Students in the streets, caribou in ravines

AWKWARD FAMILY PHOTO: Caribou =/= election metaphor
Photo by daryl_mitchell via Flickr

Well, the student protests are back in full force. Or at least they were for a couple of hours yesterday, as the major monthly demo drew thousands of students for a march through downtown that, according to The Gazette’s René Bruemmer, called to mind those heady days of spring, when you couldn’t keep the youngsters — and even some oldsters! — off the street.

But the O.G. raison d’être for #manifencours, the tuition hike, may not have been foremost on people’s minds yesterday, as Adam Kovac reports over at OpenFile. No, the provincial election coloured the discourse of dissent, with FEUQ distributing signs that included a space for people to write down what they’re voting for, whether a party, or an issue, or a delicious snack.

In case you forgot, this was a big week for political debates. It concluded last night as François Legault faced off against former BFF Pauline Marois. It got metaphorical, as the Globe and Mail reports, with some talk of caribou and kangaroos and ravines.

Legault, who said he’d vote no on secession, invoked that caribou incident from 1984, when 10,000 of the animals drowned crossing the Caniapiscau river, in the James Bay region. The hardcore sovereignists, he said, would force a referendum, and it would be something like a herd of a caribous following their leader off a cliff.

As we move closer to this election, though, are we forgetting anything? Per former Mirror news editor Patrick Lejtenyi, yes. ■