WHAT does Quebec want? It was a pressing question some time ago … but hasn’t been heard much in the intervening years. Yet now the question looms starkly, and it begs to be answered by Quebecers. This was driven home by Thursday’s concerted attack on the metro that shut the system down, disrupting the lives of tens of thousands of Montrealers. It was an attack on a vital public service…. Thus all of us … have an obligation to reflect and decide … whether we want a society governed by democratic rule … or whether one governed by the dictates of mobs and vandals….

The crippling of the metro may or may not have been perpetrated by boycotting students. But it happened in the context of the student revolt…. So the students who have pushed the confrontation to this intolerable point will find themselves rightly wearing some of the blame.

Some hard facts have to be faced by reasonable … people in this province which … excludes the leaders of the student rebels….

The boycott movement has thoroughly discredited itself…. It has rejected all compromise, even when the government bent to sweeten its proposal. It has made a mockery of democratic practice, both by seeking to intimidate the government with mob tactics and in its own assemblies, with dubious voting methods and sparse turnouts….

Thoroughly unhelpful contributions … have come from other quarters, including the Parti Québécois leadership, which … has advanced no better suggestion than that the government appease the mob ever more. And then there’s Quebec Solidaire’s Amir Khadir, who persistently asserts that the government is inciting mob violence by holding to its reasonable decision to raise tuition rates. Khadir is also stridently calling for an inquiry into police tactics in response to last weekend’s violent assault on the Liberal Party meeting in Victoriaville. He makes no mention … of an inquiry into who started the fracas, or who was throwing bricks … at the police…. One can certainly question the Sûreté du Québec’s use of plastic bullets. But it was clearly the protesters who incited the violence….

The time has come for true majority rule enacted by Quebec’s democratically elected government backed by a decisive majority of Quebec’s citizenry…. It is evident … that no accommodation short of abject surrender will becalm the student mob.

It is up to the government to draw its own line…. Students who wish to attend classes or exams should be enabled to do so, if necessary by law-enforcement authorities. Students who wish to keep cutting classes in defiance of a deadline to return should have their semester scrubbed. And teachers who don’t show up on the job should have their pay suspended….—(May 11)