Drimonis: My thoughts on protests, props and moral panic

I’ve been thinking about this month’s International Workers Day demonstration in Montreal, where a papier-maché effigy of what appeared to be Quebec Labour Minister Jean Boulet was decapitated with a makeshift guillotine.

Boulet filed a complaint with Montreal police, which opened an investigation into the incident. The act by militant labour group Alliance Ouvrière was widely condemned by Quebec politicians.

I don’t appreciate the mock beheading of a puppet depicting the likeness of a Quebec minister anymore than I did “freedom convoy” protesters carrying makeshift gallows with a noose and accusing then prime minister Justin Trudeau of treason. I worry such theatrics carry the potential of encouraging real-life violence in troubled individuals.

But as distasteful or disturbing as these protest tactics may seem, unless they’re accompanied by explicit threats, they’re generally protected under freedom of expression provisions in charters of rights.

Alliance Ouvrière says its effigy wasn’t meant to represent Boulet specifically (despite the obvious likeness) but was symbolic of public anger toward the ruling class. It was a May Day protest after all — traditionally associated with support for workers’ rights and union protections, and denouncements of social inequality.

Not to be too blasé about it, but burning effigies of politicians or imagery of guillotines — symbolic of the French Revolution — are not uncommon in labour protests around the world and are widely seen not as an incitement to violence but symbolic of anti-establishment anger. Far-left street theatre denouncing corporate greed.

In 2020, a guillotine was placed outside Jeff Bezos’s $23-million home to protest Amazon workers’ working conditions. When anti-capitalist movements yell “Eat the rich!” they’re not actually inciting anyone to engage in cannibalism — they’re calling out extreme wealth inequality and demanding a system that doesn’t trample all over the have-nots while protecting the one per cent.

I probably would not have commented on any of this, but Boulet’s statement that he felt threatened — “When you are the person depicted, the one who is beheaded, it hurts” — changed my mind. I was reminded of his own reckless statement a few years ago that “80 per cent of immigrants go to Montreal, do not work, do not speak French or do not adhere to the values of Quebec society.”

Coming from a then-immigration minister no less, and unsupported by any data, his categorically false comments created deep unease and worry among Quebec immigrants. With a global rise in xenophobia and nativism, didn’t putting a target on their backs make them feel threatened and worried for their safety and that of their families? Did it also not hurt?

Political leaders called the guillotine act disgusting, shocking and unacceptable. I’m not here to defend it, but rather to point out that another brand of political violence (albeit less loud or ostentatious) moves top-down — via legislation inflicted through government power and an unfeeling bureaucracy by people most often wearing suits and ties.

Throughout history, systemic power — via institutions and government policies — has disproportionately affected lives without uttering a single threat or even raising its voice. Sometimes all it takes is someone saying “It’s the law” to lend it an air of social acceptability.

I can firmly condemn depictions of violence — symbolic or otherwise — while also lamenting: governments gutting essential services while squandering billions in cost overruns and failed investments; the most vulnerable being evicted or living on the street because of failing safety nets; patients dying while waiting for surgery while governments underfund health care; victims of gender-based violence being turned away because of lack of shelters. All this and more are forms of political violence in my books.

There are consequences to not addressing rising inequality for any society. We run the risk of creating the conditions for social unrest. I would like to see far more moral panic among our political elites about the overwhelming challenges facing average Quebecers than isolated protest theatrics that cross the line.

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Toula Drimonis, Special to the Montreal Gazette

Toula Drimonis is a Montreal journalist and the author of We, the Others: Allophones, Immigrants, and Belonging in Canada.

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