Macron faces spreading student protests, rail strikes
POOL/AFP / Vincent KESSLERSurrounded by bodyguards, French President Emmanuel Macron argues with demonstrators opposed to his reforms as he visited the "coeur de ville" area of Saint-Die-des-Vosges, eastern France, on April 18, 2018 as part of a three-day-visit to the region
President Emmanuel Macron faced booing from hostile railway workers Wednesday while touring a town in eastern France, as spreading student protests and the fourth round of crippling train strikes in a month piled on the pressure.
The 40-year-old leader is facing the biggest test of his nearly 12-month presidency as train drivers, public sector workers and students protest against his economic reforms.
On a visit to the town of Saint-Die-des-Vosges, Macron was booed and whistled by angry trade unionists from the hard-left CGT which is spearheading attempts to resist the centrist's pro-business agenda.
"We can have differences, but we need to respect each other," Macron said while calling on staff of the SNCF rail operator to end their rolling strikes, which began at the start of the month and could continue until late June.
Only one in three high-speed TGVs and one in four inter-city trains were running Wednesday, with the same number expected on Thursday when a new round of mass demonstrations and stoppages have been called nationwide.
Civil servants, workers in state retirement homes and students have been urged to demonstrate for the second time in a month after previous protests drew hundreds of thousands onto the streets.
Unlike last time, the Paris metro faces disruption, while a union leader in the energy sector warned of "targeted" power cuts as part of a campaign to push for the creation of a new national energy provider.
On Tuesday, students occupied the prestigious Sciences Po university in Paris, the latest campus blocked by protesters over higher education reforms that will make university admission more selective.
AFP/File / GERARD JULIENSNCF said the fourth instalment of the rail strikes would heavily disrupt services on Wednesday and Thursday, with just one in three high-speed TGVs running
"Sciences Po students against Macron's dictatorship," read a banner hung from a window of the university, which has groomed generations of French politicians including Macron himself.
- Standing firm -
Macron has insisted he will not back down on his bid to shake up the big-spending public sector.
He defended other unpopular measures Wednesday such as increasing taxes on pensioners and cutting the speed limit on major roads to 80 kilometres an hour (50 miles an hour) in a bid to reduce deadly accidents.
"They are in the street because they don't want anything to change," Macron told a passerby. "If I give ground on the 80 km/h, if I give way to protesting rail workers... that's the end of it.
"We won't be able to hold on, we won't be able to do anything."
A new poll by Ifop-Fiducial suggested 58 percent of French people were unhappy with his presidency, broadly in line with surveys showing his approval rating at around 40 percent.
Ahead of a trip to Germany Thursday for talks with Chancellor Angela Merkel, Macron is also facing resistance to his proposals to reform the European Union, where Berlin has cooled on some of his plans.
- Rail bill passed -
There are, however, some reasons for Macron to feel optimistic.
Wednesday's train strikes were less disruptive than on previous days and the SNCF rail operator said a sharply-reduced 19.8 percent of staff were taking part, down from 34 percent at the start of April.
On Tuesday, the lower house of parliament voted overwhelmingly in favour of the new rail reform bill, which will scrap jobs-for-life and early retirement guarantees for new SNCF hires from January 1, 2020.
The bill sailed through with 454 votes for and 80 against, as expected given that Macron's Republic on the Move party has a large majority.
The bill now moves to the Senate and the government hopes it can be passed quickly to take the wind out of the protesters' sails.
"Democracy is calling on the unions to find a solution that moves things forward, not backwards," Labour Minister Muriel Penicaud told France 2 television.
At the University of Strasbourg in eastern France, a poll of 16,000 students found 72 percent wanted teaching to resume, bolstering the government's view that a minority of agitators are behind the sit-ins.
Only four out of 70 universities are completely blocked and nine other university faculties have suffered disruption.
The various protests are still a far cry from the mass public sector strikes that forced a rightwing government to withdraw pension reforms in 1995, or May 1968 when a revolt by students and workers turned Paris into a battleground.
Quebec wary of bitcoin gold rush
AFP / Lars HagbergA technician inspects the backside of bitcoin mining at Bitfarms in Saint Hyacinthe, Quebec
At the site of a former cocoa factory in Canada's Quebec province, tiny holes punctured in the walls of a warehouse allow fresh air to cool thousands of whirring processors connected by a tangle of wires.
Yessoulou Coulibaly watches over the sea of 7,000-odd computers hidden away in this industrial park at a center operated by Bitfarms, one of the emerging players of the cryptocurrency "mining" boom.
Unlike the dollar or the euro, cryptocurrencies are not issued by central banks. Instead they are "mined" or created thanks to server "farms" like the one in the Montreal suburb of Saint-Hyacinthe -- which crack increasingly complex computer codes in order to unlock new batches, or blocks of virtual coins.
Mining on a large scale requires massive computing power, which in turn requires a lot of electric power.
That is where Quebec comes in the picture: luring miners with its plentiful, cheap electricity and below average temperatures -- akin to Iceland, where a sister cryptocurrency blitz is also underway.
Coulibaly is among a wave of entrepreneurs flooding the province, in a bid to transform it into a Silicon Valley for the emerging sector.
But some authorities are leery, fearing a surge of demand for electric power could trigger blackouts, for the benefit of an industry that few fully understand.
In March, a number of Quebec municipalities slapped moratoriums on new cryptocurrency factories while the province's government and the Hydro-Quebec public utility have halted new projects to get a better grasp of the technology and its broader economic impact.
The first to put on the brakes was the tiny municipality of Bromont, east of Montreal, where a new bitcoin operation was seeking to consume 30 of the town's 36 megawatts of total available excess power.
Soon after, the neighboring township of Brome-Missisquoi imposed a similar ban on new bitcoin mines.
"Most of the business requests that we had in our region to open computer warehouses to mine cryptocurrencies would result in very little job creation," said the town administrator, Robert Desmarais.
AFP / Lars HagbergTwo technicians look at bitcoin mining at Bitfarms in Saint Hyacinthe, Quebec
Marc-Antoine Pouliot, a Hydro-Quebec spokesman, added: "We can't predict the future for this industry."
Authorities, he explained, "want to see first how projects can be established in Quebec in a sustainable manner," without ruling out a hike in electricity rates.
According to Pouliot, the dash began in September after China moved to regulate cryptocurrency trading.
Quebec has received proposals for projects that would use more than 9,000 megawatts combined, out of Hydro-Quebec's total 40,000-megawatt capacity -- equal to the power consumed by 83 percent of Quebec households.
Most of the interest in relocating to the province has so far come from China, according to Pouliot. Russian investors have also shown interest, say organizers of the first international blockchain summit to be held in Montreal in April.
In Quebec, "electricity is affordable, abundant and green," Pouliot said, noting massive hydroelectric dams in the north generate most of the power. The cool weather also means factories require less air conditioning.
Add those factors to bitcoin's soaring valuation -- which peaked at $20,000 in December, before falling to less than half that -- and Canada has itself a modern-day gold mine, even as some critics warn the virtual currency boom could amount to a bubble, or even a Ponzi scheme.
- Blockchain 'revolution' -
Bitfarms president Pierre-Luc Quimper said his startup already employs 90 people.
"It's like a traditional mining company that digs up gold and sells it, but 2.0," he said of his company, which channels computing power to mine bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies.
The internet entrepreneur made his fortune starting a web hosting and cloud services business at age 14.
AFP / Lars HagbergBitcoin is the first decentralized digital currency, as the system works based on the blockchain technology without a central bank or single administrator
Now in his 40s, he says blockchain -- the name given to the shared public database where all bitcoin transactions are recorded -- is "a new technology that can be compared to the internet" in terms of "revolutionary" potential.
Quimper started Bitfarms last year after first mining bitcoin at home and is confident in his investment.
"I did not miss the boat for the internet; I do not want to miss the boat for blockchain," said the entrepreneur, who is convinced the technology will have applications for other industries including banking, aviation and transport.
Today, the Quebec company claims to be the North American leader in cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology, and is listed on the New York and Tel Aviv stock exchanges.
In its first two months of operation in November and December, Bitfarms earned $4.9 million selling virtual currency coined at the Saint-Hyacinthe and three other mines in Quebec.
The company already uses 27.5 megawatts to power 19,000 computers, and is aiming to boost its usage to 100 megawatts by the end of this year.
"If electricity prices spike, however, we will look elsewhere," said Quimper, pointing to the abundant power sources also available in the Canadian provinces of Newfoundland and Manitoba.
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