The Quebec Student Roundtable (QSR, or TaCEQ in French), a provincial student lobbying group, is gearing up its campaign for the coming school year.
TaCEQ represents the student associations of the undergraduate and graduate students of Laval University, the graduate students of the University of Sherbrooke, and the Students’ Society of McGill University. According to SSMU Vice-President External Myriam Zaidi, the organization represents roughly 65,000 students in total.
“We’ve been working already in conjunction with these associations that are a part of TaCEQ right now,” Zaidi said. “We meet once a month, at a roundtable of the associations.”
TaCEQ, which was started last fall, spent much the last year drafting its bylaws and campaigning to introduce paid practicums for Education students. This year, however, TaCEQ plans on tackling a number of issues facing Quebec universities, including the tuition hikes scheduled to be rolled out in 2012.
“We are trying to get different actors in Quebec to endorse alternative solutions to underfunding instead of tuition increases, whether it’s businesses, university administration, or the government,” Zaidi said.
The coming tuition hikes are being approached in different ways by the different student lobby group, throughout the province. Others include the Quebec Federation of University Students (FEUQ), and the Student Union Solidarity Association (ASSE).
“They all go at it differently to a certain extent just to make sure that they offer something different to their constituents,” Zaidi said. “We will be going at it in the sense that we really want increased government funding for universities.”
This differs from FEUQ’s campaign, which, according to their website, is focused largely on the management of finances in university administrations.
However, there is some overlap when these different groups come together at the Table of University Partners (TPU). “It’s a roundtable of all the partners in Quebec universities. That includes student groups, professors’ unions, teaching assistant unions, and others,” said Zaidi.
TaCEQ is in the process of obtaining recognition by the Quebec government, which would allow them to get government funding. Zaidi is also working on increasing the group’s visibility at McGill by promoting TaCEQ’s English-language acronym, QSR.
