Paris is burning — as is Lyons, Nantes, Rennes and Lorient.
It’s fair to say that the French are a tad upset these days over their president’s plan to raise the retirement age to 64 from 62.
As many as a million people at a time have hit the streets across the country in protest, and these demonstrations have often turned violent. Someone even set the city hall in Bordeaux on fire.
Emmanuel Macron, the French president, insists that reforming the country’s pension system is the only way to ensure that it can remain viable into the future as fewer people of working age are available to pay for the pensions of those who have retired.
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The French citizenry is having none of it, however.
The mayhem is in sharp contrast to what happened in Canada 10 years ago when the previous Conservative government announced plans to delay Old Age Security benefits to age 67 from age 65.
There was grumbling, for sure, but I don’t remember anyone throwing Molotov cocktails at police in the streets of Ottawa, Winnipeg or Medicine Hat.
I attended a rally in Saskatoon more than 30 years ago where farmers gathered to demand financial aid from government at the height of agriculture’s income crisis. The event filled the city’s hockey rink and was loud and angry, but no one spilled out into the streets after it was over to burn city hall.
Last year’s protests against COVID-19 health measures, both in Ottawa and at border crossings, were a little out of the ordinary for Canada, but they didn’t erupt into the kind of violence we’re seeing in France.
I recently read about a more typical Canadian protest.
The provincial government in Ontario was in the middle of spending cuts in the mid-1970s when an orchestra held a concert in Toronto.
The conductor dedicated the orchestra’s encore to the province’s minister of culture and recreation and then proceeded to lead his musicians through a performance of Bach’s Air from the Suite in D.
However, the performance ended abruptly before it normally would have, with the conductor explaining that in an effort to follow the provincial government’s funding policies, the orchestra had decided to reduce the piece of music by five percent.
That’s what you would call a Canadian protest.
