When Quebecois students faced an 82% tuition hike last year, they didn’t sit down and accept it. They used their already-organized student unions to mobilize in the hundreds of thousands, drowning the streets of Montreal in a sea of red, their unifying color.

While the media ignored them almost completely, they pressed on. When the government responded with a new anti-protest law, the students mobilized even larger numbers than before. Then, in Quebec’s last election, the students once again mobilized at the voting booth and ousted the government.

Within 24 hours of taking power, the new government repealed both the tuition hikes and the anti-protest law. The student movement has only ramped up the pressure since, by calling for free education.

Idle No More, the social movement for immigrant and indigenous people’s rights, has similarly caught the attention of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, and is actually polling higher than ever in the latest public opinion polls. The movement has since come to the United States, and has joined with immigrant activists in pushing hard for an overhaul of the US immigration system.

The Republicans that have opposed immigration reform in the past haven't really warmed to the idea of a road to citizenship for 11 million aspiring Americans, but they now have recent memory of their drubbing in the November 2012 elections and know that opposing something wanted badly by Latino voters would be electoral suicide.

Most recently, the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut has ignited a wave of support for meaningful regulations on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines from adults and children across the United States. My eight-year-old niece Evelyn even joined a march for gun regulations on Capitol Hill, carrying a homemade sign that read “3RD GRADERS DEMAND ACTION.” Dianne Feinstein’s bill to reinstate the assault weapons ban that George W. Bush repealed in 2004 is now gaining traction with social movement pressure to see it through.

Contrast that with 2009, when the movement to elect Barack Obama and a Democratic supermajority in Congress went home and left the politicians to their own devices. The only social movement pressure came from the Tea Party, who had the funding of the billionaire Koch Brothers and the bully pulpit of Fox News to pressure Congress to enact an agenda of socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor.

Were it not for heat in the streets from the Tea Party, we very likely would have had a public option in the Affordable Care Act and a Wall Street reform bill that included a Volcker Rule, or regulations on the derivatives trading that originally led to financial collapse.

The social movements that are leading the push for immigration reform and gun regulations must ratchet up pressure on Congress and the White House after these latest battles are won to ensure that we also win the battles for climate change legislation and anti-poverty legislation, addressing the two defining issues of our time that affect all global citizens.

Idle No More activists must continue to build on coalitions built with gun regulation activists, organized labor, the antiwar movement, women, environmentalists, and the Occupy movement to be the loudest voices in the streets and the media, day in and day out, until we have meaningful laws on the books that make things right.

Democracy is about much more than just electoral politics—as we learned in 2009, electoral victory is meaningless without our elected officials feeling pressure from the streets. With President’s Day on the horizon, and President Obama’s ambiguity on the Keystone XL pipeline decision, tens of thousands of activists are promising the largest environmental demonstration in history in Washington D.C. on February 17.

Plans are already in the works to mobilize on Tax Day this year for a tax system overhaul that would require millionaires and multinational corporations to pay proportionally as much in taxes as ordinary citizens and small businesses. Will we let the Tea Party be the loudest voice again, or will we get involved and force our government to listen to us?