This letter is in response to Sean White’s June 27 letter, “Beware the red square.” Mr. White feels that it is “astonishing” that the events in Quebec are “in protest to a $325 increase per year, for five years, to the lowest tuition in Canada.”
Although it is certainly true that tuition rates in Quebec are the lowest in Canada, tuition rates only tell a part of the picture. Readers may be aware that Ontario ranks lowest for post-secondary funding in Canada. According to the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), Quebec is second-lowest. As we know, tuition is only one way to fund universities. In Quebec, tuition has been kept low by provincial legislation; however, with those low fees, the government has not been increasing university grants.
In addition, students in Quebec graduate with large debt that, like their Ontario counterparts, handicap them in the beginnings of their professional lives. There has been an argument that the increase is only a small amount and it would be implemented over several years. However, the students of Quebec are concerned not only about themselves, but future students. As well, they are concerned about the overlying principles of the chronic underfunding of universities.
The red square has come to mean more than “just” the student protests that began it. On May 18, the Quebec National Assembly passed a law restricting the freedom of assembly, protest, or picketing on or near university grounds, and anywhere in Quebec without prior police approval. Every Canadian should be greatly concerned about this outrageous affront to our basic right to freedom of assembly. This law has been condemned by many groups including CUPE and the Quebec Human Rights Commission, and it is considered by constitutional experts to be against the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and it is being compared to the War Measures Act, invoked in the same province in 1970.
May 22 marked the 100th day of the strike and in an absolutely wonderful display of civil disobedience; well over 100,000 people took to the streets in Montreal. Throughout Quebec ordinary citizens – not necessarily supporting the students in their original struggle – are coming out nightly in solidarity with the protest against Bill 78.
In 1981 I voted for my university student union to join CFS. The vote was successful and I see on CFS’s website that this is still active as local 11 (University of King’s College). The principal reason I remember is that we voted to join because we saw the value of one united group representing students’ interests from coast to coast. The early 80s were the time when tuition first started rising exponentially – the time when funding to universities started eroding. As a (really) mature graduate student and a parent of university-aged children, I am continually amazed at the complicity of so many students in their own struggle.
Pam Griffin-Hody
Master’s history
