Kevin Paul was a member of the “strike maintenance and enlargement committee” of CLASSE, the radical Quebec student organisation that led this year’s struggle against tuition fee increases. He spoke to Solidarity during his recent speaker tour of the UK, organised by the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts.
The story of the struggle
In 2011 the Liberal Party government of Quebec announced plans to raise university tuition by 75 percent over five years. This year, after a long campaign of political education and simmering protests, the student movement escalated into an explosion.
An unlimited student strike — the only tactic that activists believed could win — began in February. Most of the local participating student associations were affiliated with the coalition CLASSE. After two months the government began negotiating.
In April there were mass actions linking the tuition hike to opposition to the Plan Nord, which is an economic plan to “develop" northern Quebec in the interest of mining companies, with bad consequences for indigenous peoples and the environment. On 4 May fifty busloads of students besieged the Liberal Party conference in Victoriaville.
Negotiations resulted in concessions, limiting the fee rise and staging it over seven years, but this was not nearly enough to demobilise the movement.
At this point, the government attempted repression. The courts had already granted anti-strike student injunctions against picketing and disrupting classes, which we defied. Now Parliament passed an emergency law, Loi 78 [Bill 78], which suspended the student semester, banned picketing at universities and required all demonstrations to submit their planned routes to the police.
This backfired massively. On 22 May, hundreds of thousands of people protested in Montreal in defiance of the law, on a demonstration not registered with the police. The more moderate student organisations attempted a legal march, but perhaps 99 percent of the protesters went with CLASSE.
The fight against Loi 78 involved many thousands of new people in the movement.
In August, afraid of a revival of the student movement after the summer, the government dissolved parliament and called an election a year before it had to. The Liberal Party lost office. The new Parti Quebecois [PQ: nationalist, broadly social democratic] government cancelled the fee hike and other neo-liberal measures such as increased electricity rates and a healthcare tax, and repealed Loi 78.
The nature of the Quebec student movement
In Quebec, unlike in many countries, in addition to a bureaucratic, hierarchical national student organisation, there is a large and effective counterpower which sees its role as militantly defending students’ interests as well as engaging with bigger political issues.
This is ASSE [the Association for Student Union Solidarity], the organisation which at the beginning of this struggle launched the coalition CLASSE [“Broad Coalition of ASSE”]. [CLASSE has now been dissolved.]
ASSE was established in 2001, but it comes out of an oppositional current in the student movement that goes back decades. Its slogan is “Democracy, Solidarity, Combativity”. We stand for a syndicalisme du combat (“combat student unionism”). ASSE is an explicitly anti-racist, feminist and anti-imperialist, and implicitly anticapitalist, organisation.
ASSE is and CLASSE was based in large part on local, directly democratic structures which as far as I know are unique to Quebec — associations in university departments, each with its own general assembly. Students tend to organise around these units, working most closely with people on the same courses, who they know well, sharing the same issues, which for obvious reasons makes it easier to mobilise than university-wide structures. Different departmental associations affiliate to different student federations.
CLASSE also had higher-up structures, but with the emphasis very much on control from below. During the struggle decisions were made by weekly congresses, but the delegates at these congresses could only take positions on issues which had been discussed in their assemblies. The delegations were often rotated week to week. In several cases the congress had to send the issue back to the associations for discussion, which obviously took longer but ensured that CLASSE decisions really represented the views of the grassroots
The more mainstream federations, FEUQ [university students] and FECQ [sixth form/FE equivalent], also include local associations but are more heavily based on campus-wide student unions, which are much less democratic and responsive and play a more minor role in student struggles. Many FEUQ- and FECQ-supporting associations joined the CLASSE coalition because they wanted to play a full role in the strike.
These ongoing structures are very important for allowing knowledge and skills to be transferred from one generation of students to the next. They are not set up spontaneously during the struggle but already exist, which means activists can concentrate on actually mobilising.
Unlike in earlier struggles, for instance 2005, FEUQ and FECQ could not dominate negotiations with the government and use this position to demobilise the grassroot struggles.
The lessons of the strike
Students can most effectively build power when we act outside the spaces that the state deems appropriate for political argument and engagement.
We should rely on our own alternative forms of democracy, not on dialogue with politicians, or even just on stunts that look good in the media.
At its best ASSE and CLASSE and the movement around them got “out of control” in the good sense; not only that no one political organisation could control them, but that many of the actions were not called from above or even by official bodies, but spread like wildfire with more and more people autonomously organising on their initiative.
Clearly the government and the ruling class viewed this as a serious threat — hence new proposals to “give legal recognition” to student strikes, which in reality means legally limiting them.
The experience of McGill
My own university, McGill, is largely Anglophone and quite politically conservative. There were more and larger barriers to successful mobilisation than elsewhere.
At McGill we began with a very small minority and never had the majority on strike. It was mainly students from certain departments — English, Philosophy, Art History, Gender and Sexual Diversity Studies, French Literature, Social Work…
Nonetheless the McGill strike was highly significant. The fact that there was mass involvement at such privileged and prestigious institution broke through the wall of "social peace" and will have caused major alarm to university management, the bosses and the government.
One thing which helped prepare the ground was a strike of non-academic staff over wage scales, benefits and pensions in autumn 2011. The strikes lasted four months and won a partial victory; there was major student solidarity and as a result a much more political atmosphere developed on campus.
The sovereignty question
Historically the left in Quebec has been closely tied to the movement for sovereignty [i.e. independence].
This has introduced tensions into many social movements, particularly given that the nationalist movement has many reactionary, chauvinistic and xenophobic elements.
During the protests there were some Quebec flags on the streets, and we were very aware of the potential for deeper social questions to be distorted through a nationalist lens. My view, and it is a view shared by many, is that independence would bring little benefit and could bring new threats. The same people who are somewhat excluded from the student movement, for instance international students and students of colour, who are also most affected by the neoliberal assault, have the most to lose from nationalism.
ASSE is very much non-nationalist and committed to internationalism. For instance, we demand free education for everyone studying in Quebec, regardless of their origin. The other student federations are closer to the nationalists — one FECQ leader became a PQ MP. Their politics mean they not only fail to demand free education, but accept this discrimination against non-Quebecois students.
International inspiration
There was a strong sense that our struggle was unfolding in the context of similar international battles — in Chile, in the UK, in Spain, Greece, California.
We also took inspiration from the uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East, though I think it was right to be cautious what was said about this, given the difference between a campaign against a tuition hike and the overthrow of dictators.
Official politics
My attitude is that the government’s decision to call an election was an effective and intelligent tactic, pulling students away from our own grassroots forms of democracy and into liberal representative democracy.
Some in the movement advocated a vote for particular parties — generally the PQ or Quebec Solidaire [a small left social-democratic party] — others just a vote “against” the Liberals. Some explicitly advocated not voting. Others — I think this is the most interesting position — didn’t tell people not to vote, but argued that we should use the elections to expose the limitations of liberal democracy and get discussion about the alternatives. The crucial thing was advocating that the struggle continued regardless of the election.
Students and workers
Students’ and workers’ struggles are, of course, inherently connected - because all students are workers in a sense, undertaking academic labour; because we study in a framework designed to suit the needs of profit-making; and because many students do actually work in order to get through their course.
There were some moments in the strike where our struggle intersected, or was consciously intersected, with workers in struggle. At one point aviation workers at Aveos [which does airframe and engine maintenance for Air Canada] were on strike: CLASSE moved its congress to the town where they were based and our delegates took part in their march. There were other things like that, though I think more could have been done.
Relations with the national trade unions were mixed. A number of unions provided financial support, but there were also attempts to limit the solidarity movement, for instance when the FTQ [the main Quebec union federation] told unions in other parts of Canada not to get involved. At negotiations with the government there were often trade union executive members present, and they generally allied with the moderate student federations to advocate students accept a bad deal.
What next?
The PQ government is holding an “education summit” early next year. ASSE is demanding free education. The government is talking about indexing fees to inflation, which would obviously mean indefinite increases.
There’s a debate about whether the student movement should participate in the summit. It is a forum in which corporate interests which will have a disproportionate voice, but we need to decide what our tactics towards it should be.
On 22 November there will be a mass student demonstration under the slogan “Education in the service of globalisation — no pasaran!” (part of an international week of action).
Things are quieter, but the radical wing of the Quebec student movement is getting stronger. Many of the associations which joined CLASSE are now affiliating to ASSE. This bodes well for future struggles.
