When I took the photo above, back in November, Quebec’s student demonstrations were lively, orderly and non-violent.
Not so much these days, sadly, as nightly demonstrations seem to degenerate into disorder.
As Quebec’s student protest movement against tuition hikes reaches Day 101 on May 23, every side has been accusing the other of being at fault.
Well let me congratulate you, as you’ve been all correct, all along.
Here’s how I figure it.
The Quebec government has been at fault for trying to use this dispute as a means of boosting the popularity of the provincial Liberal party. Up until the scandal-plagued Jean Charest government passed Law 78, which places severe restrictions on demonstrations, their polling numbers were inexplicably up. They perhaps overestimated the public’s appetite on limiting freedoms, though, as the latest poll numbers show things are swinging back the other way.
University administrators have a part in this: If they’d been fully transparent from the start about how they spend the millions of public dollars they receive, justifying why they absolutely need a tuition increase, it would address one of the student demonstrators’ main grievances.
The police have been at fault for overextending their authority. Nothing new here: The presence of police officers at Quebec student demos has had a instigative effect for as long as I can remember. (I got my first taste of tear gas courtesy of Sûreté du Québec riot officers in Quebec City, while covering a student demonstration way back in 2000.)
The students, too, have their share of blame. Hungry for political effect, they’ve allowed their movement to be commandeered by causes that have a tangential connection to tuition fees. In at least one newspaper interview, the folks at Occupy Montreal were proudly showing off the success of their re-invigorated movement, thanks to daily student protests.
Great, but what’s your solution? It’s too simplistic to say that you want low tuition fees because everyone preceding you paid low tuition fees. It’s too simplistic to say that the rich and the big, bad corporation aren’t paying enough taxes. It’s too simplistic to say all students are poor and need a financial break, because that’s simply not true. We need something more realistic on the table.
And their collective failure to prevent and to condemn violent acts during their demos does much to harm their legitimacy in my eyes.
The result of this public head-butting is a whole bunch of angry people on all sides, heels dug in based on their ideological beliefs, unable to make any kind of constructive move.
Caught in the middle are students who didn’t vote to strike, who actually want to go to school and get their spring semester over with; people whose businesses are directly and indirectly suffering from the disruptions; and Quebec taxpayers (and indirectly, all Canadian taxpayers), whose money is at the heart of this dispute and who are also stuck with having to pay the bill for day after day of police deployments.
That being said, I am sympathetic to those who truly have financial barriers to post-secondary education. As I wrote in my column in Tuesday’s Calgary Sun, someone’s financial or social situation should not impede their access to college or university. Scholarships and bursaries must be made available to those who deserve them, and loans made accessible to all.
But constant protests and the resulting police interventions are not helping in any way. The current situation in untenable. All sides need to concede that no one has it completely right, make some kind of gesture of goodwill and get this resolved soonest — lest this dispute drag on, disrupting the summer and fall semesters for thousands of students at Quebec’s post-secondary institutions and doing irreparable harm to everyone involved.
Ricky Leong 
I’m not living in Montreal anymore, but I will always be a Montrealer at heart. I find these protests embarrassing. My friends here in the United States have been warned by their government that travel to Montreal may be dangerous. What does that say about my city? This is not a repressed Middle-Eastern country fighting to free itself from the tyranny of a violent and all-controlling government. I think the protesters are exaggerating their plight, and a little perspective is in order.
There is wrong on all sides of this story. The educational institutions need to be more transparent, as does the government, and student loans need to be made available to a larger number of people. That said, the protesters also need to be more reasonable. Look at the rising cost of everything around you. Look at how much a post-secondary education costs your American counterparts. Frankly, I’m glad to see “tuition” increase, instead of an unsustainable “tuition freeze” that prompts schools to raise “photocopy fees” and other nonsense fees to get the money out of the students anyway.
As to the police, yes, police brutality is deplorable, and there is absolutely no reason to throw tear gas into a quiet crowd or to shoot rubber bullets point-blank. I think Montreal needs to take a serious look at how it handles protests and riots, but, honestly, what do you expect when nearly every riot in Montreal ends in torched police cars? Violence begets violence.
Your suggestion to solve the problem, while good intentioned, doesn’t really change anything. The problem with scholarships and bursaries is that the ordinary smart students can rarely meet their requirements. Most scholarships / bursaries either require the student to be
1. The absolute brightest (straight A- average is not good enough, straight A average is iffy, only guaranteed for the straight A+ students),
2. Extremely poor (One part time job at min. wage and the student doesn’t qualify)
3. Spent hours and hours contributing to the community (Students working jobs while studying full time rarely have the time to be volunteering)
What ends up happening is that the scholarships / bursaries are all going to the same few students over and over, while the rest are stuck with student loans only.
Student loans may allow the students to go to school but all the benefits of that just ends up siphoned away if the students can’t find a high paying job right after they graduate. Those students ends up paying until they die thanks to compound interest.
If you truly want this solution to work, scholarships and bursaries needs to be rationed out with slightly lower requirements (Ex. B+ average, minimum wage income), In addition, student loans should only have interest that follows inflation and students should not be required to pay until he/she gets a job that pays above a certain threshold.
You make some very interesting points.
Heres a compilation of vids demonstrating the kind of brutal behavior from police students have been dealing with for 3 months:
Not saying people getting pissed at cops is helping, but first gratuitous shield bash to the face i got, i stopped caring when people were retaliating at police. I mean in italy, they dont fuck around, theres no self-delusion about how you can deal with cops if you are gentle, pacific etc… they know what to expect, front line is often equipped with shields and helmets on the protestor side.
I know what you mean: I’ve was physically removed by riot police on two occasions while reporting on demos, about 10 years ago.
Do you understand french? If you do, take a look at this:
http://www.facebook.com/notes/genevi%C3%A8ve-lobstineuse/lindignation-en-chiffres-et-en-aberrations/10150741789137149
FORTY cases of corruption from Charest where he blew away large amounts of taxpayers money. This is the reason why students should not budge. They are in the right, Charest governement is in the wrong.
If you cannot read french, i will translate for you the first of forty reasons why students are in the right.
“The (secret) sale of the Anticosti island from Hydro-Quebec to Petrolia and Junex, under pretext that Charest didnt know the gaz potential of 40 billion barrels. (100$ per barrel = 4000 billions). Coincidence? Many members of the administrative board of Junex and Petrolia are ex-employees of Hydro-Quebec who have done prospection, such as Erick Adam.
The ex-CEO of Hydro-Quebec is on the administrative board of Junex since 2008. Jean-Yves Lavoie, co-founder of Junex, worked at SOQUIP from 1974 to 1980 as a petroleum engineer. Another member of the administrative council, Jacques Haubert was a high management then president of the SOQUIP at the end of the 1990s.
The chief of Junex’s operations Peter Dorrins, occupied the post of chief of the petrol and gas division of Hydro-Quebec from 2003-2006.
Daniel breton has made a complaint to the SQ (Quebec provincial police) against the Charest governement who he accuses of perpetrating the steal of the century.”
On the matter of people scuffling with police, you do realize that a young women lost teeth from a rubber bullet to the face, 2 persons lost an eye, there is easy obtainable youtube of gratuitous heavy violence of police against students, such as this one where you see a student getting hit point-blank range with a gas canister:
I got easily 15 videos of gratuitous police violence just from 2 days of twitter feed at #ggi the hashtag of the student protest.
That tends to piss people off.
Certainement, et je suis plus ou moins au courant de ce qui se passe sur la scène politique au Québec, malgré avoir déménagé en Alberta. Je trouve absolument époustouflant qu’un gouvernement puisse être le cible d’autant d’allégations de corruption. Ça n’aide certainement pas au débat sur le coût de l’éducation …