Ryerson University’s Oakham House meeting room is full of student organizers from around the Greater Toronto Area — York, University of Toronto, Ryerson. They’re giggling, embracing, handing out campaign material and attaching Day of Action stickers to paper cups.

Spirits are high at the Toronto-wide student Day of Action planning meeting, organized by the Canadian Federation of Students‘ Ontario office. On this day, their big protest is only 13 days away (February 7) and everyone seems confident that numbers at the Ontario legislature rally will be good.

Janice Folk-Dawson of the Canadian Union of Public Employees is there to share the union’s contribution to the campaign: full endorsement, subway ads and a wheelchair accessible bus for the event.

CFS Ontario’s chairperson, Jesse Greener is missing. He’s at the Sudbury students’ mock funeral for accessible education. So, Joel Duff, former Ontario chairperson and current CFS organizer, leads the meeting.

One of the executives of Ryerson’s student union reports to the group her most recent contribution to the campaign: a YouTube video mocking Capital One’s “hand-in-my-pocket” commercials. This time, the hand comes not from the bank, but from the provincial government.

Across the country, the tuition situation is varied. Under Manitoba’s NDP government, tuition fees were reduced by 10 per cent in 2000 and funding was increased by 40 per cent, says Manitoba’s CFS representative, Rachel Gotthilf.

But she says it’s not enough.

“It got better in 2000 and got worse since then,” she says. In 2003, Manitoba lifted the freeze on international student fees and universities across the province have used ancillary fees to make up for the money they would have received from tuition.

On their day of action, Manitoba students are rallying at the Winnipeg legislature with support from CUPE, the Winnipeg Labour Council and the Canadian Association of University Teachers.

Yet with all of this effort and organizing it is very unlikely that even 50 per cent of CFS Ontario’s 250,000 members will come out for the big day.

The last time a CFS day of action had over 10,000 estimated students in attendance was 1995 when thousands of students protested the Chrétien government’s education transfer payment cuts. (The CFS maintains that more than 100,000 students nation-wide took part in the 1995 day of action although the media of the day do not confirm this.) About $5 billion was cut from post-secondary education cumulatively throughout the 1990s (most of that post-1995).

Since then there have been successive national days of action in 1997, 2000 and 2002 — each with specific messages, but all against tuition fee increases.

Duff points to the protests of 2000 as the most recent success stories of the students’ movement.

“Access 2000 was significant across the country. BC tuition fees were reduced by five per cent after the day of action,” he says, noting that Manitoba’s tuition was frozen that year and Newfoundland was given a 25 per cent decrease in fees over three years.

Despite these successes, student protests since 1995 have never reached the numbers they once did.

A.K. Thompson was part of the protests against tuition fees in the late ’90s and is one of the editors of the book When Campus Resists about student occupations of presidential offices in 1997. He is also an editor of Upping the Anti: a Journal of Theory and Action and a PhD candidate at York University in sociology.

Thompson says CFS lost its relevance to many students since 1995, due to internal mismanagement, an overly narrow focus on tuition fees, and resistance to varying tactics and viewpoints from within the student movement.

“I don’t think CFS has been particularly smart in organizing campuses,” he says.

“In 1995 students at Canadian universities came to grips with what neo-liberalism meant. CFS created the conditions (for the protests) and used the tuition question as an organizing device âe¦ (but) fighting solely around tuition is not sufficient.”

Thompson points to the 1997 day of action in Toronto where a group of students broke away from the march to occupy the CIBC building to draw attention to its holdings of student debt.

“CFS organizers were quite horrified by this, but for many people that was an inspiring moment,” he says.

“People resist being a number in a stage-managed demonstration. If there isn’t an active planning process for participants, they remain indifferent or hostile,” he says.

Jesse Greener, chairperson for CFS Ontario, sees things differently.

“All the federation can hope to do is be a mobilizing force and help to inspire individuals and spin-off initiatives by other students,” he says. The staged nature of the demonstrations is only to help the local organizers by freeing up their time to get students interested, rather than making their own materials.

“Ideally, every student would be at every annual general meeting; every student would be plugged in.”

Greener disagrees with Thompson’s view that the issue of tuition can’t mobilize students as a core issue. “It’s the most broad issue — it touches every student. I think tuition fees help unify people âe¦”

Despite his critiques, Thompson is hopeful the day of action will go well. “My greatest hope is that every demonstration is enormous. We’re all going through periods of demobilization. People don’t know what’s going on.”

But, he says, “Even if (the day of action) is bigger than ’95, the fundamental questions will remain the same.

“The question to pose to ourselves is not ‘how can we make the student movement the beacon for the left,’ but ‘given the imperialist aggression in Iraq, Haiti, Palestine and Afghanistan, what is preventing us from staging another Quebec,” he says, referencing the massive anti-globalization protests in Quebec City in 2001.

Back at the day of action planning meeting, none of these questions surface. The organizers are far more occupied with coordinating events, handing out literature, making videos and buying megaphones.

After this year’s day of action, the plan is to have student assemblies and get direction from the members on what to do next. In October, Ontario will have general elections and CFS wants to keep the pressure up and make tuition a campaign issue.

Editor’s note: Since its publication, this article has been edited for three inaccuracies and one clarification. rabble.ca regrets the errors.