Quebec has now sat languidly through weeks of students in the streets, riot cops standing guard here-and-there, smoke-bombed metro tunnels and now envelopes showing up full of baking soda (of terror!)

As the simmering frustration of this past winter pushed through to a spring outright revolt, there were those who prosthelytized that such momentum could not sustain itself nightly into the summer. Students are lazy, self-important and easily distracted, the reasoning went.

Maybe that was true for a time. Certainly no column inch has been spared on the importance of Loi 78 in kickstarting Le Printemps Érable, as the movement has styled itself. I won’t bore you with more of that.

What is worth meditating on is the amount of political capital that Jean Charest has put down, and the correlating value of the student’s stock. Betting it all on green, it seems, is the premier’s 11th-hour power play. Students, for their part, appear to be hedging their bets - splitting their chips between red, white and black.

If that metaphor is lost on you, let me explain the colour-scheme that has come to govern Quebecers’ lapels in recent months.

By now, most are familiar with the small felt squares - les carrés rouges - that symbolize solidarity with the students, and opposition to the hikes. An immediate symbolic response was volleyed from more conservative-minded, pro-hike (or, at least, anti-strike) students - the green square. As the crisis dragged on, a coalition of professionals, doctors and parents began sporting white squares - an appeal to sanity, a call to legitimate talks and, if need be, mediation. Black is the most recent square, worn usually alongside red, it has come to signify a mournful attitude towards the alleged death of civil liberties that has come along with the introduction to Loi 78.

There, now you’re all caught up.

Green squares are not oft seen these days. Even the white square group who made headlines with their exasperated plea have faded. Black and red, anecdotally, rule the streets of Montreal. Certainly les banlieus, la campagne, and the capital feel differently.

But while Quebec City has, for the most part, followed along from home until this point, the protests are increasingly taking their plight to l'assemblée nationale, even leading to the arrest of leftist MNA Amir Khadir this week. That, certainly, doesn’t bode well for the rather bizarre I’m-keeping-you-safe narrative propagated by the premier.

Arresting journalists and politicians doesn’t bode well for any narrative, in fact.

Which is why Charest’s gambit is so befuddling. He appeared to extend the proverbial olive branch last week when he met with student groups for the first time of the crisis. He then proceeded to turn around, stick that branch between his legs, wave it around and giggle “je m'en câlice!”

Certainly Charest or Corchesne can’t be blamed entirely for walking away from the table. The students, despite having indicated some willingness to budge, still came short of real or creative compromise. That can certainly be said of the government, too.

Yet the students should be given credit for staying consistently open to talks. They, too, have shown some actual interest in ending the strike. This certainly trumps Charest’s paper-thin rhetoric of maintaining “an open-door policy.”

But both sides are, perhaps, getting rather high on their own supply.

Students have become arguably one of the most powerful forces in Montreal. That power, however, is unwieldy, fickle, and urbanized. While the casserole protests have gone a long way to decentralize and demonstrate a measure of pan-Quebec support for the students, it hasn’t made up for the fact that rural folks simply don’t support the students. Opposition to Loi 78, which is broad, has succeded in giving oxygen to the smoldering protests, but it will not continue to add kindling forever. 

But popular support isn’t necessairly a critical factor for the students. Surely they have never pretended to be anything but a fed-up minority, a few self-appointed Napoleons aside, and as such can do with only a sizeable minority of supportive Quebecers. That is, so long as they can people in the streets. That, really, is their only bargaining chip. Without their fingers wrapped threaneningly on the collective gonads of Montreal’s business community, the students have very little to bring to the table.

Yet Charest’s grasp on these negotiations is even more tenuous. Because he must sleep in the bed of public perception, he’s obliged to balance a heavy-handed response to roaming brigades of traffic-disrupting students to appease the tough-on-crime soft middle that makes him his core constituency, but he must avoid alienating the ambivalently federalist center-left that could flop to the Parti Quebecois if his mismanagement of the crisis becomes any more apparent. But with that political calculation comes the task of firewalling his center-right federalist contingent from the upstart CAQ.

Certainly, a Liberal pollster sits somewhere, measuring his rapidly receding hairline.

The other parties have their work cut out for them. Quebec Solidaire will court students into their brand of European-styled leftism. The PQ will take their sovereigntist base that remains ever-faithful (even under Marois) and try to court some malcontented middle-class families. The CAQ have to bill themselves are firm-handed technocrats who can manage the crisis away without ideological fixation (a lark, for sure.)

In this topsy-turvy, two-degrees-of-latitude world where everyone’s roles are typecast, something’s gotta give.

I’ve been trumpeting the horn of mediation for some time. Someone needs to lock both sides - all the student groups (striking or not,) and all the relevant cabinet ministers, Charest included and the other party leaders - and have a grand ol’ general assembly. A 72-hour marathon session, locked down by a complete gag order and embargo, would have to produce at least one offer. If there are two or more offers, an panel - it’s members decided by the assembly - would have to be struck to bridge the gap and come out with a single plan.

As much fun as I find these protests, and as much as my love of democracy swells when I see otherwise unegaged students taking to the streets - a deal needs to be reached. Festival season in Montreal is fast approaching, and I highly doubt the city is looking to put on a Manif-en-Places-des-Spectacles. The more hardline protesters seem intent on going after the cultural sector that, to a large extent, supports the movement. Les Francofolies, Just for Laughs, Jazzfest, and a handful of others are all threatened by the movement.

But those who think the answer to saving those festivals lie at the end of a police baton are delusional. Transforming the streets from quasi-parades teeming with happy-go-lucky students to battle-scared scenes from the war-torn Belle Province. That’s more damaging than the nightly manifestations.

So where can I rent a room big enough to fit all the interested parties?