The 2019 dissolution of the Association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante (ASSÉ), which led the historic 2012 strike, leaves the Quebec student movement without a fighting organization capable of leading the struggle. The existing national federations, the Union étudiante du Québec and the Fédération étudiante collégiale du Québec, take more of a lobbyist approach and put little effort into grassroots mobilization. Despite this, several student associations remain mobilized, but their energy is dissipated among many competing priorities, while unifying demands struggle to emerge. Close to 90,000 students struck for at least one day during the week of March 21 to April 1, with demands as vast and varied as free tuition, internship compensation and climate justice.
The student movement seems ready for the project of rebuilding a fighting national association, which means confronting the movement’s fragmentation and finding unity. An analysis of the current state of the movement shines a light on the prospects for struggle.
The historical demands of the Quebec student movement, carried by ASSÉ and its predecessors, were to prevent both tuition fee increases and reduced access to financial aid, within an overall struggle for free education and a decent standard of living while studying. These demands have the potential to both unify the vast majority of students around common material interests and connect with the broader political struggle to defend public services and working-class living standards.
While the 2012 student strike succeeded in blocking the Charest government’s planned $1,625 per year tuition increase, it ended with fee indexation — a recurring annual increase which totalled 26 percent (double the rate of inflation) between 2013 and 2021. In the current context of a housing crisis, rising interest rates on student loans, and wages that are not keeping pace with rising inflation, demands that directly relate to students’ lives remain the strongest foundation for the struggle and must continue to be advanced.
After the failure of the 2015 strike against austerity, paid internships emerged in 2016 as a central demand from a leftist tendency in the student movement that was hostile to ASSÉ’s organizational structure and pressed for a completely decentralized struggle. The theoretical underpinnings of this tendency — which called for the recognition of student labour as wage labour, rather than for the defence of education as a public service — and, especially, its hostility to the movement’s structures made it difficult for student associations to constructively take up its demands at the local and national levels.
Yet, abolishing unpaid internships is a key part of the struggle for a decent standard of living for students and for the defence of public services. While student interns also provide cheap labour in the private sector, unpaid internships are concentrated in public service fields such as education, nursing, midwifery, social work, and childcare. The struggle to abolish unpaid internships in these programs of study, where women are the majority, is part of the fight against the erosion of working conditions in these fields and for increased funding in health and education as public services. It is also part of the common struggle against student precarity, since the internship period is demanding and makes it more difficult to balance studies, work, and family. The students who are currently reviving the demand for paid internships have every reason to reject the divisive approach that dominated this trend in 2016 and, instead, to participate in rebuilding fighting student organization and connecting their struggle with those of public sector unions.
The issue around which students are most likely to mobilize, especially new CEGEP students, is undoubtedly the environment and climate. The September 27, 2019 climate protest was the largest in Quebec’s history, and the September 24, 2021 protest saw 112,000 students on strike across the province. Clearly, young people are deeply concerned about climate change, and their willingness to organize is far from waning.
It is equally clear, however, that the environmental movement lacks a common direction and ideological clarity. Most student environmental groups focus on raising awareness, changing individual consumption habits, and local actions such as composting at educational institutions and divesting university foundations from fossil fuels. In the main, such demands are symbolic and, when met, serve largely to enhance the image of the institution. Environmental activists who link the climate crisis to capitalism will generally challenge economic development itself and excessive consumption, rather than focus on the anarchic and irrational character of capitalist production.
The environmental movement needs a class perspective to guide it. Demands for degrowth and reduced individual consumption result in higher prices or taxes on consumption, which is nonsensical to the working class. Working-class interest lies in rational planning of the economy for the common good, which includes energy transition and environmental protection. To this end, the environmental movement needs to orient itself toward public ownership and democratic control of natural resources, energy and transportation. Debates on environmental issues are also an opportunity to develop anti-imperialist positions in the student movement: the Department of National Defence accounts for 60 percent of the federal government’s carbon emissions, and Montreal will soon host a new NATO research centre dedicated to preserving the geostrategic interests of imperialist countries in the face of climate change, which sharpens the contradictions of imperialism.
Closer cooperation between the student movement and environmental activists in the labour movement is a promising development. As they had done in the fall of 2019, around 15 unions voted for an illegal strike day in solidarity with the student strike for the September 2022 climate protest. Among their demands was a call for massive reinvestment in public services to address the effects of the climate crisis. However, this “climate strike” movement is entirely limited to the education sector and is not anchored to the labour movement’s approach to the issue. The defence of the environment should not compete with labour’s socio-economic struggles, but rather be expressed through them.
While trying to give a common direction to the climate mobilization, the national student association in formation will have to be careful not to leave aside the movement’s historical demands concerning students’ conditions: the imminent recession will only aggravate student and worker precarity. The new association will have to build links with other social forces if it is to count on their support, and particularly so with the labour movement, which is its natural ally in the struggle to defend public services and the living standards of the working class. Finally, without compromising its principles of fighting unionism, the national association must seek to rally the less mobilized elements of the student movement around its demands and maintain non-antagonistic links with the national federations. If there is a lesson to be learned from the 2012 strike, it is that the strength of the student movement is in its unity.
Let’s get organized and revive the fighting spirit of the Quebec student movement!