Link to photo of May 22 protest
Earlier today, 200,000 people marched illegally in downtown Montreal to mark the hundredth day in student protests against the Quebec Government.
The average age of today’s protesters increased in comparison to the first 99 days. Seniors, families, labourers, and anyone else who considers civil rights important have joined the students in their power struggle against the government.
It’s about time.
Quebec citizens are finally protesting in favour of a free and democratic society instead of allowing our government to continue passing laws that exert undue control over students with no obvious improvement in the system.
The trend continues with Bill 78, which was proposed, debated and passed in Quebec’s National Assembly last Friday. Known as “an act to enable permit students to receive instruction from the postsecondary establishments they attend;” it should be called “an act to control student associations we don’t like.”
Bill 78 tries to meet the needs of everyone, except striking students and their parents. College administrators, contracts with teachers, students who want to attend classes, businesses that need summer employees, businesses in strike-heavy city centres, the government curriculum; all these issues were taken into consideration.
I’ve never attended school in this province, but since I moved here in 1993, I’ve learned that education is both cultural and political in Quebec.
In the last few years, however, there have also been a great many public discussions about the high rates of unemployment among Quebec students and a particularly high drop-out rate among Francophone boys. L. Jacques Menard, the chair of the Action Group on Student Retention and Success and then President of BMO Financial Group summarized the concerns in his 2009 report, “Knowledge is Power:”
In Quebec, however, our best efforts are falling short. Despite all the resources devoted to promoting student retention, our education system lets nearly one in three students fall through the cracks: 30%1 of our youth celebrate their 20th birthday without a high school or vocational diploma. Beyond the human tragedies that loom over dropouts and their families for their entire lives, imagine the disaster in store for a province where barely two working-aged people will have to support five people age 65 or over. That is what awaits us in Quebec just two decades down the road.”
Despite these signs of a failing system, the state uses a heavy hand to determine how education is doled out to students.
Everything is regulated by the government, from the number of hours of instruction a student must have in a day, week and year to what students at each level can study. The curriculum at every level is so full, both of my children get super stressed every April to finish everything before the end of the year. Yet there is no room for music lessons, a healthy dose of physical education or anything else parents and students want. Government talk about treating students as important clients of schools never seems to extend to the “customer is always right” philosophy.
No matter what party controls government, ministers seem to think that passing laws about how education is delivered can fix the most recent societal ills.
Concerns about whether the laws can actually be reasonable enacted don’t seem to count, whether those concerns are expressed by teachers, parents, students or other parties, including most recently the police.
Problems over the years have been rampant. Years ago, the Parti Quebecois changed everything about how teachers deliver lessons in a complicated series of regulations known jointly as “the reform.”
The reform wasn’t even fully rolled out to all the grades when the Liberals got in. Still, ministers stopped talking about it and began passing other types of legislation about how education could be improved instead.
The most undemocratic law prior to Bill 78 extended the terms of school board commissioners for two years without an election. The idea was that school board elections could occur at the same time as municipal elections.
Last year, the government passed a law determining how report cards should be filled out. This year, prior to the strike, we were all discussing English Immersion for Grade 6 students in French schools. All these proposals were roundly criticized by the teacher unions and administrative representatives, but for the most part, schools implemented them and students simply buckled down and studied harder.
They woke up when the government mentioned higher tuition fees.
None of this was necessary. Instead of using the student protests as a ready-made election campaign, Jean Charest could have declared a moratorium on tuition fees for a few more months until he could call the election he wants. Instead of bragging that they didn’t back down before students voted on a deal that might have made colleges and universities more accountable, ministers could have kept their mouths shut.
Instead, they proposed Bill 78, a bill with a section about “peace, order and public security” that hints at Canada’s historic preoccupation with “peace, order and good government.”
I’ll be writing more about that tomorrow.
