Tellingly, the group did not say what it thought McGill should do to end the protest. Indeed, it is not entirely clear what McGill can do at this point. After all, it has already asked the Montreal police to intervene — only to have the police refuse. It has gone to court to seek an injunction against the protesters — only to have the Superior Court of Quebec reject its request on the grounds that the protesters were acting peacefully and thus not really causing any harm. And it has tried to negotiate with the protesters, who are not really interested in negotiating and who recently dismissed the university’s latest offer as “laughable.”
The anger being directed at McGill for its supposed failure to end the encampment should be directed, instead, toward the Quebec government. The government led by François Legault has said virtually nothing about the encampment. To be sure, not long after the first tents went up, Legault did suggest that the tents should be dismantled. But since then, his government has remained largely silent on the issue.
Contrast this silence with the government’s response to another incident that took place after the encampment began on April 27. When a backbench Liberal member of Parliament from Laval suggested that Canada — including Quebec — should be a bilingual country, there was a swift reaction from Quebec’s political leadership, which very quickly secured a unanimous resolution in the National Assembly against the idea. And before that, when a Liberal MP had the temerity to question widespread claims about the decline of the French language, he was roundly denounced, leading him to apologize.
What these two cases show is that there exists a leadership class in Quebec that is willing to speak out on an issue if it chooses to do so. It is thus significant that when a group of masked protesters sets up an encampment on the grounds of McGill University and then proceeds to accuse the university of being complicit in genocide and to call on the university to sever ties with Israeli institutions solely on the basis that they are Israeli institutions, the Quebec leadership class can do little but offer tepid calls to dismantle the tents. Only after a social media post linked to the encampment contained images of a firearm, did some Quebec politicians call more forcefully for the end of the protest.
One cannot help but wonder why the Quebec government has been so unwilling to condemn the encampment. Should its silence be read as a form of support for the protesters? Is the government, along with much of the rest of the province’s political class, in fact deriving satisfaction that the protesters have targeted McGill in particular? After all, what is happening at McGill right now can only be helpful to the government’s larger effort to delegitimize the university as a “real” Quebec institution. Over the past year, the government has slashed funding to McGill, hiked tuition for out-of-province students, and accused it of seeking public funding that should instead be going to French-language institutions, which is to say, “real” Quebec institutions. The encampment on the McGill campus, in fact, only advances the government’s larger effort to portray the university as an institution that has been complicit in the decline of the French language in the province.
More to the point, does the Quebec government see itself in these protesters, which is to say, as part of a minority group that believes itself to be oppressed by a colonizing power that is occupying Quebec territory? By denouncing McGill for promoting genocide, for being an elitist institution that refuses to acknowledge its role in marginalizing an oppressed minority group, and for profiting from its oppression of this group, the encampment is doing much to advance the nationalist narrative that McGill represents a threat to the survival of the French language in Quebec and must be starved of resources.
If McGill is weakened by this encampment — as it most surely will be — the Quebec government would likely be just fine with that. After all, it has spent the better part of the past year attempting to weaken the university.
Right now, McGill finds itself alone. It is being attacked by the protesters on campus for being complicit in genocide; it is being attacked by the government for contributing to the decline of the French language in Quebec; and it is being attacked by anti-hate groups for not doing enough to end the encampment.
The truth is, McGill is the only institution at the moment that is actually trying to do something about the encampment on its campus. It asked the police to intervene. It asked the courts to intervene. And it tried to negotiate with the protesters. The Quebec government, meanwhile, has remained silent, seemingly enjoying the spectacle of the protesters describing McGill as part of the oppressor class. This is the narrative, after all, that the Legault government itself has spent much of the past few years promoting.