McGill TribuneThe Quebec student movement is gearing up for a winter of action against the government’s proposed tuition hike. In coming months, an unlimited general strike will play an essential role. McGill can and must be a part of it.
The Quebec government seeks a $1,625 raise in the annual base fee paid by all students, to be imposed in increments over five years, starting this fall. That’s a 75 per cent hike for Quebec students, and the government has left open the possibility of steeper increases for out-of-province and international students.
If we allow the hike to come into effect, university education will become less accessible. Groups that tend to have more difficulty paying for university will be the most affected by the hike, worsening social inequalities. Since available financial aid will remain inadequate, students will face surging debt burdens, which act to channel us into high-paid corporate jobs, rather than work we might find more fulfilling.
Education is a right, not a privilege. In fact, Quebec agreed to respect this principle when it signed a 1976 UN declaration holding that “higher education shall be made equally accessible to all, on the basis of capacity, by every appropriate means, and in particular by the progressive introduction of free education.”
Yet government officials and Principal Heather Munroe-Blum, a vocal proponent of the tuition hike, argue that budgetary constraints leave them no option but to seek more revenue from students.
In fact, funding for education is a question of government priorities. A study by research institute IRIS shows that Quebec could afford free postsecondary education for all were it to both raise its corporate capital gains tax rate from zero per cent to 2.4 per cent and its top-bracket income tax rate by 1.4 per cent.
Munroe-Blum has also promised that the tuition hike would produce tangible benefits for students. But tuition hikes in Quebec have historically been accompanied by cuts to public education funding, meaning they serve to change how education is funded, not increase funding. Tuition hikes shift the cost of education from the society which benefits from the production of knowledge to students, imagined as individual consumers.
Some may object to tens of thousands of students marching through downtown Montreal against a tuition hike when their degrees would remain among the cheapest in North America. But the fact that fees are higher elsewhere is not an argument for raising them here. In some parts of the world, such as Denmark, Finland, and Brazil, postsecondary education is free. If anything, the comparisons drawn with other provinces and across the border heighten the urgency of defending Quebec’s relative accessibility, as a model of a North American society that values higher education as a public good. Tuition is low here only because students, working alongside broader social movements, have fought again and again to keep it that way.
Why an unlimited general strike?
Through years of negotiations, rallies, and marches, Quebec students have expressed to the government that tuition hikes are unacceptable. The government has failed to change course. An unlimited general strike is necessary because all other options have failed.
In 1996, a strike beginning on Oct. 24 and numbering around 100,000 students at its peak lead to the reversal of a planned 30 per cent fee increase.
Most recently, in 2005, the government tried to cut $103 million from financial aid. By March 15, over 230,000 students were on strike—over half of Quebec’s student population. On April 1, the Minister of Education agreed to restore all $103 million in cuts.
Unlimited general strikes work because of the economic pressure they exert on governments, which cannot afford the delay in the annual influx of tax-paying workers, or the additional classrooms and instructors needed to accommodate a cohort of students repeating a semester, just as a new cohort arrives.
The strike
The prospect of classes postponed indefinitely this semester is understandable cause for anxiety. Moreover, it may be unclear exactly how an unlimited general strike will work.
Once a special General Assembly of AUS or another student association votes for a strike mandate and the strike is initiated, the association will meet weekly to re-approve the continuation of the strike. In other words, no single vote mandates an unlimited strike, but typically it continues until student demands are met.
In any case, the semester will not be lost. Because the costs of accommodating the additional students in the following semester are too high to the government, at no time in the long history of Quebec student strikes has a semester been canceled. Classes will resume where they left off once the strike is over, extending the end of semester and exams into May, if necessary. For graduating students, a strike delays but does not jeopardize degree conferral.
Raising a GA ballot card in the air to vote “yes” to a strike can be a moment of shared empowerment without equal. As scenes of collective action sweep Quebec campuses this winter, we at McGill have the chance not only to defend our own future, but to build relationships of mutual support that extend far beyond the Roddick Gates to show bureaucrats and administrators across the province and the world that students, united, will always prevail.
Visit tuitiontruth.ca or bloquonslahausse.com for more information. A General Assembly of the AUS will be held on Tuesday, Jan. 31, at 6 p.m. in Stewart Bio S1/4, to debate and vote on several motions critical to the preparation for a strike.
