Salon.com > Quebec student strike

Quebec student strike claims victory

Fri, 21 Sep 2012 16:12:00 +0000

Thousands of Quebec students and their allies are claiming victory Friday as the newly-elected government immediately scrapped the proposed tuition fee hike, which sparked the longest ever student strike in the region.

Within 24-hours of stepping into power, the Parti Quebecois leader Pauline Marois announced that the fee rise would be cancelled. She also repealed the contentious Loi 78, a draconian anti-protest law passed in mid-May to contain and control the then-nightly mass mobilizations of around 300,000 students and supporters.

Voices from the moderate end of student leadership celebrated Marois' election and the repeal of the fee hike. The Montreal Gazette reports:

“It’s a total victory!” said Martine Desjardins, president of the Fédération étudiante universitaire du Québec, which is the largest student association with about 125,000 students. “It’s a new era of collaboration instead of confrontation.”

Representatives from the more radical, influential student union, CLASSE, were less unmitigated with their praise. In a press release, they note that the fee hike repeal "is not the end of the fight and that student and citizen mobilization should continue." For many individuals and groups involved in the six-month strike, the proposed tuition hike was just a trigger issue to mobilize against neo-liberal education reform and more.

Student anger boils over

Fri, 29 Jun 2012 15:35:00 +0000

As Salon’s Andrew Leonard reported, Senate leaders reached a compromise Tuesday to ensure that government-backed student loan interest rates would not double come July. Owing to this compromise, he noted, “You can scratch student loan debt off the presidential campaign whiteboard.”

And indeed, he’s correct. The White House, Congress and the Romney campaign were all keen to keep the student loan rates capped at 3.4 percent for now (just 34 times higher than the rate at which banks can borrow from the Fed), rather than doubling them to 6.8 percent. But student debt – now a ticked box on 2012 campaign agendas -- looms as a growing focus for political activism and organized dissent around the country. Congress may have managed to strike a deal, but students, activists and allies are starting to talk seriously about a debt strike.

“Emerging out of social movements of the past year or so, we’re starting to realize that the only way to get action on debt is to start to talk about refusal,” Nick Mirzoeff, New York University professor of media, culture and communication and longtime Occupy participant, told Salon.

Dissent, à la Québécoise

Wed, 23 May 2012 22:45:00 +0000

For the past eight months, when chants of "Anti-Capitalista!" have echoed through New York streets, they've tended to emanate from crowds with a penchant for black clothing. But on Tuesday night, when once again a march of around 300 snaked through the streets around Washington Square Park, the color scheme was different: red flags, red banners, red clothes, red masks and little red felt square pins adorned the marchers -- a mixture of long-term Occupy participants, students and others taking the streets and donning some red in solidarity with the Quebec student strike.

Reminiscent of ad hoc Occupy actions last fall, the march in Manhattan blocked streets and confused police attempting erratic, aggressive arrests. It was, however, just a small nod to the action taking place in Montreal. There, up to 500,000 people took to the streets on Tuesday in what's being called the largest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history, marking the 100th day of a powerful student strike.