Is it time for Jean Charest to convene an
Estates General?
Posted on Sat, May 26, 2012, 5:08 am by Don Lenihan
Don Lenihan is Vice President, Engagement at the Public Policy Forum in Ottawa, Canada. He is an
internationally recognized expert on democracy and public engagement, accountability and service
delivery, with over 25 years of experience in the field. He is the author of numerous articles, studies and
books. Don’s latest book, Rescuing Policy: The Case for Public Engagement, is published by the Public
Policy Forum.
Premier Jean Charest is caught between a rock and a hard place. Bill 78 was supposed to bring
the protesters to heel. Instead, it’s unleashed a wave of frenzied activity and conferred a sense of
legitimacy on the protesters’ cause. They have the momentum.
For their part, most of the protest’s leaders seem in no mood for compromise, so a negotiated
settlement to the tuition question is unlikely. Nothing short of a full retreat is likely to satisfy
most of them. If so, Charest seems to be left with two equally unacceptable alternatives.
On one hand, he could order the police to crack down on protestors who engage in violence or
fail to obey the new law. This would be very risky. Violence would surely follow and someone
somewhere is going to get seriously injured — or worse, killed. That would be more than a
tragedy; it would be a political disaster that could ramp-up the conflict to a whole new level.
On the other hand, some people now think Charest should call an election. If he has lost the
ability to govern, they say, he should go to the people and let them decide on the next step. But
that won’t happen. It would be political suicide. The Parti Québécois would make mincemeat of
him in the campaign, first, for having created the crisis, then for mismanaging it.
There is a third option. It lies in the historic idea of the Etats généraux or Estates General.
In France, under the Old Regime, the Estates General was a legislative assembly made up of
three different classes: the clergy, the nobility and the commoners. The Estates served as
advisory bodies to the king, who convened and dismissed them as required.
The system had an element of genius. It gave each class a voice in decision-making to ensure its
interests were fairly taken into account. At the same time, the various estates acted as a check on
one another, keeping each other’s demands and expectations in balance.
Quebeckers have drawn on the idea of an Estates General to deal with difficult issues before,
most recently in 2000, when the Parti Québécois government of Lucien Bouchard called an
Estates General to address the language question.
Charest could convene a version of the Estates General to deal with the tuition question.
Effectively, this would be an assembly with representatives from the students and other key
public sector areas, such as health, public transportation and social services, and, possibly, a
cross-section of citizens.
This assembly would be tasked with deliberating on and arriving at a fair and appropriate
resolution to the tuition question and would report to the National Assembly. Through these
deliberations, the participants would consider different options for university tuition, as well as
the possible impact on other public priorities.
Such a discussion thus would situate the students’ demands in the larger context of other social
needs and expectations, represented by a group of their peers. The overarching goal would be to
ensure that a solution was reached that is fair to stakeholders and citizens from across Quebec
society and that enjoys a high degree of legitimacy.
The assembly would need clear rules of engagement, but these would not be hard to provide.
They would be based on the same principles of fairness, openness, transparency and mutual
respect that underwrite democratic discussion everywhere. Lots of authoritative work has been
done on this topic and there are plenty of precedents to draw on.
The same is true for designing an agenda and a process to ensure the discussion remained
focused, and that participants worked through key issues and arrived at conclusions together.
For example, a reasonable time limit would be set for the participants to carry out their
deliberations; if necessary, experts could be called in to provide information on relevant issues;
different dialogue techniques could be used to explore issues and build trust and agreement; and
a neutral facilitator might be engaged to lead the group.
There is a question of who would be involved in such an assembly. The list could quickly
become very long, but this is neither necessary nor desirable. All that is really required is that the
assembly be seen as representing a reasonable cross-section of key social interests. No one will
expect perfection.
Similarly, the participants must be seen as authoritative, credible and representative of the views
and perspectives within their sectors, but this needn’t be exhaustive. The number of participants
could likely be kept to as few as 40, which is large enough to carry legitimacy, but still small
enough to engage in meaningful dialogue.
Finally, Michelle Courchesne, Quebec’s Minister of Education, could preside over such a
process as a chairperson, along with a highly respected co-chair, likely someone from a civil
society organization. As co-chairs, they would symbolize a shared recognition that
collaboration between government and the sectors is essential to the solution of complex issues
such as these.
If such a process were proposed in good faith, the student leaders would have to participate in
good faith. Failure to do so would quickly undermine the movement’s credibility, re-legitimize
the government’s leadership and return the momentum to Charest.
Consider: the protesters began by using the marches to challenge the government’s position on
tuition. They have now rallied enough support to put the government’s leadership on the crisis in
question.
As a result, the protest leaders now feel emboldened to all but ignore the government’s efforts to
engage them in dialogue over a solution. Their non-cooperation amounts to a demand for
unconditional surrender.
However, their bargaining strength comes directly from the public support they have rallied to
their cause, especially over the last few days. Bill 78 has played a critical role in this. It
galvanized the public around the democracy issue.
But this surge in public support is ambivalent and tenuous. It could disappear overnight. Citizens
are rightly appalled by the violence around the protests and worried about where they are
heading.
The protest leaders would be making a serious mistake if they thumbed their nose at an invitation
to join an assembly of their peers aimed at resolving their issue. It would rightly be seen as
hypocritical and arrogant. The bottom line here is that, if you want to preach democracy, you’d
better be willing to practice it.
Lastly, it should go without saying that, to succeed, this Estates General would have to be
scrupulously non-partisan. In addition, Premier Charest would have to be firmly committed to
acting on the findings. Any fiddling with the process or wobbling on the results would leave his
government’s credibility in tatters.
Given the alternatives, however, neither seems like a huge ask.