Having watched most of the Québec student protests from Ontario, I’ve obviously spent hours thinking about the differences between the Québec student movement and the Ontario student movement. And I've come up with a few theories that I hope to write into something … someday.

Luckily, others have similar questions as I do. Doug Nesbitt, PhD student at Queen’s and the local PSAC president, has done some thinking on this. Here is what he's posted at his blog on the subject. Nothing I write next will be as good as his analysis…

Scuttlebutt amongst the chattering classes here in Quebec is that Premier Jean Charest will call a provincial election for September 4th, the Tuesday following Labour Day. That would see him pulling the plug on his third consecutive mandate on August 1st, and hitting the hustings for a rare summer election.

His window of opportunity is about as narrow as that, since the following Monday would leave advance polls (upon which the Liberals rely) to take place over the Labour Day long weekend, when many are away. The Monday after that is Rosh Hashanah, and any date past there would coincide with the resumption of the Charbonneau Commission, and televised tales of Liberal corruption.

I wrote earlier in the week about the Quebec-Ontario Student Solidarity Tour, which will see representatives of CLASSE, Quebec's largest student federation, and other grassroots activists touring ten cities in nine days across the province.

Well tonight that tour kicks off with a bang in Ottawa, a city which has seen large solidarity demonstrations with the Quebec student movement all summer long.