For Glendon College’s first Festival of Research, a bilingual conference on the student mobilization in Quebec was held on November 8. Organized by Professor Francis Garon and the Centre for Global Challenges, the round table brought together 6 panellists who discussed the Quebec student crisis and tried to understand the lack of student mobilization in Ontario.
The origins of the crisis
Recalling that the trigger for Quebec’s student strike in
the spring of 2012 was the announcement of the rise in university tuition fees, Professor Garon indicated from the outset that the purpose of the meeting was to get to know this conflict’s challenges for Ontario and the rest of Canada, and to suggest comparisons between Quebec and Ontario, especially with respect to tuition fees and accessibility to higher education.
The first panel, made up of David Macdonald, Senior Economist at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, and Professor Ross Finnie, reviewed the evolution of tuition fees. It was made clear that Quebec is the province where university is the most accessible, which was Jean Charest’s argument. Striking Quebec students did not compare themselves with students from other provinces; they preferred to compare themselves to the OECD, where 11 of 27 countries do not have tuition fees. Although Canada is classified as one of the most costly places in terms of tuition fees, Quebec is close to the median for tuition fees in OECD countries, which was an argument for student mobilization, and could also be the case in Ontario.
The second panelist, Ross Finnie, an Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa, clearly indicated that tuition fees do not determine accessibility to higher education, that cultural factors do. For Ross Finnie, going to university is not first and foremost a question of money, but of culture, i.e., perception of the value of higher education. That is the first barrier to a university education. As well, in his opinion, low tuition fees are a regressive tax transfer to more well-off families, and low tuition fees lead to mediocre universities. Lastly, he recalled that all studies show that the provinces with the lowest tuition fees are also the ones where university education participation is the lowest. He was also surprised that women in Ontario have a higher rate of university attendance than Quebec women, and a rate twice as high as Quebec men.
The second panel focused on governance and mobilization. The first speaker was Professor Éric Montpetit, Chair of the Political Science department at the Université de Montréal, who questioned certain preconceived notions which were widely circulated during last spring’s conflict in Quebec. For him, it is wrong to say that being in favour of increased tuition fees means being right-wing. For Éric Montpetit, Jean Charest’s policy on tuition fees was a “left-wing” social-democrat measure. However, the student crisis was marked by great poverty of debate. A genuine right-wing policy would have been, for example, deregulating tuition fees or an excessive increase. The announced increase was “reasonable” and likely to ensure high-quality education at the universities. Lastly, Quebec should not seek to imitate many OECD countries, where the quality of university education leaves much to be desired. Although Switzerland has an excellent university system with lower tuition fees, the system is very selective. Quebec has many reasons to maintain its current university system.
Another preconceived notion: the success of the movement relied on “brilliant” young people. There were certainly exceptional leaders, but on March 22, 2012, it was 28 degrees in Montreal, which made the strike easier and kick-started the movement, a peculiarly Montreal phenomenon. The students’ position was an individualist position (refusal to pay). Refusal to accept the concept of university underfunding is a right-wing, individualist position. Another preconceived idea was that the Charest government was inflexible with the students. For Éric Montpetit, that is not true, even though the government took too long to sit down with the students. Not only did the government do so, but it made major concessions, while the students did not make any.
For her part, Pascale Dufour, an Associate Professor in the Political Science department at Université de Montréal, reflected on the opposition between street democracy and elective democracy, and she recalled the timeline of events, from November 2011 until last June. In her opinion, demonstrators are also voters and the majority of demonstrators in democracies are “super-citizens”. She also emphasized that protest actions are not the prerogative of youth. In the past 20 years, there has been an increase in recorded protest actions. The strike last spring in Quebec, she recalled, mainly involved francophone students; what also fed the movement was the will to break the routine of a government in power since 2003.
The final speaker, York Professor Miriam Smith asked why the Quebec protest movement did not spread to Ontario, the province next door. In her opinion, Ontario citizenship is very different from Quebec citizenship, and the differences favour more neoliberalism in Ontario than in Quebec. Citizens participate in social movements because they are affected. We cannot say that the lack of student mobilization in Ontario is due to the lack of grievances. After all, 50% of Ontarians believe that tuition fees are too high in the province, and one Ontarian in three was sympathetic to the Quebec student mobilization. But there has been a campaign to delegitimize sociopolitical movements in Ontario, especially since the Harris government. As well, the sociocultural role of creating and preserving knowledge in Ontario universities is obscured: the only topic is economic discourse, which means that it is very difficult for students to think about university other than for their individual ends. According to Professor Smith, we no longer seem to believe that higher education is a societal investment. All of that explains, basically, the lack of student mobilization in Ontario in 2012.
The discussion following these two panels highlighted other factors such as cynicism towards the political class in the context of allegations of corruption and wasting public money. All that also contributed to some of the success of the spring’s movement. Moreover, according to participants, it was probably not a good idea for the Charest government to announce a controversial policy at the end of its third mandate, when nobody still supported this government. In short, as Pascale Dufour emphasized, this social crisis will have a generational effect on raising awareness of the challenges of public debate, because the public debate last spring was not trivial.
In conclusion, the Chair of Glendon’s Political Science department, Ian Roberge, recalled that last spring, Quebec experienced a public policy debate which went beyond the single issue of tuition fees. In a way, everything was on the table: university quality, its purpose, youth participation rate, etc. Therefore, the discussion was about values very different from just money. And, as Professor Roberge concluded, “thanks to this conference, we can better understand what is happening in the province next door, which will enable us to have better discussions around us on these important issues.”
By Michel Héroux
