Free For The Taking

For close to four months up to 180,000 Quebec university students have chosen to boycott classes, and instead join in boisterous and increasingly violent demonstrations to protest a tuition hike that, when it is completely instituted by 2019, would still mean they enjoy one of the lowest rates for post-secondary tuition in the country.

When the Liberal government of Jean Charest, battling a credit down-grade as a result of an increasing deficit and allied debt, brought in an austerity program that included raising the tuition rate for CEGEP and university students, they likely braced for reaction, but it was unlikely they quite foresaw the volume and violence involved in the reaction by the "striking" student population.

Those students who declare themselves resistant to the government's plans and who have chosen to leave their classes to make their point that their government is decidedly anti-Democratic because it refuses to back down from its decision, to sit and listen carefully to what the students would prefer, and then enact the students' preferences, feel that they are the forefront of a new popular resistance.

Who do they think should pay for their education?  Everyone, it appears.  It should be completely free, to all who wish to further themselves by attaining higher education.  There should be no tuition fees levied whatever.  So that, the short-range plan is to discourage the government and the province's taxpayers from the delusion that they can impose higher fees to begin with.

And once that issue has been settled, the long-range plan can be launched, whereby there will be no tuition fees at all. And this is their just due.  That the Liberal government relented from its original stance that what they proposed was non-negotiable was the first nod-off.  They might just as well now have a good long sleep.  And hope that when they awaken all the controversy and unpleasantness will just go away of its own tired volition.

The students at university represent the cream of the society's promising intellectuals.  Their campaign is so without fault that several Ontario CUPE unions have helped to fund it.  There is great union between the stridently demanding public service unions and the student unions.  Although the Black Bloc has become involved in the strike aiding the students, exercising their own special brand of violence, the students themselves have been violent and abusive.

The federal government itself will support a private member's bill introduced recently to make it a crime to wear a disguise or mask while taking part in a riot.  But students, faces visible, have been seen throwing billiard balls, chunks of asphalt and other projectiles at security officers.  They have been entirely disruptive in blocking bridges, ports, main roads and the Montreal Metro.

They have smashed storefronts and set private vehicles on fire.  Their antics have not endeared them to the public who, if they were at one time sympathetic to the students, no longer are, in the majority.  Those 50% of the students who have remained in their classes have been frustrated to have them cancelled.  International and out-of-province students have also been inconvenienced by threats and intimidation.

The most militant student union, CLASSE, leads the volatile confrontations.  The student unions are now in the process of voting, having agreed to put the province's latest, amended offer, to a vote.  The negotiations between the province and the unions have seen an offer to trim some student fees, look at cutting research budgets, and freezing administrative wages.

So it's perfectly all right if other groups and programs within the university suffer to accommodate the denial of the students.  The voting process has begun, and before long the results will be revealed.  But even before the vote began it was predicted by the unions that the students will turn down the amended offer; their union heads have recommended spurning it.

CLASSE is triumphant that their "mobilization bore fruit".  And they're more than prepared to keep "mobilizing", until the fruit becomes free for the taking.