Student strike against tuition hike #3

19 demonstrators, mostly CEGEP students, arrested in Sherbrooke for picketing government offices

inspiring video from Wednesday at UQO

LA CONTESTATION ÉTUDIANTE À L'UNIVERSITÉ DU QUÉBEC EN OUTAOUAIS EN DIRECT

Recall Minister of Propaganda and Repression Line Beauchamp had given all three student organizations until the end of Wednesday to declare their opposition to "violence and vandalism". CLASSE said it couldn't do so before putting the issue to its assembly this Saturday. Beauchamp therefore condemned them to the wasteland and has been furiously working to get a meeting going with the FECQ (CÉGEP students) and FEUQ (university students) tomorrow. Divide and rule.

And this just in:

FEUQ refuses to meet Beauchamp without CLASSE

And then this:

BRAVO!

The students united will never be defeated!!

It is absurd, given the rather extreme police violence against peaceful protestors - the young man who lost an eye was playing the harmonica at the time; that was on camera.

There is only one action - done by Gord knows whom - that could be considered potentially violent - bags of bricks on metro rails. It would be a very odd thing for anyone in a progressive student movement to do - usually it is rightwing groups that attack public transport, from fascists in Italy to Al Qaida in London and Madrid. All the other stuff was just the usual "redecorating" - some of it actually very creative and pretty - one usually finds in such conflicts, some sit-ins and occupations, etc.

In my very humble opinion, it would not be a bad move for the student associations - all together - to speak out against such sabotage that could endanger ordinary commuters, but to emphasize the fact that not only have  Beauchamp and Charest failed to condemn the extreme police response and the serious wounding of students, arrests of reporters and professors etc, Charest has actually said (I don't have the exact quote, unfortunately) something to the effect that if one takes part in a protest, it is at the participant's peril. Very authoritarian indeed.

I'm wondering how the student movement will be approaching the upcoming Earth Day demo.

Lagatta, I agree with you about provocations, etc. But what violence?? Even the bricks on the Métro tracks were carefully preceded by synchronized pulling of the emergency stops at several stations. I repeat: What violence??? It's a diversion, pure sabotage by Charest and Beauchamp. And of course, there's no definition of "violence" or "vandalism", so the student organizations are being asked to denounce everything from artistic murals to "hard picketing" (as the students call it, by contrast with "soft picketing"), and who knows what else. The government is isolated and is running around like cornered rats, trying anything to divert attention from the main game.

The students have responded well, by calling on Beauchamp to condemn police brutality (only the police and security guards have actually committed violence!). And CLASSE has said, "Don't tell us what declarations to make - we are answerable to our members. We'll let you know!"

Meanwhile, another day on the front lines. This is downtown Montréal:

Student strike: Several police interventions

Another demo was declared illegal here today. Many other demos around Québec. Students at U de M did a silent artistic demo, physically recreating Rodin's sculpture "The Thinker", in order to promote the education of "free thinkers".

Too many other events to report. Read the article! More to come.

The student movement in Quebec is an incredibly important development, with implications that reach well beyond provincial borders. The movement emerged in response to a 75 per cent increase in tuition fees to be implemented over the next five years, but it has quickly evolved into something far more significant. “People are starting to realize that the real problem behind the rising tuition fees and the commodification of education is something related to a socioeconomic system that is behind it all,” said Frank Lévesque-Nicol, a spokesperson for a protest that was held on February 2, 2012. The student movement has rekindled the political imagination to a degree not seen since the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s. This is the most troubling and dynamic period in recent Quebec history, and the possibility that this energy will foster fundamental social change is very real.

quote:

The speed with which the student movement broadened to a general social struggle is significant and worthy of replication elsewhere. Austerity budgets have been introduced in provinces and cities across Canada and the world, and the level of political organizing in opposition to these measures is promising. It is important to recognize that most of these initiatives are led by students and youth. As Noam Chomsky wrote in defence of the students in 1968, “the student movement today is the one organized, significant segment of the intellectual community that has a real and active commitment to the kind of social change that our society desperately needs.” The achievements of students and youth in the 1960s were significant, and they are certainly replicable, but the conditions and struggles being waged are radically different today.

The student movement began gaining visible momentum in January 2012, as college and university student unions across the province started to adopt unlimited general strike mandates during their general assemblies. These assemblies affirmed the merits of syndicalist organizing, as the strength and effectiveness of the movement in Quebec rests upon highly localized student associations meeting regularly in their communities to adopt collective decisions. Implementing the strike was most effective where students organized within their own departments, rather than through larger centralized unions. The smaller departmental associations then send delegates to weekly congress meetings organized by La Coalition large de l'ASSÉ (CLASSE), which must wait for local assemblies to adopt positions before moving forward. The model is proving very effective. This same approach should be emulated elsewhere – in university departmental groups and associations along with public and private sector workplaces, for example.

Students received a boost of support when two of the largest public sector unions publicly endorsed the student strike, calling on their membership to join the national protest in Montreal on March 22. The protest drew roughly 200,000 people and may have been one of the largest marches in Canadian history. It was around this time that the movement clearly became a general social struggle. Streetlamps, windows, storefronts and balconies are draped with red felt squares that have symbolized the Quebec student movement since 2004, and dozens of people don the square on their lapels in a show of solidarity with the movement. Students organized solidarity actions with locked out Rio Tinto Alcan workers and with hundreds of Aveos employees who recently lost their jobs, and actions were also organized in opposition to the Liberal government's controversial Plan Nord, which seeks to exploit natural resources on indigenous lands.

A major action is planned for Earth Day on April 22 that will be organized along internationalist lines in solidarity with environmental struggles across the world. Several internationalist solidarity actions have taken place in France, England, South Korea and elsewhere. The actions are simply too numerous to list. Queer and feminist groups have also had a visible and articulate presence within the movement, and autonomous actions and mass events have become a daily occurrence.

http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/619.php

quote

Oppression is not merely taking the form of rhetoric. The Occupy and student movements were treated naively when they began, but youth are now pepper sprayed and beaten on a near-daily basis in Montreal and elsewhere. Police have begun to deploy riot squads immediately to dismantle actions, whereas some effort was made at conciliation in the past. “Our job, as police officers, is repression,” said the President of the Police Fraternity of Quebec, Yves Francoeur. “We do not need a social worker as a director, we need a general. After all, the police is a paramilitary organization, let's not forget it.” It is wretched to say this, but the point has been reached where creative thinking is needed to figure out how to organize effectively in the face of increasing physical oppression.

http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/619.php

CAUT supports Quebec students’ protests to maintain accessibility

The Canadian Association of University Teachers joins with our colleagues in the Fédération québécoise des professeures et professeurs d’université (FQPPU) in expressing support for Quebec students currently opposing higher tuition fees announced by the Charest government. We also deplore the excessive force that has too often been used against student demonstrators.

Quebec universities require more funding, but shifting the burden to students and their families is counterproductive. CAUT’s policy is that tuition charged to students must be kept as low as possible with the goal of moving toward a zero tuition policy. The reasons are many.

A high tuition policy makes post-secondary education less accessible to students with modest means. Access to post-secondary education should be decided by ability and interest, not family wealth or willingness to undertaken substantial debt. On average, university and college graduates more than pay the cost of their education due to the higher income they earn and the resulting higher taxes they pay.

Perhaps most importantly, as has been recognized for elementary and secondary education, the benefits of post-secondary education are societal as much as personal. As a society we all benefit by having doctors, engineers, librarians, nurses, and other educated professionals and personnel. Our costs for health, social services, and social assistance are reduced as our population is better educated. The cultural benefits are enormous.

Quebec students know this and are speaking out.  We support them. But we also support the demand of many in the post-secondary sector in Quebec for more adequate public funding for universities and colleges. This is a difficult economic time that tests a society’s true values. Regrettably, too many recent federal and provincial governments have valued lower taxes for corporations and the wealthy at the expense of education, health care and social welfare.

Canada is a rich country.  Quebec’s students are reminding all of us of what our priorities should be.

http://www.caut.ca/pages.asp?page=1075

Downtown Montréal is the scene of massive confrontations between police riot squads (city police, now apparently bolstered by provincial cops) and thousands of student demonstrators. The protestors massed at the Palais des Congrès (Convention Centre), where Premier Jean Charest was addressing some kind of fair to promote his Plan Nord. There were rocks, bottles, some broken windows, lots of tear gas and stun grenades, physical fights, injuries, about 16 arrests known so far, and in the past hour the cops have declared the demonstration "illegal" several times - it doesn't work. Charest can't get out of the Palais, nor has anyone else been allowed in or out for the past couple hours.

I've also heard that the demo is splitting up, some going to Complexe Desjardins (a major nearby office and shopping complex - I think it still houses the U.S. consultate?), others to Parthenais (police HQ).

Here's the ongoing live coverage from the Gazette:

http://live.montrealgazette.com/Event/Students_against_tuition_fee_hikes...

An Open Letter in Support of the Student Strike in Québec

We, the students of the City University of New York and State University of New York, openly support the Québécois student strike.  For over nine weeks, post-secondary education students have been on indefinite strike, galvanizing 300,000 people to take the streets and holding the largest student demonstrations in North American history.

Three Brooklyn College student organizers visited Montréal for four days over our spring break to meet with and learn from the student strike–to understand the challenges that Québécois students face and how they have been able to successfully mobilize around their tuition hikes. Even if for only a couple of days, what we witnessed was beyond our wildest dreams of what a student movement could look like and accomplish. We marched with hundreds of students in the strikes, we saw students with pepper spray stained cheeks and the courage to stand up for their right to education.

Québec is rightfully proud of its institutions of higher learning, and Québécois students are rightfully proud of years of work they have put into ensuring that these places remain accessible despite provincial attempts to raise tuition beyond the reach of many Québécois and to convert grants and scholarships in to student loans. In keeping with the tradition that has kept Québec’s tuition the lowest in Canada — an important insurance that education will remain available to the many instead of the few in one of the country’s poorer provinces —  students have taken to the streets to protest tuition increases of 127% over ten years. We see these hikes as an attack on the rights of low-income and communities of color to access higher education, and we find their parallel in the tuition increases that will affect SUNY and CUNY students. Our “rational tuition increase” will result in students and their families having to pay an additional $1500 over the next five years.

In addition to seeing clear connections between the struggles around access to education facing our two provinces, we also see the Québec student strike as a model for gaining legitimate student power in our own city in struggling against the anti-austerity measures affecting students across the United States.

We denounce the violence against strikers and unjust profiling of students in Montréal for exercising their right to protest against unjust policies. In particular, the use of pepper spray to violently hinder the strength of the hard picketing on the part of students.

As an act of solidarity and a symbol of our escalation campaign as a student movement in New York, we are launching a “Red Square Campaign” in which allies wear the very same red squares pinned to their chests as the student strikers of Québec. We do this in solidarity with the student struggles in Québec, and to signify our shared struggles against the neoliberal corporatization of our institutions of higher learning. We will wear the red square because we share a common vision of a truly free university.

Thank you for being an inspiration to students everywhere, despite the colonial borders that separate us. We are together in this fight. Nous sommes ensemble.

Solidarité,
Brooklyn College Student Union

New York Students Rising

Students United for a Free CUNY

CUNY wide General Assembly

The Graduate Center General Assembly

http://takebackbrooklyn.wordpress.com/

Here's a relatively decent wrap-up of the day's events from the Gazette, of all sources. It includes a hint of the anger generated by Charest in his speech to the millionaires inside the Palais, when he "joked" that the students protesting outside were knocking on the door looking for jobs in his Plan Nord project (the planned rape of northern Québec's resources and environment):

Student rally against Plan Nord turns ugly

..i post this because i wanted to share my fascination with how well students are organized.

ALL STUDENTS

1) Attend Upcoming meetings:

• Brooklyn College Student Union meeting: Wednesday at 10pm at Liz’s house
• GC GA: Friday at GC

• Everybody interested in plugging in for May 2: Sunday from 12-8pm at Biola’s house

     Contact:  Julieta Salgado: joolietasalgado@gmail.com

• Develop press kits
• Make press contacts
• Generate and fill out the master press contact google excel sheet
• Delegate contact people
• Schedule interviews
• Generate a social media campaign: twitter, facebook!

Legal Team:

      Contact: Stephen Thompson: stephenthompson91@gmail.com ...and much much more.

http://takebackbrooklyn.wordpress.com/2012/04/19/how-to-help-with-the-may-2-student-manifestation/

Concordia University Senate voted unanimously to request that Quebec Premier Jean Charest start an unconditional dialogue with student groups, and that Interim Concordia President Frederick Lowy pass along the message.

“I think that this is a very important and powerful step,” said Concordia Student Union President Lex Gill. “Concordia is the first university to call on the minister to negotiate without condition and with all stakeholders at the table to resolve the student conflict.”

The original motion proposed by Fine Arts faculty member David Douglas asked that a letter from Lowy be addressed to Education Minister Line Beauchamp. An amendment was added by Arts and Science Senator June Chaikelson to send it to Charest instead.

“That’s even better. It goes to the premier, that’s her boss,” said Gill. “I think its a breaking point for universities to realize that they also have a responsibility to tell the minister and the premier that they need to show some serious leadership right now,” she added.

It is currently unknown how the letter will be written, but Gill believes it might be the original wording of the final motion, and that the letter will first have to be presented to the university community.

The Trans Identity Project also made progress with an announcement by VP Services Roger Cote that students will now be able to list their preferred name on student records and gender will be removed from forms. Legal last names will remain on all documents.

Despite lengthy discussions at the Senate and Board of Governors meetings this week, there is still a lot of confusion surrounding the finances and governance of eConcordia and KnowledgeOne.

More to come.

http://thelinknewspaper.ca/article/2973

...or a video game?