All Posts Tagged With: "Maple Spring"

Student groups demand full public inquiry instead

The Quebec government has named a three-person panel to investigate events related to last year’s student crisis that made international news.

Public Security Minister Stephane Bergeron said the panel will study the actions of students and police during anti-tuition demonstrations that rocked the province.

Bergeron told a news conference Wednesday that he wants to ensure there is never a repeat of clashes like those seen during 2012′s so-called “Maple Spring.”

Protesters accused the police of numerous abuses — including arbitrary mass roundups and fines, indiscriminate pepper-spraying, and violations of mobility rights.

A number had been demanding a full public inquiry into police actions.

There were expressions of disappointment Wednesday from groups that said the new mechanism fell far short of what they had demanded, and would continue to demand.

The investigative body will have no power to subpoena witnesses, will do its work in private, and will be unable to point to offences by individual officers.

The government made it clear that any disciplinary measures against individual police officers would continue to be handled by the regular provincial police ethics committee.

The panel has been asked to analyze circumstances surrounding the protests and identify factors that led to the deterioration of the social climate.

It will cost $400,000.

“The government is interested in learning lessons from the 2012 crisis, a social crisis of such a magnitude that we can never let it happen in Quebec again,” Bergeron said.

Students took to the streets for months, and many shut down their classrooms. They were protesting a planned tuition increase of 77 per cent over five years in Quebec, which has the lowest university rates in Canada.

The protesters won a partial victory when the Parti Quebecois took office, scrapped the initial plan, and introduced a permanent tuition increase of 3 per cent a year.

The new group will examine techniques used by police and protesters, as well as the financial impact of the crisis. There will also be a study of how other jurisdictions deal with similar movements.

The group will deliver a report to the government, including recommendations, by Dec. 20. Bergeron said he plans to make the report public within six weeks of its delivery.

Bergeron appeared to already have drawn some conclusions about what caused the chaos.

He blamed the previous Liberal government for introducing Bill 78, a controversial anti-protest law designed to get students back to class. He also said the crisis would never have happened if the previous “Liberal party government” had not introduced such “excessive tuition hikes.”

The minister said it was the Liberals’ behaviour that brought thousands into the streets for near-nightly protests in Montreal and elsewhere in the province.

Bergeron said the panel will conduct its hearings in private, so that anyone wanting to testify could do so without fear of reprisals. The panel will accept written, audio and video testimony.

He said the panel will not intervene in cases already before the province’s police ethics committee, nor seek out people who might warrant charges.

Bergeron said municipalities and police had to adjust their tactics, given the unprecedented event and the need to maintain social peace and safety.

“The vast majority of Quebec police officers acted with professionalism, given the circumstances,” Bergeron said.

Bergeron said he encourages people who feel they were treated unfairly to file a complaint with the ethics committee. Some 200 complaints have already been filed with the body, which has the power to sanction officers.

The committee will be chaired by Serge Menard, a former Parti Quebecois public security minister and federal Bloc Quebecois MP. The other two posts will be held by ex-union boss Claudette Carbonneau and former judge Bernard Grenier.

Opposition parties blasted the plan.

They called it a waste of money. And they also questioned its impartiality, noting that the PQ and union movement had clearly supported and — in the case of the labour groups even funded — the protest movement.

Coalition party member Jacques Duchesneau, a former police officer, said the announcement left a “bitter taste” in his mouth.

He said there had been 711 student protests recorded in Quebec last year and there had only been arrests at one-third of them.

“Is it the police’s fault that people threw smoke bombs on the metro?” Duchesneau told a news conference. He was once chief of the Montreal police force.

“Is it the police’s fault that people threw bags of bricks on the tracks to stop the metro? Is it the police’s fault that people wanted to take over the (Montreal Formula 1) Grand Prix?”

He said he was fine with the idea of a study — but said it should have been done in a public forum, like a parliamentary committee, and been more neutral.

The government drew entirely different criticism from student protesters. They wanted a more muscular mechanism.

The more hardline student group, ASSE, said it would continue to demand a real public inquiry as well as an abandonment of all charges or fines levied against 3,500 people during the crisis.

“This is a far cry from the independent public inquiry on police behaviour, demanded by 91 Quebec civil-society groups,” said a statement from the group.

“We’re not asking Mr. Bergeron to share his reflections on social movements. This special committee should instead be weighing in on the actions of those who are supposed to be protecting us.”

-With files by Sidhartha Banerjee

Man, 29, accused of possessing explosives, threats

A man arrested on a terrorism-related charge during a student protest this week in Quebec will remain behind bars for now.

Denis Marc Pelletier was in a Montreal courtroom Thursday for what was supposed to have been a bail hearing, but the case did not proceed as planned.

A new lawyer and evidence disclosure pushed the bail hearing back to at least March 8, and perhaps later.

The Crown has already indicated that it will oppose bail in Pelletier’s case due to the nature of the charges against him.

The 29-year-old man is facing at least seven charges, including possession of explosives, possession of an arson device and uttering threats.

A charge of inciting terrorism stems from alleged postings on a social media site that police observed last weekend.

Continue reading Quebec protester faces terrorism-related charge

Quebec premier says confrontations are “behind us”

Arrested during demonstration (Graham Hughes/CP)

Without the salvos of snowballs pelting police, the chunks of ice flying through the air, and the officers chasing protesters across a snowy plaza, this could easily have been a scene lifted from the “Maple Spring.”

The clash in downtown Montreal was a mid-winter twist on the student demonstrations that shook the city on a near-daily basis last spring and summer.

Thousands of people marched through the streets Tuesday in a protest that coincided with the end of Quebec’s summit on higher education.

This time, protesters were venting at a different government.

The two-day summit saw the newly elected Parti Quebecois announce three-per-cent-a-year tuition hikes. The PQ’s new fees are significantly lower than the ones proposed by the previous Liberal government — about one-fifth as much.

Premier Pauline Marois had left the conference feeling confident enough to declare that Quebec’s era of social unrest was over.

“We have succeeded in putting the confrontations behind us,” Marois said in the closing address of a Montreal summit that assembled students’ associations, university leaders, unions and social groups.

“The social crisis is behind us.”

A few hours later, signs of the familiar tumult re-emerged.

On the other side of town, armoured police confronted projectile-throwing protesters in a sequel to the clashes that drew international attention last year.

The demonstration blocked streets, altered bus routes and saw police drag some marchers out of the crowds in order to arrest them.

The skirmishes led to 13 arrests, mostly for unlawful assembly and assault with a weapon. Two of those arrested were carrying Molotov cocktails, police said.

The police department said one officer was injured.

Last year, Quebec’s first student strikes of began in mid-February and they grew into a social movement that saw nightly street marches.

At issue was the $1,625 tuition increase over five years planned by the previous Liberal government.

The PQ cancelled the Liberals’ hikes after it won power in September and this week it announced scaled-down increases of its own. Its proposed hike will raise tuition by one-fifth of the Liberal plan — $70 per year, or roughly $350 after the first five years.

Earlier in the day, Marois had conceded that her small tuition hikes wouldn’t please everyone — not the student groups, nor the university administrators who said they needed more cash.

“We had some difficulties (finding a consensus) with the tuition, but the responsibility of the government is to decide — and I decided,” Marois told reporters after the summit.

Even the more moderate student groups, who participated in the summit, called the three-per-cent annual increases unacceptable.

They had requested an absolute freeze on tuition. Instead, they got what some of them called a perpetual tuition hike.

“We’re really disappointed about the fact the tuition fees are going up,” said Martine Desjardins, president of Quebec’s largest student federation, who attended the summit.

She said she had hoped the government would have debated the issue further.

But students, Desjardins added, did not leave the summit empty-handed. She credited the government with providing some extra funds for the financial-aid program and establishing a committee to examine mandatory student fees.

Student leaders will now consult their members about the next step.

The march Tuesday in Montreal, meanwhile, was the first of more student protests expected in the province. The movement is planning to stage nightly demonstrations starting next week.

It’s not yet clear how many student groups, and protesters, will participate in the demonstrations.

Thousands hit the streets Tuesday in a march organized by ASSE, one of Quebec’s more-radical student federations.

The group boycotted the education summit and has long demanded free university tuition.

“We will not cease mobilizing, we will not cease demonstrating, we will not cease these actions,” Jeremie Bebard-Wien, a spokesman for ASSE, said of Tuesday’s protest.

“We will keep coming back to remind the government that the summit was not what we expected and that a tuition hike will not pass.”

He predicted that it would take time, however, for the movement to gain steam again.

While his group said 50,000 students agreed to a one-day strike Tuesday, those at some schools with a reputation for militancy actually voted to stay in class.

Inside the tight security bubble that shielded the summit, students weren’t the only ones who disagreed with the PQ government’s plans for the education system.

Some university administrators left the long-awaited event with deep concerns their schools are at risk of under-funding, due to a cut in their budgets by $125 million in 2012-13 and again in 2013-14.

“The university system remains anaemic and it will be bled of $250 million in the coming years,” Universite de Montreal rector Guy Breton told the summit.

Breton warned of a looming crisis that could imperil some university programs — including medicine — unless the government increases university funding.

“The patient is far from being in good health — I guarantee that,” he said.

Others saw the PQ government’s indexed tuition increases as too small, a plan that would pile more burden on taxpayers who didn’t go to university.

“You’ve obtained an artificial consensus… in this room where the vast majority is excluded,” said interim Liberal leader Jean-Marc Fournier, who then pointed to the challenges of lower-earning Quebecers.

“You’re asking (students) to pay a little less, someone else will pay instead.”

In an abrupt reversal of roles compared to 2012, it was the PQ government dealing with uproar in the streets.

While she was Opposition leader, Marois wore the student movement’s signature red square in the national assembly and even took part in a pot-banging protest that became commonplace in the province.

One marcher held up a sign Tuesday that read: “Pauline, where’s your casserole (pot)?”

During the closing news conference of the summit, Marois was asked about her declaration that social harmony had been restored.

“I’m very at ease telling you that the divisions are now behind us,” she said.

“That doesn’t mean that there isn’t any tension; that doesn’t mean that there won’t be any disagreements.”

—Andy Blatchford with files from Peter Rakobowchuk

Plan would raise fees by $70 per year

Premier Marois and Education Minister Duchesne at the summit (Paul Chiasson/CP)

Quebec students who staged a memorable series of protests last spring could see their efforts result in a roughly 80 per cent discount on planned tuition hikes.

The Parti Quebecois government has tabled its plan for tuition increases, a long-awaited development in a political dispute that rocked Quebec last year and was dubbed by students as the Maple Spring.

The plan involves indexing university tuition by three per cent a year — which amounts to about $70 annually. That is sharply lower than the $325 yearly hikes sought by the previous Liberal government, which then adjusted the proposed increases to $254 per year, over seven years.

The planned hikes prompted huge and often rowdy protests, with the PQ siding with the student protesters ahead of last summer’s election campaign.

Premier Pauline Marois then cancelled the Liberal tuition increases after taking power.

Continue reading Parti Quebecois proposes tuition indexation

Student group says there won’t be second ‘Maple Spring’

Not even the most militant of Quebec’s student federations expects this week’s education summit to plunge the province into another Maple Spring.

Quebec gained international attention last year when a dispute over proposed tuition hikes boiled into a months-long uprising.

The unrest, dubbed the Maple Spring, saw thousands of protesters swarm Montreal streets night after night. The crisis eventually faded away, in part because the Liberals lost power and the incoming Parti Quebecois government cancelled the tuition increases.

The PQ stickhandled its way through the perilous political issue, during the election, by promising to come up with a new tuition policy at an education summit.

Some students are feeling disillusioned and boycotting the two-day summit, which starts Monday, because they believe the new government has tuned out some of their ideas.

The ranks of the restive, however, appear smaller than last year.

“We are aware… that there will not be a new Maple Spring,” said Blandine Parchemal of the ASSE student federation, one of the more militant groups within the movement.

“The Maple Spring is over.”

The once-powerful ASSE, led by its charismatic former spokesman Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, suffered several setbacks last week after it failed to gather support on a strike vote from a number of its associations.

The most symbolic setback came at a college near Montreal known as a bastion of activism, which was the first school to declare a strike last February in an event that kicked off the movement.

This time, College de Valleyfield not only voted against the strike, it tabled a motion to disassociate itself from ASSE.

That doesn’t mean the tuition divide between students and the government has disappeared.

One of the major sticking points is the PQ government’s intention to freeze rates, which are the lowest in Canada, but to introduce small increases indexed to inflation.

Some student federations that made up last year’s protest movement have drawn a line in the sand at an absolute tuition freeze.

They say they refuse to accept indexation.

ASSE, meanwhile, decided to boycott the summit completely over the government’s refusal to debate the group’s desire for zero tuition.

They view free university as an achievable goal, if only policy-makers would make it a priority like in many other jurisdictions. Former premier Jacques Parizeau, who as a young civil servant in the 1960s helped build the province’s university network, expressed support for their cause.

The federation is now planning to take its battle back into the streets. ASSE has planned to stage a protest Tuesday outside the summit venue.

With memories of last year’s clashes with demonstrators, Montreal police pledge to be present in large numbers and will maintain a security perimeter around the summit’s building.

Student associations representing junior colleges and universities affiliated with ASSE have also voted to hold a one-day strike on Tuesday.

But any protest revival from within ASSE faces an uphill climb. Several of its member unions voted last week against the strike, including those from some of the most militant schools during last year’s uprising.

“There’s a lot of exhaustion,” said Parchemal, ASSE’s secretary of academic affairs. She was referring to the compressed, intensive academic schedules students have had to endure after the 2012 strikes cancelled sessions.

She maintained, however, that the associations that voted against the strike still oppose indexation and support free tuition. Parchemal added that some schools that voted against strikes last year, actually supported the most recent one.

That stood in contrast to places like College de Valleyfield — where the vote was 366 against the strike and 124 in favour of it, said a student-union representative.

“We didn’t expect to be crushed like that,” said Cedrick Mainville, himself a supporter of the strike.

He blamed the loss on student fears that a Yes vote would lead to a prolonged strike like last year.

ASSE’s approach is much different than that of FEUQ, the largest student group in the province. The organization, which says it represents 125,000 students, plans to take its concerns to the summit’s negotiating tables rather than into the streets.

FEUQ president Martine Desjardins believes the student movement still has many potential avenues to explore before presenting a strike vote.

“Before that, you need to prove that you’ve tried everything that you could,” said Desjardins, who led FEUQ during last year’s protests.

When asked if students in her federation would be prepared to strike over indexation, she said it’s too early to know.

“We’re not planning strikes, for example, in two weeks,” she said. “It will take much more time to convince students to ramp up the pressure.”

Desjardins disagrees with ASSE’s decision to boycott the summit, a step she believes could hinder the process.

Last year’s student unrest was ignited by opposition to the Liberal government’s proposal to boost tuition rates by $325 per year, over five years. The government later tweaked the planned increases to $254 per year, over seven years.

Even though the hike still would have left Quebec with some of the lowest tuition in Canada, many students insisted they opposed the increase out of principle.

Some demanded a freeze to keep fees from inching closer to the higher rates in other provinces. Others called education a right that should be free, just like in some European countries.

The Marois government appears to be aiming for the middle ground with indexation, somewhere between a freeze and the increases proposed by the former Liberal government.

A recent poll suggested the PQ’s middle-ground indexation solution had strong public support.

That’s a far cry from the spring, when the PQ’s early alignment with the protesters — such as wearing red squares in the national assembly and banging on pots and pans in the streets — came to be viewed as a political liability.

But the PQ did take some steps to try distancing itself from the protesters in the weeks before the election.

It ditched the red squares, and started side-stepping questions about its own tuition policy by promising a summit.

Now that the moment has arrived, university administrators worry the meeting won’t address the serious issues they say are facing post-secondary institutions.

Relations between the PQ and the universities are already strained after the government announced a $124-million cut to universities in December, midway through the fiscal year.

Universities have gone on the offensive in the lead-up to the summit. At one of a series of town hall meetings, McGill University’s provost called the cuts “an unprecedented attack” on higher education.

Alan Shepard, president of Montreal’s Concordia University, said he’s concerned the summit will get bogged down in the debate over tuition fees and proposals like that one won’t see serious discussion.

Even with an increase tied to inflation, Quebec universities would remain woefully underfunded, he said.

“The difference is substantial when you compare the financing we have per student compared with the rest of Canada,” he said in an interview.

One idea being floated by Shepard and others is to introduce differential fees based on the subject, so that a student in dentistry or law school would pay substantially more than a history student.

If the funding issue isn’t somehow addressed, Shepard said Montreal risks losing what he called an “enormous jewel” – a hub for research and student learning at its four major universities.

Universite de Montreal rector Guy Breton said post-secondary institutions now realize they need to do a better job explaining their role. Last spring, he felt they were drowned out in a debate dominated by students and the government.

“The student message was two letters — n-o,” he said.

“Ours is much more complicated.”

—Andy Blatchford and Benjamin Shingler

Literature and life lessons help to understand activists

Swartz (Boston Wiki Meetup/Flickr)

In Timothy Findley’s The Wars, a young officer, Robert Ross, defies orders and releases horses confined in a barn. It is WW1 and he is in an area of France being shelled by Germans. Releasing them is a way of saving them as the structure is an obvious target. Ross is an officer with the Canadian Field Artillery and it’s his love of animals and justice that motivates him. It’s also his last act before desertion.

Findley’s assertion was that Ross’ actions were heroic in context. His liberation of the horses is cast against the shadowy psychopathy of WW1, a psychopathy so hideous it kept high-ranking military men from touring the front. Had they done so, the carnage of the Somme, Ypres and Passchendaele might not have materialized. More soldiers, from all forces involved, might have made it home.

The Wars is timely because it seems conventional ideas about heroism are atomizing before our eyes. More relativistic ways of seeing things, perhaps brought on by the pervasive use of the internet, are transporting us to a world where the bad guys are everywhere and they’re usually in charge. It’s created some odd bedfellows and even odder instances of cross-pollination. The Arab Spring, a political uprising with some very discernible causes, was replicated in Quebec by the Maple Spring, a student uprising that had a lot of us here scratching our heads. Many were puzzled by the students’ adoption of a name whose power was clear but whose basis for comparison was wildly inaccurate.

Continue reading The heroism of Al-Khabaz, Swartz & the Maple Spring

Tuition freeze likely

The Parti Quebecois government appears to be challenging the notion that the province’s universities are under-funded, a tactic that could hold significant implications it prepares to hold a highly anticipated summit on education.

The government has promised to host a symposium in February aimed at finding a long-term solution to the challenge of university funding, an event that stems from a key PQ election pledge to cancel previously planned tuition hikes.

But it is now sending signals that universities might not actually require a financial boost.

Members of the government including Premier Pauline Marois have in recent weeks been repeatedly challenging the premise that the province’s universities are under-financed. On Thursday, the government even leaked a report to the media challenging that oft-repeated notion.

Continue reading Quebec universities aren’t underfunded: leaked PQ report

PQ says it will index tuition to rate of inflation

Quebec student leaders are ready to face off against any plans the newly elected Parti Quebecois may have to increase tuition fees.

Students claimed a cautious victory after premier-designate Pauline Marois promised to reverse tuition increases for college and university students.

Less than 24 hours after the PQ won a minority in the Sept. 4 election, Marois announced she would undo the hikes introduced this year by the Liberal government of outgoing Premier Jean Charest.

For now, the near-daily protests in Montreal have come to a halt.

The downtown park where hundreds, and often thousands, of protesters gathered nightly for marches over the past few months has gone quiet. Classes have resumed at Quebec’s junior colleges and universities.

Continue reading Another Quebec tuition fight on the horizon

An in-depth look at the nightly protests in Montreal

Photo by Roger Lemoyne

For the last month, thousands of protesters have taken to the streets of Montreal in what might be described as a schizophrenic display of righteous, pacifist outrage and opportunistic violence. Beginning at about 8 p.m. every night since late April, they gather at Place Émilie-Gamelin, a squared-off chunk of grass and outsized public chessboards formerly best known as downtown Montreal’s go-to spot for public drunkenness and illicit drugs. From there, the crowd marches off in a direction chosen by whoever happens to be in front. Purposefully, no one knows where the protest march is going.

Continue reading Quebec’s new ruling class