What Should You Know About The Quebec Student Strikes?

But the most interesting resistance happening right now is going on in Quebec, Canada. There are, according to one representative report, over 165,000 students on strike from class out of a 495,000 student body.

Quebec is looking to increase their tuition 75% over the next several years; students responded by starting what is now the longest strike in the province’s history. It’s gone on even though the government has offered to make student loans a nicer, kinder form of debt, with income-contingent repayments while not budging on the tuition hikes.

Here’s an image by Tina Mailhot-Roberge showing tens of thousands of people marching through Montreal on March 22nd, 2012:

Here’s an amazing video of two and a half hours of the protest time-lapsed down into 50 seconds on youtube. And here, with a h/t to The Nation, here’s the Real News Network’s coverage of the protests.

The strike is heading into a dangerous time. The administration isn’t looking to budge on tuition and students are approaching the point where they won’t complete the semester. This will be worth watching in the weeks ahead.

Why are these sites so potent for activism? The campus combines several issues into one – the privatization of public services, the dismembering of social insurance and its replacement with a regime of debt and risk-shifting, the dismantling of the primary means of social mobility with one designed to entrench inequality, which all builds towards a lack of freedom to fully develop ones talents and abilities and be full, productive citizens.

These students are right to fight this battle at the beginning, during the initials cuts. Privatization creates its own justification; the more public universities are defunded and reconceived as a private good, the less civic interest there is in defending them as a public good. And they are also fighting at the beginning of their lives, both for what kind of world they want to live in while resisting the constraints of indenture that we see when this process of privatization and debt reaches its ultimate conclusion – a path the United States is much further along.

Cross-Posted From The Roosevelt Institute’s Next New Deal Blog

The Roosevelt Institute is a non-profit organization devoted to carrying forward the legacy and values of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt.