Students and teachers protest against tuition hikes and demand free education at all levels
On Tuesday, March 22, hundreds of students gathered around Place du Canada to strike and mark the tenth anniversary of the 2012 Quebec strike against the provincial government and its increase in tuition fees. The demonstration was organized and led by several student associations across Quebec.
While others were marching and blocking the streets of Montreal, dozens of Concordia students set up tents on the second floor of the Hall building to show their support.
Concordia University students camped out in the Hall building in solidarity with the Free Education protest. CATHERINE REYNOLDS/The Concordian
At the march, Ludmila Hérault, a 17-year-old student and spokesperson for Collège de Bois de Boulogne, addressed her speech to the government of Quebec.
“Dear government, aren’t you supposed to encourage a world in which every individual would have the same rights?” Hérault asked. “A world in which education is not about money, or a world in which each person is given the same opportunities in order to build the future they wish?” Hérault added.
According to Gratuité Scolaire, 85,000 students from 50 student associations in Quebec planned to go on strike that Tuesday.
The strike was largest downtown near UQAM, Concordia, and McGill University areas. KAITLYNN RODNEY/The ConcordianStudents moved from downtown to flood St. Laurent St. in the Village. KAITLYNN RODNEY/The Concordian
Among the different students associations across Quebec demanding reduced fees was l’Association étudiante du Cégep de Sherbrooke (AÉCS) who travelled close to two hours to attend the protest.
“We came today [with] two buses from CEGEP Sherbrooke because we think that education is a right and not a privilege,” said Hugo Forget, a member of the AÉCS.
Since 2006, annual tuition for undergraduate students in Quebec has increased by $111 every year. Today, tuition for an undergraduate student reaches $4,310, compared to $2,506 in 2006. The Quebec government recently announced a 5.4 per cent increase in spending on education.
Many demonstrators marched wearing a red square of fabric to symbolize support for the 2012 student strike. The symbol has been used historically to represent students opposed to tuition increases and their supporters.
On March 18, 2011, the Quebec government, led by Jean Charest and the Quebec Liberal Party, announced a budget that hiked university tuition fees in what would amount to a 75 per cent increase from $2,168 to $3,793.
The decision to increase tuition fees sparked the longest student strike in history. From February 13, 2011, to September 7, 2012, student associations went on strike for an indefinite period before Bill 78 was passed, which forced students to go back to class and limited their right to protest.
At the strike on Tuesday, the Fédération nationale des enseigantes et enseignants du Québec (FNEEQ) walked alongside student associations in solidarity. Benoît Lacoursière, a member of the FNEEQ, was one of the many teachers present at the 2012 strike and was back to show his support.
“For us, it is a fundamental value to access education, and solidarity is a fundamental value,” said Lacoursière. “It is important to continue to maintain this current struggle.”
The main message of the recent protest was to give students a voice and hope for their future education. Speakers also called attention to unpaid internships and demanded free education at all levels.
“We are on their side not only in class, but outside in their demands, and then it is their turn to speak,” said Martine Huot, a professor at Cégep du Vieux Montréal.
Following Concordia’s School of Community and Public Affairs Students’ Association (SCPASA) assembly on March 16, many members of the SCPASA joined the free education strike.
“Today is about showing the students are capable of mobilizing and creating momentum for future movements,” said Joshua Sallos, a member of the SCPASA.
At Concordia University, the students who set up tents on the second floor of the Hall building to occupy the space requested to be referred to by their first names to demonstrate a group effort.
“We’ve been a group of non-hierarchical students who are looking to democratize education, to exercise our power and our right as students to demand change and to organize as students to kind of force that change upon institutions, rather than just as individuals trying to approach an institution with issues,” said Luna, a participant.
Though the occupation was a joint effort among students, a source clarified both Arts and Science Federation of Associations (ASFA) and Concordia Student Union (CSU) helped fund and provide food for the protest.
The group camped for three days and held general assemblies every night at 7 p.m. to discuss their demands about free education.
“We were trying to keep it under wraps. […] It was mostly affinity-based,” said Errico, one of the group’s security liaisons.
On Tuesday night, students shared their demands, writing them on a whiteboard. A few requests included free education, commitment to divest, more voices in student government, disability justice, non-corporate education, better engagement from faculty, and more.
CATHERINE REYNOLDS/The ConcordianA list of demands was written by the protesters to put on display. CATHERINE REYNOLDS/The Concordian
On Wednesday morning, Andrew Woodall, dean of students, was on-site to speak to the occupiers.
“My role is to develop relationships with the students, understand what they are doing and make sure that they have someone to whom they can reach out if there are any problems or concerns about logistics or anything else,” said Woodall.
The occupation ended on Friday following a teach-in rally where Indigenous leaders and activists spoke about the climate crisis at the Sir George-Étienne Cartier Monument in Mount Royal Park.
KAITLYNN RODNEY/The ConcordianKAITLYNN RODNEY/The ConcordianKAITLYNN RODNEY/The ConcordianKAITLYNN RODNEY/The ConcordianKAITLYNN RODNEY/The ConcordianKAITLYNN RODNEY/The ConcordianKAITLYNN RODNEY/The ConcordianKAITLYNN RODNEY/The ConcordianKAITLYNN RODNEY/The ConcordianThe sit-in lasted 3 days and ended on Friday, March 25. CATHERINE REYNOLDS/The Concordian
Concordia's EV building on the downtown campus. CAROLINE FABRE
Strike planned on the anniversary of the Maple Spring student strikes which prevented tuition hikes in Quebec in 2012
At a special assembly on Wednesday, March 16, Concordia University’s School of Community and Public Affairs Students’ Association (SCPASA) voted to strike. The demonstration will take place on March 22 – the ten year anniversary of the Maple Spring student strikes, one of the largest student walkouts in history, which saw thousands of students protest tuition hikes.
Today the SCPASA is striking for many of the same causes which students walked out for in 2012. Their primary concern is ongoing tuition hikes, although specific numbers regarding hikes were not shared in the motion.
“We continue the concerns about the ongoing privatization of education and the increasing tuition,” said Ellie Hamilton, a co-chair of the SCPASA Strike Readiness Committee and third year student at the School of Community and Public Affairs. The SCPASA is also striking for reasons that students in 2012 could never have seen coming – a lack of what they believe to be adequate health and safety measures provided by Concordia to combat the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The Concordia Student Union (CSU) published an open letter in February requesting the university implement a number of additional health and safety measures to accompany the return to campus, however Concordia has yet to comply with many of these requests such as providing K95 and KN95 masks to students.
“COVID exposed weaknesses. It didn’t create them, and they don’t go away just because we’re pretending the pandemic is over. So primarily tuition, secondarily health and safety and accessibility on campus.”
According to the SCPASA, 30 per cent of students at Concordia’s School of Community and Public Affairs voted in favor of the student association at the special general assembly where the strike was voted on. The School of Community and Public Affairs is an interdisciplinary program which integrates public policy, advocacy, and community development.
“For our first vote we had 76 per cent in favor, which is a very strong start. And again, we’re emphasizing over and over this is the first step, not the last.” said Hamilton.
The SCPASA will be planning other strikes in the near future with one set to take place on March 25, in order to line up with a future climate strike.
On March 22, the SCPASA will send representatives to the Large Protest for Free Education, an event organized by many Quebec student associations including the CSU, which will take place at Place Du Canada. Those involved will also be walking out of classes and engaging in friendly picketing on campus.
“In the short term, we want students to get experience with these types of mobilizations and we also want them to see that this is part of a bigger moment,” said Hamilton who explained that one of the main goals of this strike is “To help people place themselves within history. Understanding that this is the first step that builds us towards that point we saw with Maple Spring, where students were actually at the negotiating table directly with the government and not trying to do it by proxy through the provincial legislature.”
To Hamilton, organization, mobilization, and strikes like these are important because they have yielded very real and tangible results in the past, as was the case with the Maple Spring.
“This is what democracy looks like at its strongest; it’s when the people are able to get to the negotiating table and have a much more active voice informing policy than just casting a ballot through party machinery that they’ve never touched in their life,” said Hamilton.
Furthermore, to Hamilton fostering this democratic involvement is an essential role of education, which is hindered when universities become further privatized by increasing tuition costs.
“It’s important to protect education, because this is a necessary component to democracy,” said Hamilton.
“We want people to get good work from their university degrees. But if that’s all a university education is to people, we’re losing sight of that second piece that we need to be democratically engaged citizens.”
At a time where the world needs them the most, reporters face strong impediments to their job
Over a month ago, The Concordian published an article covering pro-Armenia student protesters who called on Montreal city mayor, Valérie Plante, to support Armenians in the ongoing Nagorno-Karabakh territorial dispute. It’s the kind of beat story that’s perfect for young reporters who want to get their feet wet in news coverage: a conflict being covered worldwide, with a local connection to grassroots support among fellow students.
Unfortunately, this reporting attracted the wrong sort of attention, prompting a stern letter from the Montreal Consul General of Turkey, sent not to The Concordian, but Concordia University. Key to their concerns was the inclusion of two photos, each featuring a woman holding a sign stating “Turkey = Terrorist,” no doubt a response by the protester to the cluster bombing in the region, often aided by Canadian drone technology.
Politicos in office or at the dinner table have long opined how journalists are vital to a democracy and the need to protect them and their work. After all, public discourse from news coverage is often the only way we educate ourselves once we leave school. Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel’s book, The Elements of Journalism, found in almost every journalist’s bookshelf, describes this urgency as news reporting’s chief commitment, “to provide citizens with the information they need to be free and self-governing.”
But that goal is challenging and getting harder. Reporters are working with less time, less money, and fewer resources than those who would seek to influence their coverage. Young, freelance and student journalists are especially vulnerable, as they have nowhere near the same security as employed reporters. And even those privileged few still face trials, as diminishing advertising revenue has seen their budgets evaporate. Adding to the issue, journalists have a long history of dealing with intimidation, and you can see why it’s becoming tougher to inform people of what’s going on.
It was only a few years ago when I was an undergrad, and the Maple Spring was raging. Red squares adorned almost every student coat, and pots and pans protests took place every night. While the demonstrations garnered international attention, eventually leading to the fall of that administration’s time in government, student journalists’ treatment was less covered. Being kettled, heavily fined for photographing and documenting, or straight assault were standard plays inflicted on young reporters by the Montreal police department, that saw anyone under 30 as a threat. As a student journalist struggling to pay your rent and tuition, how do you have the time to fight huge fines, fees, and court dates, on top of all the regular challenges life flings in your direction?
This past summer, a few reporters over at The Link were intimidated by police following a Black Lives Matter protest. Non-lethal guns were drawn on them and medics who were also present, as they pleaded with officers while kneeling on the ground at Place des Arts.
And when we aren’t scared of power-tripping cops, journalists can be threatened by the public. In 2018, far-right activists (read: fascists) stormed Vice Montreal’s offices after they published on the rise of attacks perpetrated against anti-fascist protestors. And this year, a TVA reporter was assaulted by two anti-maskers, who bear-hugged her while she covered their protest live on television. And let’s not even open the can of worms that is reporter harassment on social media.
Was the Turkish Consul’s response intimidation? Probably not directly. But it’s telling that a student newspaper in Montreal, thousands of kilometres from the conflict, caused such concern that they not only wrote a letter but sent it to the school where these same reporters were learning their craft. The editorial staff’s emails are publicly available on The Concordian’s website, so it’s unlikely this was an oversight.
Student, freelance, or full-time, a journalist commits to journalism. I say commits because we are committed to accuracy, fairness, and representative work and because we commit to this vocation. We pledge to this despite being routinely demonized, so much so that our safety isn’t a priority.
But let’s remember — without good journalists, you have nothing but marketers and merchants influencing you to buy and believe what is on their agenda this minute. We need better protection, but it can’t only be through legislation. It has to come from you. So the next time you see a journalist intimidated, please speak up. Whether it’s at your dinner table, in your Zoom call, or on social media, defend those who defend your right to know. Because without us, you won’t be ready when the intimidators come for you next.
Thousands of students flood downtown Montreal. Photo by Navneet Pall.
Protests plagued by months of police brutality, mass arrests succeed in ending tuition hikes
On March 22, 2012, roughly 200,000 students poured onto the streets of downtown Montreal in what was one of the most iconic moments of the 2012 Maple Spring movement against provincial tuition hikes. In support, students pinned red squares of fabric to their clothes to denounce austerity measures imposed by the government.
One month prior, 36,000 students had voted to go on strike.
This large-scale mobilization was in response to former Quebec Premier Jean Charest announcing gradual tuition hikes in March 2011.
The Charest Liberal government proposed a province-wide tuition increase of $1,625 for university students, intended to be put into effect over a five-year period. Based on this plan, annual tuition fees would increase by $325 every year, rising from $2,168 to $3,793 by 2017.
Various occupations and mobilizations continued during that spring and throughout the summer, leading up to a protest on November 8, 2011, when 30,000 people took to the streets of Montreal to oppose these hikes—this culminated with a sit-in held at the administration building of McGill University.
The municipal government introduced P6—a bylaw which banned certain components of public protests. Photo by Navneet Pall.
While the protest in March 2012, which marked the peak of the movement, saw no arrests, in the months that followed, thousands of protesters were detained, along with bystanders and journalists caught up in kettling, a crowd-control tactic that corrals groups of people into a confined space.
As the summer of 2012 approached and the strike persisted, the municipal government of Montreal sought to curtail demonstrations by passing laws such as P6—a bylaw which banned protests not authorized by the city’s police and prohibited participants from wearing masks. This resulted in mass arrests—students endured police brutality, hefty fines and even harsh weather as the protests persevered into the winter months of early 2013.
Photo by Navneet Pall.
The Parti Québécois (PQ) was elected into office on September 4, 2012—the planned tuition hike was revoked one day after they took power. However, by December, the new government had laid out plans to slash the provincial budget. Among other affected institutions, Concordia University announced it was facing $13.2-million in cuts—cuts which caused the university to declare a deficit.
In February 2013, the PQ announced a three per cent tuition fee increase, amounting to $70 annually. This would increase tuition by $254 per year over a seven-year period, according to Maclean’s, which would be slightly less than the $325 hike proposed by the Liberal government. This was an act students condemned, and it led to renewed demonstrations, resulting in mass arrests during the following weeks.
After a long period of dwindling mobilization, a resurgence nicknamed Printemps 2015 restarted not just for students, but for all who were discouraged by the Quebec government’s budget cuts and the direction the province was headed.
Now, five years later, those who were involved in the Maple Spring movement reflect on the movement’s success, the evolution of the anti-austerity mobilization and the future of access to education for students in Quebec.
Many of Concordia’s current students were in their first year of university when the strike began. One student among them is Lucinda Marshall-Kiparissis, the general coordinator of the Concordia Student Union (CSU).
“I joined the PSSA [Political Science Students’ Association] strike mob committee to help out with organizing, with picketing,” Marshall-Kiparissis said. The committee was tasked with organizing pickets and other events related to the strike. “At that point, I wasn’t in a lot of organizing work because I was still getting my feet wet.” Nonetheless, she described herself as a very enthusiastic participant.
Marshall-Kiparissis said mobilization in the form of strikes and large-scale protests was more common among francophone universities at the time. “So for Concordia to go on strike, this was one of the first major times that an Anglophone student community joined that greater movement,” Marshall-Kiparissis said.
36,000 students vote to go on strike in February 2012. Photo by Navneet Pall.
Alex Tyrrell, the leader of the Green Party of Quebec, attended various student protests at the time. He said he would often record the protests and upload those videos to Youtube to document the movement, particularly focusing on police brutality and other incidents.
While filming, Tyrrell was stopped by law enforcement officials.
Protesters dress don the red square, a symbol which represents the opposition of tuition hikes. Photo by Navneet Pall
“I got arrested one time for P6 on May 22, 2012,” Tyrrell said. “That was immediately after they passed the special law.” The Montreal P6 bylaw had been imposed by then-Mayor of Montreal Gérald Tremblay in 2012 to counter student protesting.
“You had to provide your itinerary before protesting, otherwise it would end in mass arrests,” Tyrrell said.
On the day of Tyrrell’s arrest, each detainee was subjected to an invasive search, one by one, and then put on a bus and were read their rights. Tyrrell said he and the bus loads of detained protesters were taken to the Centre Opérationnel Est in Saint-Léonard to be processed. He was released at 5 a.m. the next morning.
Throughout the protests, participants faced police brutality and mass arrests. Photo by Navneet Pall.
He described the mass arrests and the laws causing components of student protests to be illegal, as a form of oppression administered by the Liberal government. “Being arrested is frowned upon—a lot of people think it’s a very negative thing,” Tyrrell said. “I’ve only actually recently started talking about it publicly because now it’s actually been proven unconstitutional.” He said before the arrests were deemed unconstitutional, people would warn him that a criminal record could affect his political career. P6 was ruled illegitimate in June 2016 by the Quebec Superior Court Justice Chantal Masse, as two crucial points of the bylaw were unconstitutional, including Article 2.1, which made it illegal to hold a protest without an itinerary registered with police beforehand. Additionally, Article 3.2 was marked wrongful as it prevented the wearing of masks during a protest.
Tyrrell said after acquiring leadership of the Green Party of Quebec, he found himself in situations where could debate with Geoffrey Kelley, a former minister of the Liberal government, about a generation wanting to protest being met with police brutality and mass arrests.
Over the course of the protests, Tyrrell said he lost confidence in the integrity of the police force. During April 2012, protesting peacefully increasingly put the physical safety of participants at risk. He said it was often other protesters who would intervene when some participants began vandalizing. “The protest would try to police itself,” Tyrrell said.
He said he realized the police were not interested in arresting specific unruly protesters or preventing individual acts of vandalism. “They were more interested in using the fact that the window was broken to declare the entire protest illegal, and start taking out the rubber bullets and pepper spray,” Tyrrell said. “That, I think, for a lot of people, called into question the legitimacy of the police force.”
Former Quebec Education Minister Line Beauchamp mocked in protest photo. Photo by Sophia Loffreda.
Over the course of the protests, SPVM law enforcement officials requested more than $7.3 million in overtime income for work between February and June 2012, according to the McGill Daily. For May and June alone, SPVM police officers were paid $5.6 million for overtime.
La fraternité des policiers et policières de Montréal—the union representing SPVM police officers—estimated that special intervention units were paid between $2.5 to $3 million during the strike, as they were required to assist more than 150 times during an 11-week period, according to the McGill Daily.
Tyrrell recounted an instance of police brutality faced by a friend of his during one protest. He described his friend fleeing riot police officers, but, as they chased him, Tyrrell’s friend stopped to turn himself in. Despite his compliance, police pushed the young man from behind and threw him to the ground, causing him to fracture his wrist. “Then they put him in handcuffs with a broken wrist and they cut the straps of his backpack off,” Tyrrell said.
Matthew Palynchuk, now a masters student, was a first-year undergraduate philosophy student at Concordia at the time of the protests. He was one of 26 students who were set to face tribunals at the university for actions during strikes in the 2011-2012 academic year. These students were being charged for conduct prohibited under section 29G of the university’s Code of Rights and Responsibilities, which deals with the “obstruction or disruption of teaching, research, administration, study, student disciplinary procedures or other university activity.”
Palynchuk said the evidence to be used against him at the trial consisted of security tapes which didn’t contain any recognizable footage of him.
On September 18, 2012, the day before Palynchuk’s tribunal, newly-appointed Concordia President Alan Shepard withdrew all charges administered by the university, as a fresh start between administration and students.
The Association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante (ASSÉ), a Canadian student union prominent within the anti-austerity movement, obtained a large number of members over the course of the protests. “ASSÉ went from about 40,000 members before the strike [to] 75,000 after,” said Marion Miller, a member of ASSÉ’s training committee.
After 2012, ASSÉ dropped in male* involvement and membership. According to Miller, ASSÉ had trouble making quorum last congress—in other words, reaching a minimum number of members needed to validate the proceedings of that meeting, which took place between February 25 and 26. “It’s a quiet period,” Miller said.
Photo by Sophia Loffreda.
In response to rumours made towards ASSÉ disbanding, Miller said she understands the assumption, as ASSÉ has not been as externally active in recent years. However, she denied the claim. “If [ASSÉ] were to be at the end of an era, they could rebuild,” said Miller. However, she said ASSÉ is not at the end of era.
“The strike was against tuition hikes, but the long-term goal was free education and redistribution of wealth,” Tyrrell said.
“It’s just a question of priorities. The government has more than enough money to pay for people’s tuition, but they choose not to,” Tyrrell said. “They choose instead to give tax breaks to national corporations, the one per cent—that’s a choice.”
“Neoliberals want students to graduate in debt,” said Tyrrell. He said this is because somebody who graduates university debt-free is not necessarily going to go work for a corporation immediately. “That’s the freedom that’s associated with free education.”
Tyrrell said a way the Quebec government could provide free education is by not only removing tax breaks to private corporations, but by generating revenues from a number of sources. Some suggestions include a carbon tax and mining royalties—this is the model proposed by the Green Party of Quebec.
Tyrrell said he believes the government is being infiltrated by private interest. “Who is the government working for?” he asked. “They defend private interest rather than the well-being and best interest of the general population.”
“The 75 per cent hike was supposed to come into force over five years—the entire hike would be in place by now,” Marshall-Kiparissis said. “Instead of having the 75 per cent, we’ve had about 15 per cent hike over that period of time. That’s the legacy of the student movement.”
*This article has been updated for accuracy and clarity. The Concordian regrets the error.
