They Vilified Us. We Won. (Quebec Students Hail Their
Movement’s Victories)

By Camille Robert and Jeanne Reynolds

The Toronto Star
September 24, 2012

http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/article/1260832--quebec-students-hail-their-movement-s-victories

Many mocked us, many vilified us, many told us we would
achieve nothing.

But after a wave of student mobilization in Quebec through
the spring and summer, we can count our victories: on the
first day of the new PQ government’s term, it cancelled a
tuition hike and repealed an anti-protest law that curbed
basic freedoms of expression and assembly.

If the PQ yielded so quickly to some of our demands, it is
because we organized a strike movement whose support was
popular and broad, which allowed people of all ages and walks
of life to express their grievances about our political and
economic system, and which helped defeat the Charest Liberal
government.

That might be hard to believe, going by the depictions of us
in English Canada: halfwitted hooligans, spoiled brats or
frightening extremists.

But if we are guilty of anything, it is of questioning the
dogmas of the rich and powerful, who have spent the last
decades trying to lower our expectations for what is
politically possible.

The purveyors of such dogmas insisted we be quiet and
content, because our tuition was already the lowest in
Canada. But it remains lowest precisely because we have
fought our government every time it tried to raise it.

As with education, the fundamental rights we value today - of
abortion, collective bargaining, health care and many more -
are not gifts from politicians, but a legacy of the struggles
of ordinary people.

The struggle of CLASSE has been not merely to stop the
tuition hike, but to campaign for high-quality, public and
free university education. This is education as a right
accessible to all, not as a commodity available to those with
the thickest wallets. This is education dedicated to the
common good, serving freethinking and the flourishing of the
potential in each person. It is an investment in our
generations to come.

Our commitment to genuine democracy is a reflection of the
type of society we seek to build: one that is more equal, not
less, and revolves around the needs of people, not
corporations.

It is also within reach. No wonder the Globe and Mail would
label us "irrational," the better to distract the public from
our proposal, feasible across Canada, to fund free university
education with a tiny tax on the transactions of banks - the
same banks that shackle families in debt, while making
billions of dollars of profit.

What we raised with such arguments and peaceful, creative
protest, the government tried to silence with "emergency"
laws, riot squads and tear gas. More than 3,000 have been
arrested and are still charged, three times more than during
G20 policing debacle in Toronto in 2010.

Such scenarios are possible only in a broken system of
democracy that comes up for air once every four years, in
which politicians prefer the murmurs of business lobbyists to
the voices of those they supposedly represent. Our faith is
in direct, participatory democracy, which we practise in
assemblies of thousands where every student can give input
into the decisions that impact them.

Our commitment to genuine democracy is a reflection of the
type of society we seek to build: one that is more equal, not
less, and revolves around the needs of people, not
corporations.

Ours is an age of cynicism, but we are learning that our
dreams can be made real.

What we are fighting in Quebec, many are fighting across
Canada: the privatization and degradation of public services,
cuts to people’s wages and old age pensions, and the free
rein corporations have to destroy our environment and fuel
climate change. If our rights can be taken from us by
throwing our educational system into the marketplace, we can
say the same for our hospitals, our water, our forests, and
the soil beneath our feet.

This has always been the essence of our strike and our
mobilization: a shared, collective vision whose scope lies
well beyond student interests. In our campuses, in our
workplaces, in cities and villages across our province,
people have come together like never before: to talk, to
debate, and to imagine a new society with us. And we are
making new alliances, overcoming old divisions, all across
Canada.

At the upcoming provincial summit on the future of education,
the Parti Québécois will aim to increase tuition fees by
indexing them to the cost of living, their stated policy. But
we think the time has come for free post-secondary education.

This is what we demanded on Saturday, marching as we have on
the 22nd of each month since the spring. If we have
demonstrated anything in Quebec, it is that a condition for
social change is not that people should hunger for it - we
know they do. It is that they believe their actions matter.

The social movement of the past year has taught us that
police batons and corrupt politicians will not always prevail
over the power of ideas. Ours is an age of cynicism, but we
are learning that our dreams can be made real.

© 2012 The Toronto

Camille Robert and Jeanne Reynolds are co- spokespeople of
CLASSE (La Coalition large de l’Association pour une
solidarité syndicale étudiante).

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