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Quebec students defy cops, call mass protests

Published May 26, 2012 7:58 AM

Quebec students, who have been striking for three months for lower tuition and demonstrating each of the last 25 nights including May 18, have now targeted Law 78, adopted by the Quebec parliament a day earlier.

The students, who have demanded a repeal of 75 percent tuition hikes, are defying the new law by demonstrating and holding marches in large numbers in Montreal and Quebec City and in smaller numbers in Rimouski, Gatineau and Sherbrooke.

The student movement has issued a call for 100,000 people to come out in Montreal on May 22 to mark the 100th day of the strike.

The cops deem these marches illegal. But students are pressing forward to demand their democratic rights to free speech and association. Law 78 requires groups of 50 or more to give police at least eight hours’ notice of the time, route and duration of marches.

According to television reports, while hundreds gathered in the three small cities, over a thousand protesters gathered in front of the National Assembly, Quebec’s parliament, and marched from there all over old Quebec city and back. The route they followed was not the one they had filed with the cops.

One big argument the Quebec government led by Premier Jean Charest used in pushing for the law on May 17 was an incident in the Université du Québec à Montréal on May 16. Professors under injunction in the law school were teaching classes against their will. A few hundred strikers broke up the classes by shouting, “Scabs, scabs, scabs, get out.”

Some 10,000 people, mainly Francophone youths with some professors and parents, gathered in Montreal’s Emilie Gamelin Square May 18 and streamed north on Rue Berri at 9 p.m., blocking a few streets and quickly abandoning the route that had been filed with the police. Some fleur-de-lys, the national flag of Quebec, were carried, but there were more red velvet flags of the student protest.

The cops claimed that around 10 p.m. someone threw a molotov cocktail (gasoline bomb) at them, so they declared the march illegal. Marchers wound back to Emilie Gamelin around 11 p.m. Skirmishes between cops and protesters continued until 3 a.m.

Background of strike

The student strike and demonstrations started in early March after the so-called Liberal Party government of Premier Jean Charest proposed a budget that would increase the cost of postsecondary education in Quebec by 15 percent a year over 5 years, doubling the current $2,400 to just under $5,000.

Perhaps this is low compared to comparable costs in the U.S., but Quebec’s youth say it should be free, as in France. By the government’s own figures, about a third of the students — 155,000 out of 450,000, mostly from the French-language universities — are still on strike after 12 weeks. In each institution the students meet at a regular general assembly to discuss participation in the strike.

Three major student associations have played an active role in Quebec politics for years. They all support the strike. They are the College Student Federation, led by Léo Bureau-Burin, which represents students in the CEGEPS, the equivalent of community colleges in the U.S.; the University Student Federation, led by Martine Desjardins; the Broad Coalition of the Association for Labor-Student Solidarity (CLASSE), whose main spokesperson is Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois. The media often charge CLASSE with being anarchocommunist.

The general line of the student groups is that Law 78 is “worthy of a police state” and is “a declaration of war against the student movement.” When Nadeau-Dubois of CLASSE called the new law “unjust, arbitrary and especially unconstitutional,” he noted that it prevented him from responding to some questions the way he would like to. Law 78 sets fines up to $35,000 for leaders of organizations who urge violation of the law. (Le Devoir, May 18)

Beside student leaders, all three major Quebec labor confederations — the Legal Bar, the Parti Quebecois and the Federation of Professional Journalists — and leaders of teacher unions, whose members could lose summer vacations and have to do three-months work in one, all denounced this new law.

This long, stubborn struggle against using education to extract more money from working people will have an impact far beyond Quebec.