The generally good-natured manner of the Quebec protests should not mask this is a fundamental conflict, between generations and ideas of social justice, reaching beyond Canada to modern democracies around the world. What is taking place in Montreal is an early and unofficial referendum on the global economic model of an elite that facilitated debt, government and personal, threatening to plunge the world into another Great Depression.

What the protesters in Montreal are rebelling against is the idea that spending cuts and austerity measures are required to rebuild the same economic system that caused the crisis in the first place. And some of the reaction to the reasonable desire among many students to take up the responsibilities of an adult citizen, without the de-humanising debt burden to get an education, is worrisome.