to move up and down
Sid Ryan: The case for zero tuition
In Ireland, where I’m from, education is free from kindergarten through university. It seems absurd to me that we charge our young people any college or university fees at all, given that their skills and knowledge will propel our economy.
There are 20 developed countries in the OECD that currently charge zero or nominal fees for higher learning. However, here in Canada, free tuition continues to be treated like a radical idea, while the more than 150,000 students who have been striking in Québec for the past 15 weeks to stop fee increases have been chided by politicians and pundits alike for harboring a sense of “entitlement.”
Isn’t it time to consider free and universal access to college and university in the same way it universalized high school education at the beginning of the last century? Isn’t it time that profitable corporations were obliged by law to invest in workplace-based training such as apprenticeship and basic skills?
‘Arbitrary’ arrests being used to silence student opposition: Parti Quebecois
The historic scope of the unrest in Quebec was illustrated in surreal scenes and statistics Thursday: more people were detained within a few hours — at least 650 of them, in mass roundups — than were arrested in the entire October Crisis.
More than 2,500 people have been arrested in a months-long dispute that has catapulted the province onto international news pages.
That is at least five times the number jailed during the 1970 FLQ crisis that saw martial law declared in Quebec.
“That’s where the Quebec Liberal party has taken us: mass arrests, more often than not arbitrary ones, to silence opposition,” said Parti Quebecois Leader Pauline Marois.
Record arrests as police use controversial kettling to control Montreal protests
Police made more than 500 arrests Wednesday evening, the largest number of people arrested in a single night so far in the weeks-long Quebec student demonstrations, after using a controversial technique to control protesters.
The evening march that began with people festively banging pots and pans in support of protesting students ended in the early morning hours with police kettling a crowd of demonstrators and arresting 518 people.
The arrests came just hours after the Quebec government signalled it would be getting tougher on the striking students and set strict conditions for any resumption of negotiations with student strike leaders: There will be no talk of a tuition freeze, and no question of scrapping a newly enacted emergency law. (Photos: The Canadian Press; Gazette; AP/Getty Images; Reuters)
Controversial new laws in effect, Montreal police arrest dozens
Montreal police brought the hammer down on student demonstrators Tuesday night, enforcing a controversial law that brought tens of thousands into the streets in a protest earlier in the day that drew international support.
By the end of a cat-and-mouse operation that marked the fourth straight night of clashes, police spokesman Simon Delorme said that at least 100 people had been arrested and two police officers had been injured.
It is believed to be the first time Bill 78 and the city’s new anti-mask bylaw were used by police.
The daytime march was considered to be one of the biggest protests held in the city and related events were held in New York, Paris, Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver.
Although fewer than one-third of Quebec’s college and university students are boycotting classes, they have galvanized anger against the provincial government to the point that it tried to defend its new law by saying there were other places with tougher legislation.
Full story here. (Photos: The Canadian Press; The Gazette; Reuters; AFP/Getty Images)
Graphic: How Quebec’s tuition compares
There’s one fact that usually gets slipped into the bottom of news reports on the Quebec student protests: that the province has some of the lowest tuition rates in Canada. But how low is low? The National Post’s graphics department compares:
‘A declaration of war’: Quebec students rage over proposed fines
Threats of further student-related mayhem in Quebec have intensified with the government’s intention to crack down on the protest movement by hitting it hard in the pocketbook.
Emergency legislation introduced overnight provides for fines of between $1,000 and $5,000 for any individual who prevents someone from entering an educational institution.
The penalties climb to between $7,000 and $35,000 for a student leader and to between $25,000 and $125,000 for unions or student federations.
In all cases, the fines will double for repeat offenders.
“It’s a declaration of war, not only against students but also against anyone who clings in any way to democracy, against anyone who clings to what Quebec was before this legislation was tabled,” said student leader Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois. (Allen McInnis/The Gazette)
Riot police clash with protesters to force open several Quebec schools
Riot police shoved away a crowd of protesters while helping to force open a school in one of several tense scenes in Quebec on Tuesday.
It was a notable development amid three months of social unrest, during which several legal injunctions to reopen schools have been ignored and resisted by picketing protesters while others were respected.
In this case provincial riot squad fired chemical irritants at about 100 protesters who refused to move as they blocked the entrance of a junior college north of Montreal. (Photos: THE CANADIAN PRESS/Ryan Remiorz)
Nearly nude students take to Montreal’s streets to protest tuition hike
Striking students stripped down to their birthday suits and an astonishing array of red underwear to protest, yet again, against Quebec’s proposed tuition hikes.
The symbolism of the nearly nude event was featured in the chants the students shouted out as they marched through Montreal’s Plateau neighbourhoold: “Tout nu dehors, jusqu’a la victoire,” which translates to naked outside until victory, but doesn’t rhyme in English. (Photos: Vincenzo D’Alto/Postmedia News; Christinne Muschi/Reuters)
Montreal police and protesters rage through the night as tuition march turns violent
Montreal is waking up to a morning of smashed windows, vandalized cars and questions about how a protest degenerated into yet another violent clash between police and demonstrators.
Anger over a short lived effort to put an end to the tuition crisis through negotiations bubbled over Wednesday night when a hastily-organized demonstration turned ugly and police used batons, pepper spray and percussion bombs to disperse the crowd.
After two hours of peaceful protest, police declared the march illegal and the situation unravelled quickly. A car was set on fire at a major downtown intersection and chaos ensued as the police started to push the crowd back using whatever tools they had in their arsenal. (Photos: Dario Ayala, Allen McInnis/Postmedia News)
Graeme Hamilton: Striking Quebec students fail the test of democracy
As the strike by Quebec university students, now into the 10th week of protests against government plans to raise tuition fees drags on, the likelihood that some students will lose their entire semester grows. If they’re going to learn anything from the experience, let’s hope it’s that intimidation tactics and disregard for the rights of others have no place in a true democracy. (Photos: Dave Sidaway, John Kenney/Montreal Gazette; Mathieu Belanger/Reuters)
Gary Clement’s week in review for March 18-24
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Student debt bankrupting a generation
In 2006, Nereid Lake was a single mom with an undergraduate degree in French linguistics from Simon Fraser University and well on her way to a master’s degree in linguistics when Canada Student Loans informed her she had exceeded the lifetime lending limit of the federal program and would have to leave university — without her degree.
At the time, she had accumulated about $60,000 in student loans.
“Even though I had an armload of academic awards, I was forced to leave,” she says. “My aspiration was to work in the field of voice recognition cognitive science, getting computers to understand human language. Instead I had to take the first job I could, as a low-earning court clerk. Now I’m nearly 40 just barely making ends meet and still owe more than $50,000 in student debt. I naively thought student loans would be the great equalizer. Instead I’ve plunged into a student debt nightmare.”
Ms. Lake is not alone. Nearly two million Canadians have student loans. That debt is worth about $20-billion and includes federal and provincial government loans and personal debt in the form of credit cards, family loans and lines of credit all used to finance post-secondary education. And that number is only set to grow as student loans owed to the government of Canada alone increase by $1.2-million a day. At the same time, the amount of unrecoverable student loan debt now sits at $149.5-million.
