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Huge march against tuition hikes in Quebec

Published Mar 30, 2012 9:41 PM

Students march in Montreal against tuition hikes.

On March 22, between 200,000 and 300,000 students and their supporters — mainly union members and faculty — marched against the Quebec government’s proposal to raise tuition by $325 a year for the next five years. This would amount to a 75 percent increase over the current tuition, which averages $2,519 a year.

The government has refused to budge on its hike. The minister of finances, Raymond Bachand, declined an offer of mediation by the head of the Université du Québec à Rimouski, saying the government had made its decision more than a year ago and there was nothing to negotiate.

The minister of education, Line Beauchamp, said the hundreds of thousands of students boycotting their classes since February were “perturbing” their lives and called for them to go back to classes. (Radio Canada, March 23) Bachand and Beauchamp are the two ministers of Premier Jean Charest’s government who directly deal with this struggle.

The size of the demonstration was limited by the lack of enough buses in Quebec, which is the largest province in Canada, covering a huge area of the country’s eastern region. Still, between 3 percent and 4 percent of the 8 million people in Quebec marched. Members of both the Haitian and North African communities in Quebec took part.

The day after the march, the head of the Federation of University Students (FEUQ), Martine Desjardins, and the head of the Federation of High School Students (FECQ), Léo Bureau-Blouin, called a press conference to announce that besides demonstrations already called for the last week of March, they intended to “intensify the struggle.”

According to the head of the FECQ: “We must move the mobilization beyond the island of Montreal into Quebec’s regions to put strong pressure on the ruling party’s deputies. Some of them look on our protests on television as if they were happening overseas.”

The head of the FEUQ asked: “Is this government of Charest so used up that it has started denying reality? Quebec universities spend $5.5 billion a year. They should manage their expenses more carefully.” She doesn’t feel that the government “should pick the pockets” of students and their families. (Radio Canada, March 23)

Joël Pedneault, vice-president of external affairs for the Students’ Society of McGill University in Montreal, was one of the organizers of the march. McGill is a well-regarded English language university. Pedneault told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation on March 24, “Ideally, we are striving for tuition fee reductions and, possibly, free education; that has historically been the demand of the Quebec student movement.”

He went on to say, “If the government does not agree to speak with us, then the strike will continue, and after six, seven or eight weeks of student protesting, the universities have to start making arrangements for prolonging the semester, and it becomes a very costly decision.”

Even though the cost of going to university in Quebec after the increases go into effect will still be the lowest in Canada, the students are forming a solid block, adopting red as their color and demanding negotiations.

If the boycott continues for weeks, the tourism industry, which depends on student labor for the summer season, is going to be short of the temporary workers on which it relies.

Quebec, the largest French-speaking province in Canada, moved its economy from relying on the extraction of raw materials to a knowledge-based economy, with strengths in information science, biotechnology and communications, by building a highly skilled, well-educated work force.

Now it wants to shift the cost of this education and training onto the workers who receive it.