Niagara Youth Show Their Support For Quebec Student Movement

By Doug Draper 

They were mostly young people from across Niagara – many of them college and university students, and not just a few having one helluva time finding a job – and they were gathering in solidarity with tens-of-thousands of student demonstrating against proposed tuition hikes in Quebec.

One of the banners young demonstrators in Niagara, Ontario displayed at a ‘solidarity’ rally for striking students in Quebec. Photo by Doug Draper

More than 30 of them gathered this June 6 in front of City Hall in downtown St. Catharines, Ontario, wearing the red patches which have become a symbol of the Quebec student movement, and banging on pots and pans, just as Quebec students have been doing when they march through the streets on Montreal during their “casserole” rallies. Above the din of pot banging, they were encouraged by the number of people driving by – young and old – honking their horns or raising a thumbs’ up in support.

“I am here to show my solidarity for the striking students,” said Jared Anderson, a Welland resident and Niagara College journalism graduate who is still looking for work in his field. Those students, Anderson said, are fighting against the austerity forces the Quebec government wants to implement at the expense of students that would be burdened with higher tuition fees when, he stressed, tuition for post-secondary education in Canada should be free.

If the federal and provincial governments cancelled the billions of dollars in tax cuts to corporations, said Anderson, they would have enough money to invest in colleges and universities, and reduce the financial burden for students.

Banging pots and pans at Niagara rally for Quebec students

Brock University student Tikvah Mindorff said it is wrong-headed of some to put the students in Quebec down for protesting against tuition hikes, even though tuition fees in that province are among the lowest in the country.

“People should be questioning why our fees are so high in the rest of Canada rather than why they are so low in Quebec,” she said.

Victoria Mucciarone, Brock student from St. Catharines and Niagara representative for the Ontario Public Interest Research Group, said she is hoping gatherings like the June 6 one in St. Catharines will inspire growing numbers of students and others to join a grassroots movement to keep post-secondary residential fees down so that anyone who wants to go to college or university can afford to. 

The way things are now, most figures available from government and other sources show that today’s students are racking up tens-of-thousands of dollars in debt – enough to make a down payment on a home – by the time they graduate. Saddled with this debt, many of them are then finding it hard to find a decent-paying job in their field, if they can find a job at all. A recent CBC report this May’s Statistics Canada job figures, showed the average jobless rate going slightly down compared to previous months’ figures but, as the report put it, remaining “stubbornly high” at 14 per cent for people under 30 years old.

The Quebec student movement is, in no small way, a reaction to all of this and has been expressing itself in major street demonstrations now for more than 100 days – now making them among the largest and longest-running demonstrations of their kind in Canada’s history.

 The recent passage by the Quebec Charest government of a bill aimed at discouraging the demonstrations has been condemned by civil liberty experts across the country as a major assault on democracy and freedom of expression. Days after it passed, numerous lawyers in Montreal marched in the streets with students to protest the bill, which is now being challenged in the courts.

Meanwhile, the student movement is growing and there seems to be no end in sight.

(Niagara At Large invites individuals who are willing to share their first and last names on this site to share their views on this issue below.)