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In 2010 the government announced that they were going to raise tuition fees.
They didn’t announce by how much and that came in the 2011 budget.
At that point we were already mobilized.
We already went through a series of demonstrations, a series of one day strikes, leading up to what we see now, the unlimited general strike of Quebec students.
We sent a final warning to the government by marching on November 10th 2011 through the streets, we were about 15 000,
and a few months later, we realized that we exhausted every other mean for the government to cancel that planned tuition hike
and we went on an unlimited general strike which is how Quebec students traditionally have fought these reforms to their education system.
The unlimited General Strike started I’d say in early February with strike votes around the province first, on very mobilized campuses,
Université du Québec à Montréal for instance, and then slowly getting to very many campuses,
and that all culminated in a huge protest on 22nd of March that regrouped about 200,000 people,
which makes it one of the biggest demonstrations in the history of Canada even.
And then on, the government made a series of offers that weren’t deemed enough for students to end the strike, and as you perhaps know,
strikes are voted on a local level, at the union level, and they’re very democratic.
So the students at every association decide whether to renew or not the strike, and so far they have chosen to renew it up into now,
and this makes it the longest General Strike in the history of Quebec.
14 weeks and the government still hasn’t touched on the issue of tuition fees.
Everybody is very clear on why they are on strike.
They reject completely the tuition increase that Charest is imposing on people, and there is a complete rejection of that.
So that’s the basis of agreement of everyone, is going out and protesting and striking.
But then added to that there’s a lot of other demands.
One of them is the notion of free education and accessible and public education.
And also, looking at the privatization process of our universities from a very critical point of view, that this privatization process doesn’t serve the interests of the people,
the interest of the communities, and of the citizens.
So in that sense, there’s a wide consensus. It started with a pretty big consensus, I would say,
at first on the university spaces where professors, or students, or even support staff at universities, there’s a general consensus that this hike can’t go through.
Everybody I speak to in protests agrees with that obviously, that’s why they’re there.
But what has changed and shifted is that since the government has been so belligerent and so unwilling to hear that call, you know, that the people are making,
it’s extended beyond that now.
Because often not everybody is affected by the tuition hike.
Like Nadia was saying, it’s certain people that are more affected than others.
Like women, they earn 70 cents to a dollar compared to men, so they are more affected by a flat fee, things like that.
Same thing with racialized people, so, like people of colour,
same thing for people who have disability for example, or obviously lower class people.
Well I think we have the chance in Quebec to have lower tuition fees than elsewhere and it’s not a gift that our government’s give us.
We have lower tuition fees because we fought in the past to keep them low, we fought in the past to have a public education system,
to have an accessible education system, and what we are doing as a generation this year is on the continuation of what has been done in the past
by our parents, by our grandparents, to keep education accessible.
I think we should be proud to have the education system that we have, and we should fight to keep it.
We should not be ashamed and say oh, in the other provinces or the other countries did the mistake to reduce accessibility to education,
we should imitate them and do the same mistake.
I think we should be proud to be a model and we should instigate the other countries and provinces to learn from us instead of doing the same mistakes.
We need to see free education in the context of when the public system of education was created.
In 1968, the goal was to go toward free education.
The only thing is that at that moment the government said that we’re doing so many reforms,
there is so many things to do, so we’ll start with the low fees,
and we’ll not increase them, we’ll freeze them forever, and actually decrease them until we get to free education.
It was the spirit of the Raport Parent. But with the government changing, and also the international situation changing,
more and more right-wing positions were taken and we lost the model of free education in Quebec.
And so fees weren’t freezed, and now we have this theory that we need to get the fees from 1968,
but we cannot as a student movement only react to each time there is an increase, you know.
The only result of that will be that we never achieve the goal, and the first goal was to have free education
so we keep in mind this purpose to put together this system of education we have now.
And so we’re putting back on the table; we did not forget basically.
If we really believe that education is a right than we should demand free education, education that is available to all.
This makes financial sense; this makes political sense; it makes social sense.
And this issue has mobilized very many people. We have very strong social institutions in Quebec, and people want to protect them.
Education is one of those, and historically the student movement has always reacted very strongly to attacks to education and has demanded, in return, free education.
This demand isn’t coming out of nowhere. It’s a historical demand of the student movement.
It’s been a historical demand since the 1960’s, since the 1970’s, when the PQ (Parti Québecois) promised free education.
It’s a theme that comes back every few years, and I think it’s definitely what we should yearn for as a society.
And free education of course is one of many demands that touches upon social services.
They should all be free and accessible, and that represents the very minimum of a social democratic society.
Eventually, of course, we’d like to go further, but free education is a very good beginning.
[Protestors chanting slogan] "Shout louder, so no one can ignore us!"
In Quebec with general assemblies, students vote through general assemblies,
historically and during the strike to go on strike, and it’s viewed as being a collective decision,
not just an individual decision that those students who vote are on strike, but that all the students are on strike.
And what’s been different this time is that the government has hammered away, and it’s been picked up in the media, that this is a "boycott",
that it’s only individual students who are deciding whether or not to go to class, and everyone else, if they’re not actually on boycott, then they should be allowed.
But then that’s where the conflicts come from, is that, it’s hammering away at this idea that it’s a collective decision
and then they start calling it that it’s a right to education, that no one should be blocked from going to class.
The schools, where there have been blockades of classes and of the schools are places where students have voted a majority to go on strike.
There are no schools right now that where student associations have voted to not strike, that people are setting up blockades and blocking them from going to school.
It’s only at the schools and in the associations where students have voted to go on strike that they’ve been forced by the government,
kind of attacking and trying to minimize this idea of a collective decision and the media kind of picking that back up.
So in 2005, there were hard pickets but it wasn’t to the same degree because it was still accepted, but this time around,
they’ve decided to take another tactic of really trying to make it seem like it’s pitting students one against the other.
The way we have been able to organize such a combative and well organized movement in Quebec is through a very grassroots syndicalism.
It’s like, organizing general assemblies at the departmental level or the junior college level, and that takes a lot of organizational work.
The current strike was at least two years in the making if not decades,
through the kind off organizational work that went into building up student unions
that were autonomous, and had regular assemblies, that operate through direct democracy, and who federate in a direct democratic way with each other.
All that takes a lot of ground work but it pays off. I don’t know, I feel like there’s no magical solution but organizing very much at the grassroots
and with the people who are directly affected by certain policies or, could be tuition increases.
Like, it’s a model that’s worked here and it doesn’t have to work in Quebec but not in Ontario for example.
Like it, it can work anywhere.
[Protestors chanting slogan] "Whose streets? Our streets!"
Bill 78, not only, effectively outlaws demonstrations by making it necessary for an organizer to register the demonstration with police 8 hours in advance.
It makes all demonstrations that aren’t, that do not comply to this new law, illegal by default.
So that means, every single participant that has called for other people to join the demonstration can be punished by law to approximately 1,000 to 7,000 dollars in fines.
And this is even more dangerous for student organizers.
In unions, those who are elected, they face fines of up to 35,000 dollars, for calling on twitter for people to join demonstrations that could be illegal.
And for national organizations to do this, then the fine can go up to 125,000 dollars, and this is very dangerous.
National organizations, student unions, do not have that much money, and it’s just incredibly ridiculous how this law,
first of all circumvents the constitution of Canada which allows everyone the right to demonstrate,
and second of all is a clear attempt at outlawing all kind of political dissent in Quebec and this is a very dangerous precedent.
[Protestors chanting slogan] "We are more than 50!"
It’s touching the right of demonstration, association, and free speech. Now we need to look at what we say.
I was really afraid when I saw that in the National Assembly some MP’s asked minister Courchesne, the minister of education of the Liberals,
what would happen if someone was wearing a red square, you know, and supporting the student movement?
Is it encouraging illegal demonstrations? And their answer was not, "no that’s okay to wear such a symbol", it was "the police will judge".
Does that mean that wearing a red square can also be a criminal act?
For strikes around Quebec on local campuses, to enforce them, you have to form a picket line.
These picket lines are effectively outlawed from now on. Even if you ask the police to police them, they’re outlawed.
Any demonstration in a parameter of 50 meters around a school is outlawed and punishable by these ridiculous fines.
And if a student union calls for these picket lines, then they lose their entire funding for a semester.
That’s for calling for one day of picket lines. If they call for three days of picket lines they lose three semesters funding.
That effectively means the end of campus politics, of campus life, in Quebec.
It’s ridiculous, and the reaction we have seen from the Quebec population is one of anger everywhere.
Union leaders, student union leaders have called for have called for people to ignore the law, called for civil disobedience,
and the general population is getting very angry, and this could lead to further social movements, and further anger, maybe leading up to a general strike of all society.
[Protestors chanting slogan] "The special law - we don't give a f**k!"
It's the last chance of the government to stop our movement
They tried to divide us. They tried to scare us by police brutality
they made offers in the media hoping that the students in the general assemblies would accept them and stop the strike
they encouraged the students who were against the strike to deposit injunctions in courts to force teachers to give their courses.
And all those tries failed so now this government is desperate.
I think it is a desperate move from the government to kill our movement at the movement when it is stronger.
But we already saw the result of such a law. It's more anger.
It's not answering the political problems of that society
and people are not going just to, after 100 days of strike and all of the population supporting it,
and so many demonstrations just say okay, now you want to crush us with police, we'll stop.
No, no, no, it's just making more anger and people are going to fight it.
I'm just hoping that some liberals will wake up about what they are going to do.
It's actually, it's very terrible. It's putting the seeds of fascism
But it's clear it's a very authoritarian law, it's an anti-democratic law.
I mean, everyone who reads it, and we've seen, I mean,
we've seen thousands of lawyers in the last days writing letters, petitions, sending us emails to say that it's clearly unconstitutional.
It's breaking the freedom of speech, the freedom of association, the freedom of protest and for me it's evidence that it will be invalidated in the supreme court.
The problem is that it will be for very long, and until it's cancelled by the courts we will probably have to pay the fine.
But I guess it just kind of sucks that in the meanwhile a lot of people are going to be fined or people are going to do a little jail time
or are going to have to live under that fear of either one of those things.
But yeah, like a lot of people who I have talked with are confident that this can't last, the current situation can't last even if it's after elections or something like that,
like this kind of law was introduced at the height of mobilization, with unprecedented popular support.
As the abuses that this law can introduce keep making headlines then those in power will have to change their strategy yet again.
And, once they've exhausted the repressive option then what do they have left?
You look at the numbers of how many people were injured in the last three weeks and it's really shocking, how many people got arrested.
You know, over 1,500 students were arrested and their supporters in the last three weeks, and that is an amazing number.
As we look at the big picture, we have two students that lost their eyes, you have one student who needs complete reconstructive surgery of the front of her face.
You know her teeth are gone, her jaw, because of rubber bullets and plastic bullets.
And when the government, and the mainstream media talks about violence, well, what is the violence?
Let's talk about how many cops were injured, and how many injuries they sustained, really,
because there are probably injuries, but what is the severity of the injuries in face of 1,500 arrested
and people losing their eyes, which is priceless, this is a permanent disability.
And you don't see any real attempt of investigating these situations and finding out who shot these kids in the face with a rubber bullet that travels at 260 kilometres an hour.
One of our journalists at CUTV, our camera man, was arrested earlier in April.
He was arrested because he was just trying to, there was a police intervention,
an economic disruption for instance where students were -- which one was it again? they were trying to
The Victoria Hotel
There was a meeting of shareholders, oh no of members the Conseil du Patronat, so the bosses association in Quebec
and they tried to go in there, and just block the entrances and block this thing.
And obviously the police intervened very, very strongly, with pepper spray, by beating people up as well,
and we feel as media this is something that we need to show.
We need to show the actions of the police and take pictures because often people don't believe it,
that that's what happens and that's what goes on at these protests.
And students were engaging in civil disobedience, in a non-violent, civil disobedience, and collectively taking this action.
When you have this oppression that is happening, and the use of cops,
and now you everybody is like SPVM, police politique, you know, it's like, political police.
That's what they're calling the police of Montreal at the moment.
that is a major, major thing,
because when people lose the respect for the law, they're no longer afraid of the law enforcement you cannot govern.
I mean, tonight will probably the 25th or 26th in a row.
They've been going on every night at 8:30, and sometimes there are two night marches called in the same night,
so like one starting at 8:30 and one starting at midnight.
And those have been happening every day in Montreal and almost every day in Quebec city and sometimes in Sherbrooke,
which is kind of like a smaller town in Quebec. So maybe like Kitchener, Waterloo, or one of those smaller regional centers.
Yeah, I mean they have been getting bigger and bigger.
Especially, when I find, there's a significant event that happens the day of.
So obviously there's the special law situation. That's kind of been pushing people to go to these demonstrations
Yesterday was the first day when any demonstration above 50 people who's details haven't been approved by police was illegal.
That was the first demonstration in that context yesterday, and people have still been coming out in big numbers.
I know it was more intense than any of the other night time demos that have happened.
People who were in bars on St. Denis which is on a major street, like were pepper sprayed out of bars,
rubber bullets were shot into bars, there were fires, people were starting to use Molotov cocktails.
The intensity of these demonstrations is getting bigger and bigger.
I think they play a really important role in the political balance right now in Quebec.
Another thing that we hear a lot on the street is that la greve est étudiante! La lutte est populaire!
so the strike is the students, but the struggle is a popular one.
Obviously our strike originally started on the specific issue of the tuition increase,
but after mobilization, a lot of students started to talk in the general assemblies
that the issue of the tuition increase was part of a much broader wave of neoliberal reforms, of austerity reforms not only in Quebec but all over the world.
And we have lots of citizens coming to our protests.
We have organized protests during the weekend, for the workers to come and protest with us and it has worked.
We have seen our movement begin to include more and more people, workers, citizens, community groups, unions, who come in the streets with us
because they know that our strike is beginning to be a strike only for the possibility for the social movements
in the next years to continue to contest the decisions that are taking place by the government.
So we are seeing our movement become larger and larger, including more and more people
which gave birth to the slogan the strike is a student issue, but the fight is a popular fight.
Well Charest has been having a long standing agenda that has been going in that direction.
And he not only has been attacking, like I said, the education by increasing the fees, or even further privatizing universities.
Just a few years ago we have even a change on the board of universities to put more private companies on the boards to make a minority of the students and the unions representative.
It's the same thing happening with hospitals, further privatization, there are cuts in so many programs,
and like he said, we had to suffer through austerity budget the last two years.
But I think the economic crisis is a pretext for the government to go further in cuts and privatizations
because, at the same time as the government tries doing that, they are actually reducing the income tax of private companies.
They just cut, not long ago, the tax on capital. So, we see an agenda.
So that means healthcare, they've already introduced a 200 dollar a year fee for accessing healthcare which you pay for on your income tax return.
They're driving those wedges in, in many places.
I could see them going after the 7 dollar a day daycare system that we have which is the pillar of the social model in Quebec.
That's an important issue too, is the fact that this movement is kind of like maybe similar to the situation in Greece.
They're at the forefront of an anti-austerity struggle in Europe and the outcome of their struggle
will have repercussions for a lot of other struggles across the continent that they're in.
So the Quebec movement is in a similar situation I'd say.
I think citizens in Quebec, whether they are students or not,
see this issue as something that we need to defeat in order for broader social movements to rise from this particular movement.
The government has refused, has ignored our demands
specifically because it does not want a social movement to win.
And, if we do win this will allow for the broader society to make further demands that would go beyond a simple tuition fee increase
and this is why we have seen civil society jumping at this issue and joining students in the streets.
There is a class struggle, and this is our struggle, the students, the workers, the committee organizations, the people's,
and there's actually a minority, that's actually taking the opportunity of the economic crisis to actually further attack our rights.
In Montreal, you can kind of tell from being in a demonstration, people are just like, you know, when their car is stopped by the demonstration,
instead of honking at in in anger, they just sort of come out and cheer.
You'll see people in bars cheering, you'll see people spontaneously join, taxi drivers cheering.
A lot of people just support this movement because,
this is gonna sound really corny, it gives them hope.
It's very meaningful in terms of mounting a challenge to the government and to its policies.
Even if it's just people who are scandalized by all the corruption incidents that have happened over the last few years.
Plan Nord is one thing where the Charest government is just agreeing to anything,
just beginning to basically sell out the resources of Quebec to private companies and for a very cheap price
and have the private companies, basically mining companies and so on make all the money.
In that sense, people are very upset because they realize, what are you talking about there's no money?
They just agreed on, for example, a big amphitheatre in Quebec to build that in cooperation with this private, public partnerships that they're having,
and they're like, what are you talking about there's no money?
There is money and it's only a question of priorities. That's what I hear on the street a lot.
And so it started with the student movement but the ball was started basically you know,
the dance was started with the students, on the campuses but it's just been growing.
[Protesters chant slogan] Today, a cry, for democracy!
Well I think the best support we can have is for students elsewhere in Canada, in North America, and in the world begin to mobilize themselves also against,
not only the tuition increase, but neoliberalism as a whole. We have seen it.
We are receiving more and more emails, calls, from students from all over Canada who ask us for council in order to mobilize.
In Quebec we have a student movement that is very solid, very active, very mobilized,
and I think we are ready to help anyone who wants to open up a fight in their province.
Well I think we've already received a lot of support and we always need more support.
But the best way to change things here is to see the struggle not as a Quebec Struggle only but a much broader struggle.
It's not only a question, should the Quebecers pay more, like the student Quebecers.
No, every student in this country is paying way too much and are in the same context and have the right to have free education.
This right is something that is shared actually by everyone on this planet.
So this struggle needs to be understood in that context and also in the context of the economic crisis.
So the best way is to spread this struggle.
Don't necessarily just do solidarity work with Quebec.
Put the fear of history back into your own political classes. They link up with the liberal party in Quebec.
It's kind of like a broad Liberal family that goes across Canada.
If there's pressure coming from a lot of other provinces for free or accessible education, like everywhere else,
they won't be able to say like well, you know, it's just fine in other provinces, you guys have no ground to stand on
and we're going to raise tuition to be at the Canadian average and that's all.
If they're not able to point that out without even mainstream media pointing out that there is a lot of student activism going on elsewhere
then that will strengthen our case as well as yours obviously.
Discourse that, you know, Quebec students are spoiled, they have the lowest tuition in Canada.
I think that's why Canada should take notice because Quebec should be the standard for Canada
and once Quebec goes there's no more standard.
I mean, also, education, is also a federal issue,
and imagine if other provinces actually had a strike movement and that it was coordinated.There's so many possibilities.
Quebec students here have seen what's happening in Ontario with tuition hikes and all, with increasing worry.
And I call for all Ontario students to react strongly, and to organize unions, organize strikes in order to react to this movement.
The Quebec example is not limited to Quebec. It can happen elsewhere, and it will happen elsewhere.
Solidarity with Quebec is only the first step towards a broader struggle, a Canadian struggle,
and a struggle for free education or for lower tuition in Ontario.