a vision the people perish.

The odd bronze angel is a sculpture entitled L’Oeil, with the eye in question in the wrong place, made by Quebec artist David Altmejd, cast in Inverness, Quebec.

This angel is at the entry of the new wing of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. The festival features a film by Rénald Bellemare about the artist entitled Chaorismatique-David Altmejd, sculpteur, screening again today, March 22, at the MMFA at 1 p.m., along with a film about the museum itself, Luc Bourdon’s Un musée dans la ville.

There are other festivals of films on art, but none as big and as lasting as the one right here in Montreal. Over 30 years the festival has offered 5,000 films about every realm of the arts, from the conventional arts of painting and sculpture to design and animation.

For those who are interested in the arts, but not likely to go to a museum, this is a feast of material. The trick is to choose a subject or artist that interests you and then dive in and see what you come up with.

Here are a few highlights:

Dave Brubeck: In His Own Sweet Way (Bruce Ricker)

Co-produced by Clint Eastwood, a film about the only survivor of the mighty triumvirate of John Coltrane, Miles Davis and Brubeck. Brubeck is now 90 years old and is filmed preparing for a show at the Blue Note jazz club in New York. The soundtrack is a jazz lover’s dream, and obviously features Paul Desmond’s 1959 jazz anthem Take Five. At Place des Arts’ Cinquième Salle, March 24, 6 p.m.

West Wind: The Vision of Tom Thomson (Peter Raymont and Michèle Hozer)

He haunts us still, the man who painted The Jack Pine and whose body was found floating in Canoe Lake in Algonquin Park, with a suspicious injury to the head and marks on his ankle. Filmed in the park, Toronto and Seattle, and featuring never before seen paintings, this is a must for Thomson and Group of Seven fans. Part of a double feature with Jill Sharpe’s Bone Wind Fire, a doc about Georgia O’Keefe, Emily Carr and Frida Kahlo. At Cinéma ONF, March 24, 3:30 p.m.

The Mexican Suitcase (Trisha Ziff)

Seventy years after the Spanish Civil War, a suitcase of 4,500 negatives is unearthed in a closet in Mexico City. It is a treasure trove of images by Robert Capa, David "Chim" Seymour and Gerda Taro, who was killed. All three went to Spain to fight fascism, armed with their cameras. Three hundred of the photos are featured in the film. At Concordia, March 25, 1 p.m.

Ai Weiwei: Without Fear or Favour (Matthew Springford)

This doc created for the BBC features Chinese activist artist and architect Ai Weiwei and his newest work, featuring millions of handmade porcelain sunflower seeds, a metaphor about famine and starvation in pre-revolutionary China. The artist is also telling us something about the shoddy mass-produced goods now associated with China. At the Museum of Contemporary Art, March 24, 6 p.m.; at Concordia, March 25, 3:30 p.m.

W.A.R. Women Art Revolution (Lynn Hershman Leeson)

Forty years of women artists, historians, curators and critics on feminist art, regarded as one of the most important movements in the contemporary art world. With music by Laurie Anderson, Janis Joplin and Sleater-Kinney. At Concordia, March 23, 6 p.m.

Le Carnaval des animaux (Andy Sommer & Gordon)

A boy always wants the same story every night, the story of the Carnaval des animaux. But suddenly the story comes alive with animation against the backdrop of a real orchestra performing the piece. For children and lovers of Camille Saint-Saëns. At the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, March 25 at 11 p.m.

International Festival of Films on Art
To March 25
www.artfifa.com

Mixing defiance, joy and anger, the protest movement is becoming a Montreal Spring. This strike is not just about tuition hikes. It’s about deepening unemployment among the young, about suspicions of a corrupt electoral system, about the climate change catastrophe, about banks that take but don’t put much back. The strike is becoming a wake-up robocall.

Some observers think it very strange that the strike is going on so long, for with every passing day, it becomes seemingly tougher for the Charest Liberal government to back down.

But on the other hand, perhaps the striking students are part of the Liberal re-election map. With a general election approaching in Quebec, the Liberals must have poll results showing that among the general populace, support for the student strike action is not robust.

Quebec says it cannot afford to offer the lowest tuition fees in Canada, if not in all of North America. But why not? What a proud boast! What a badge of honour. How very European of us.

Every international study shows that the future belongs to the most educated. By all means come up with more incentives to scale down the alarming high school drop-out rate in Quebec. But making it more expensive to enter college is not an answer. Every nation that puts a premium on teachers and classrooms has a better chance to survive future shock.

The PQ certainly understood that. Pauline Marois, for all her claptrap, understood keenly the value of intelligent child care as a building block for Quebec society. Now Quebec has a daycare system that is the envy of North America. This is where education begins. And this has proven to be a very smart investment, benefiting mothers and fathers who choose to work. The province more than recoups its investment in new tax revenues.

Put Quebec’s investment in education, for example, up against its investment in aluminium over the last five years.

In 2007, the government signed a sweetheart deal with Alcan that in effect gave the aluminium company the benefit of $300,000 a job every year for 35 years. Adding to that subsidy would be cheap electricity from Hydro-Québec.

To create 740 jobs, the government gave up $2.7 billion in tax revenue. Laval economic professors who studied the deal pronounced it a very bad one for the Quebec economy. They argued that investing in roads and other infrastructure would have garnered a higher return.

The ink was not even dry on the Alcan deal when the giant smelting corporation sold out to the mining Godzilla Rio Tinto.

Now Rio Tinto is demanding savage cuts to wages and pensions at the Saguenay smelter. On New Year’s Day they took the ultimate step and locked out 740 workers, all members of the United Steelworkers. Now the company is demanding the right to replace retiring workers at the smelter with contract employees who will be offered pensions and other classic benefits that are vastly reduced. The corporate greed is really something to behold. Those jobs that are subsidized at the rate of $300,000 each for more than 30 years will be savaged.

Meanwhile, skating around Quebec’s anti-scab law, Rio Tinto is using more than 200 "management" personnel to run the plant. Years ago the smelter became famous for the role it played in poisoning the beluga whales that have long played where the Saguenay River intercepts the St-Lawrence. But dying whales and jobless workers so far down river from Montreal are easy to ignore.

It’s tougher to ignore the student protesters. Better to attack them. In The Gazette, Don Macpherson argues that the strike is undemocratic. He cites evidence that a show of hands was all some student leaders needed to head off to the streets. But surely the ultimate measure is how many students they manage to mobilize, and how imaginative their tactics are. Change is always led by the minority. In the streets they surely have everyone’s attention.

Declared one student, Taylor Noakes, in an eloquent cri du coeur (published by The Gazette on Tuesday):

"Don’t lecture us on democracy. We’re fighting for Liberal-progressive democratic values, including the right to a decent education, job opportunities and clean and transparent government.

Don’t talk to us of costs to the economy. The baby boomers ruined the world economy thanks to their collective avarice. [...]

We’re tired of being offered the ‘choice’ of getting an unpaid internship or working for a call centre. We are tired of being told how well we have it by people who have their heads in the sand.

Worst of all, we despise how the establishment, the media, and government treat us as though we have no stake in the future of the province, of the nation.

Instead of scolding us, why not offer to help? Think about who will replace you when you retire. Then ask yourself if we are worth investing in."

What kind of a message does Quebec send when it abandons the Rio Tinto workers in Alma, and stun-guns and pepper-sprays students in Montreal and Quebec City?

Douglas was a Scots-born Baptist minister and socialist. From 1944 to 1961, he led the first social democratic government in North America, and introduced universal health care to Canada. He was practical and unpretentious. He was also a man of principle. In late 1918, when he was 14 years old, Douglas saw the RCMP shoot down and kill a worker during the Winnipeg General Strike. He became a lifelong proponent of bills of rights, and one of the few to speak out against the War Measures Act.

Would he embrace Peggy Nash, who among all the leadership candidates is the closest to being a real socialist, like Tommy?

Would he go with Brian Topp, the backroom boy and strategist, who is possibly the smartest guy in the room, but so far not much of a retail politician?

Or how about Tom Mulcair, the talented and tempestuous former Liberal, who would give Harper a run for his streetfighting money.

Or B.C.’s Nathan Cullen, who as Don Macpherson observes, is the closest to being the kind of happy warrior that Jack Layton was, and who wants to bury the hatchet – not in the Liberals, but with the Liberals.

Tommy Douglas was a gifted orator and storyteller. Here was his favourite story! It is amazingly relevant today. Where he refers to mice, you could insert the 99%.

Read it and decide who it might point to:

"Mouseland was a place where all the little mice lived and played, were born and died. And they lived much the same as you and I do.

They even had a Parliament. And every four years they had an election. Used to walk to the polls and cast their ballots. Some of them even got a ride to the polls. And got a ride for the next four years afterwards too. Just like you and me. And every time on Election Day all the little mice used to go to the ballot box and they used to elect a government. A government made up of big, fat, black cats.

Now if you think it strange that mice should elect a government made up of cats, you just look at the history of Canada for the last 90 years and maybe you’ll see that they weren’t any stupider than we are.

Now I’m not saying anything against the cats. They were nice fellows. They conducted their government with dignity. They passed good laws – that is, laws that were good for cats. But the laws that were good for cats weren’t very good for mice. One of the laws said that mouseholes had to be big enough so a cat could get his paw in. Another law said that mice could only travel at certain speeds – so that a cat could get his breakfast without too much effort.

All the laws were good laws. For cats. But, oh, they were hard on the mice. And life was getting harder and harder. And when the mice couldn’t put up with it any more, they decided something had to be done about it. So they went en masse to the polls. They voted the black cats out. They put in the white cats.

Now the white cats had put up a terrific campaign. They said: "All that Mouseland needs is more vision." They said: "The trouble with Mouseland is those round mouseholes we got. If you put us in we’ll establish square mouseholes." And they did. And the square mouseholes were twice as big as the round mouseholes, and now the cat could get both his paws in. And life was tougher than ever.

And when they couldn’t take that anymore, they voted the white cats out and put the black ones in again. Then they went back to the white cats. Then to the black cats. They even tried half black cats and half white cats. And they called that coalition. They even got one government made up of cats with spots on them – they were cats that tried to make a noise like a mouse but ate like a cat.

You see, my friends, the trouble wasn’t with the colour of the cat. The trouble was that they were cats. And because they were cats, they naturally looked after cats instead of mice.

Presently there came along one little mouse who had an idea. My friends, watch out for the little fellow with an idea. And he said to the other mice, "Look fellows, why do we keep on electing a government made up of cats? Why don’t we elect a government made up of mice?" "Oh," they said, "he’s a Bolshevik. Lock him up!" So they put him in jail.

But I want to remind you that you can lock up a mouse or a man but you can’t lock up an idea."

Voting on the NDP leadership has already started. For the first time in the history of the party it’s one member, one vote. Or one mouse, one vote. The final tally will be taken at a convention in Toronto on March 24.

The NDP is poised to enter a new era. Who will take up the cause of the mice, of the 99%?

The Liberals and the New Democrats charge that the Conservative Party orchestrated electoral fraud on a massive basis. They put in play an immense operation to steal the last federal election. In up to 40 ridings, mainly in Ontario, the Conservatives set in motion a complex, expensive plan.

First, on the days leading up to the election they masqueraded as Liberal workers, making repeated harassing calls, often in the middle of the night, designed to fuel voter anger against the Liberal Party.

Then on election day the computers took over and the robo calls began.

To look at the riding of Guelph in Ontario is to see the plan in action. On election day 2011, thousands of Guelph residents took calls from a computer.

An official-sounding recorded female voice said she was calling from Elections Canada and that the polling place had changed.

"This is an automated message from Elections Canada," the voice said. "Due to a projected increase in voter turnout, your poll location has been changed … We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause."

The voice gave an 800 number to call. The same message in French then followed.

John Hudson is a librarian at the University of Guelph. He told The Toronto Star that he immediately suspected that something wasn’t right, as the "new" voting location, according to the message, was the Old Quebec Street Mall in downtown Guelph – not particularly close to where he lives. The original location, Laurine Public School, is about a three-minute walk from his home. He had also heard reports of strange calls similar to the one he received being made to other residents.

He was so alarmed, in fact, that he saved the message.

It now appears that millions of such calls were dialled by companies working for the Conservative Party on election day. Thousands of voters were sent to the wrong polling station only to find out that no such poll existed. How many single mothers, old people, people on tight schedules, just gave up in frustration?

The Liberals and NDP say such calls may have suppressed the vote, assisting the Conservatives to attain a majority. The government maintains that it knew nothing about the calls.

So far one young Conservative operative, who also tried to walk off with a ballot box on election day, has taken the rap and resigned. But trying to hang the whole affair around the neck of one operative didn’t work. To see how distressing the situation is, one has to look at some of the really tight races.

Linda Hearst and her husband, Ken Ferance, of Calvin, Ontario, say they also received a suspicious call on election day. Hearst says that shortly after they voted, they received a call directing them to vote in the town of Mattawa, about 20 kilometres away.

Both Hearst and Ferance worked on Liberal candidate Anthony Rota’s campaign and are worried the calls may have corrupted the vote in their riding (Nipissing-Timiskaming). Rota lost to Conservative Jay Aspin by 18 votes.

How did the Conservatives know who to call on election day to send them off on wild goose chases? The answer is in an Orwellian data bank Harper’s team has assembled over many years. Taking a leaf from their Republican cousins down south, the party engages companies that burrow into the lives of millions of Canadians from every kind of public and private source available. They know everything about you, including your voting inclination.

Even after the election the Conservatives flexed their robo muscles and targeted the MP for Mount Royal, Irwin Cotler. Calls went out to thousands of constituents claiming Cotler was thinking of stepping down. The calls were made to try and destabilize Cotler.

This story is not unfolding in some failed state, some shadow of a democracy. This is not Russia, where Putin’s party eliminated all opponents from the ballot, ensuring him another presidency.

What has happened to the Conservative Party of Sir John A. Macdonald, of Robert Borden, of Flora Macdonald, of Joe Clark?

As former parliamentary page Brigette DePape declared on her famous poster: "Stop Harper."