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.