La grève est étudiant/e, la lutte est populaire: the Québec Student Strike

Abstract

The media in Québec and elsewhere are not always comfortable with the word "strike," much preferring to call it a boycott of classes. Yet many of the students I have spoken to over the past six months have been firm: consumers boycott; workers strike. This has not been a boycott. Students who have chosen to strike do not see education as a consumer activity. While support for the tactics of striking have waned within the student movement, the decision to strike during the spring places the massive demonstrations and nightly "casseroles" in a lineage with previous student strikes in Québec. It affirms the students' understanding of education as part of a public, social mandate rather than a way to better themselves as individuals. Striking students do not see educaüon as a service that they are buying, but in participatory social terms as work that they do that actively contributes to their society. This is a refutation of a discourse that casts education as an "investment" that is only about individual advancement. No one denies that it is. However the debate over maintaining a tuition freeze is being articulated to a discussion of "the public good" as a political value. Québec is continually depicted as an "anomaly" in relationship to other provinces in media discussions of the strike, yet it is worth remembering that internationally, and nationally, that this is not the case. Tuition fees in at least two other provincesNewfoundland and Manitoba - are almost the same as Quebec's. Although articles such as those in the National Post use numbers to graphically display fee differentials across the country (see Edmiston & Johnson, 2012), these charts do not tell the full story: no differences are shown between undergraduate and graduate fees, between international fees, or between in-province and out-of-province fees. No mention is made of the use of ancillary fees by universities, colleges, and CEGEPs, which greatly add to student debt. While students continue to be depicted in some branches of the mainstream media as "spoiled children" or in racist terms as "The Greeks of North America" (Wente, 2012), no mention is made that in the Canadian context, the cost of tuition, as a percentage of college and university revenue, has doubled between 1985 and 2005, from 14% to 30% ("Student Debt in Canada: Education Shouldn't Be a Debt Sentence," 2012). The carré rouge is worn as a reminder of the looming crisis of student debt. In Canada, debt from loans is at $14.5 billion and growing, a debt that is estimated to be closer to $20 billion, if we take into account private loans. Student debt in Québec is the lowest. The average debt is $13,000 while in the ROC it is over $26,000 (Klein, 2012; "Student Debt in Canada," 2012; "Le travail rémunéré et les études universitaires," 2012). In the United States it is predicted that the next major financial crisis will be the direct result of the enormous increase in student debt. In Canada, 14% of students end up defaulting on government loans because they cannot get steady employment after their studies. And here it is worth noting that there has been an increase in youth unemployment to 14.7 %, almost double the national average (Marshall, 2012; "Youth Unemployment Is Robbing People of Hope," 2012).