Once again, La Belle Province puts the rest of the Canuckistan provinces to shame in terms of level and intensity of activism and protest. Student groups had declared a strike and a boycott of classes back in February to protest tuition increases, and recently other students have obtained court injunctions to break the strike, resulting in scenes such one the other day where a troop of police charged in and pepper sprayed their way through a picket line of protestors, allowing a group of students to then scurry into the building. Today the protesting students took this whole thing one step further, by invading the classes that had defied the strike:
Montreal has seen protest marches, sometimes paralyzing major thoroughfares, for quite some time now. For the first time I'm seriously starting to wonder if the unpopular provincial government is going to fall because of all this unrest (has a US state gov't ever fallen due to widespread student protest, a la 1968 France?), or if the govt is also about to up the ante by bringing in the troops to restore order on campus. I'm also oscillating between annoyance and wonderment at the level of enthusiasm and activism that students have shown by keeping up these protests for months.
- Prof Poopiehead
I realized we'd eventually have to talk about this. Some background: Quebec froze university tuition in around 1970 or so. While there have been increases since then, Quebec has the lowest tuition in Canuckistan. Tuk U is about three times the existing Quebec tuition and even after the proposed increases, we'll still be about twice as much as Quebec.
ReplyDeleteSo Quebec Unis have typically been a terrific deal. They've typically also struggled for cash, and been particularly prone to the vicissitudes of public funding for universities.
Public opinion of the student protestors here in Canuckistan is thus tempered. And all of this plays out against the backdrop of Quebec separatism.
Discuss...
In the US, students organize keggers to prevent their classmates from learning anything. This all sounds like much less fun.
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