Quebec: police brutality, legal threats fail to break the student strike

For 71 days, tens of thousands of students in Quebec have been involved in an all out strike against tuition fee increases, the longest and largest in their history. The government use of injunctions and police brutality has failed to break the movement. Here we provide some reports from comrades on the ground which give a flavour of this extraordinary movement.

On April 22, JB sent the following report:

"The government has been trying various tactics with little or no success over the past few months to either discredit or repress the student movement. As you have probably seen in the news, there have been mass arrests at various campuses with the tally reaching upwards of 500 people being arrested in the past week. 

The government has passed injunctions against the picket lines at many campuses and has encouraged the university administrations to continue to hold classes. This was met with fierce resistance from the student and battles between the police and students. Inspite of harsh repression and injunctions making the picket lines illegal, none of the injuctions have been successful in making sure the universities can function. At some schools the classes were cancelled irregardless of the lack of hard picket lines as not enough students and teachers attended classes. 

As an example of how advanced the consciousness of many students has come, at the University of Quebec at Outaouais the police tried to enforce and injunction and break the students but buses of students arrived (a few of our comrades were present) and a demonstration of close to 1,000 amassed and marched to the campus. They ended up holding a mass assembly to decide on action. They decided by a large margin that they would charge the riot police and retake the campus. The entire demonstration broke through police lines, errected barracades and held the university for a short period of time (luckily our comrades got out before the mass arrests started). They arrested almost 300 people there including some teachers."

Here's a video of the police presence at UoQ on April 17 and another one from April 19

"Yesterday, Jean Charest spoke in downtown montreal to a business crowd about his new plan to attract investment for the north. There was a demo of thousands that ammassed outside. The demonstration laid seige to the building and managed to break the police lines, entering the building and getting within a few escalators of the floor in which Charest was on. The cops managed to repel them out of the building. The riot cops were clearly surprised at the resolve of the students as the entire demonstration was shouting "MOVE! MOVE!..." as they chased the police down the street and showered them with projectiles. This an obvious role reversal. They arrested 90 people at that demonstration. Charest put his foot in his mouth as he mocked the students basically telling them to get jobs. Because of this situation, more and more people are calling for his resignation, even the rightwing Francois Legault!"

Here's a video of the police being chased away by the demonstrators and here's more footage of the demonstration against Plan Nord as it invaded the building and of earlier clashes outside the Omni Hotel

"Inspite of the media campaign of slander against the 'violence', and the fact that we are near the end of the semester, the number of students on unlimited strike has actually increased to the highest numbers ever with another 11,000 students joining this past week.

We are moving to draft a resolution which we will be publishing calling for a 24-hour general strike as the only way to defeat the government's austerity agenda."

A further report from comrade IaJ on April 22, described the situation in this way:

"Comrades, events are moving very fast in Quebec. (...)

As comrades know, this strike is the longest student strike in Quebec history, and the largest. It has lasted 69 days, and involves more than 178 390 students on strike. Those are the numbers of CLASSE (Broad Coalition of the Association for a Students Solidarity Union) member student unions that are on unlimited strike (see updated figures on the CLASSE website). But there are also FEUQ and FECQ member unions, which represent close to 50% of total students on strike, but it's more difficult to get the full numbers because a significant number of their member unions on strike have also joined CLASSE simultaneously.

Friday saw the graduate students union representing 11,000 students from University of Laval vote to go back on strike. This brings the total number of students on unlimited strike back to the level on march 22nd, slightly surpassing it even after having dipped for a while. Just to clarify, our previous number of 308,000 for that day included students striking for the 22nd to join the demo (see report here), but not having an open-ended strike.

So this is the situation with the strike itself, there remain serious reserves in the movement, with strike renewal votes this week on the island of montreal receiving mandates in the 80 and 90 percents. Outside of montreal however, the votes are coming in more close, so there are some dangers there.

Education Minister Line demanded these new votes happen, because many general assemblies had voted to simply continue to strike without need for renewal votes until the government agreed to negotiate. They had these votes, and if she was hoping the number of students on strike would drop, she was wrong. Though as I pointed out, there are some dangers of fatigue in some areas.

Line then declared that the schools should hold classes even with the strike going on, and mark students accordingly. At one school after another, strike-breaking youth resorted to the courts to order the resumption of classes, and to order the student unions to not block or disrupt them.

This opened a week or two of injunction, declaration of return to class by administrations, declaration of solidarity demo to reenforce the students on the targeted campus, big turnout with buses coming from all over quebec, battle with police and for the most part a failure to impose the injunction. At Outaouais for example, a thousand or more demonstrators showed up, and then held an open-air meeting and voted to charge the police lines to break through and into the campus and set up barricades in the university, and they succeeded. In that demo, some teachers were even arrested! Many administrations simply gave up, declaring that they have respected the court's requirement to use "all reasonable means" to reopen classes. Others have escalated their attempts.

An injunction is just a piece of paper if the students don't go to class, and the teachers don't teach it. So there is now a wave of new security guards that have flooded onto the campuses. These new layers are beasts, some armed with extendible night-sticks (a new sight on campus). They harrassing and intimidating students, but more importantly, teachers too. This was the case in UdeM, where teachers who were talking about how there is no one in their class to teach were told quite forcefully by a security guard to get back into their class.

This was also the case at Cegep Limoilou, where a philosophy teacher who planned to hold her class outdoors and turn it into a demo was locked into her room on campus by a security guard and prevented from joining her students outside, who were then beaten by police and ticketed $350 each for "blocking traffic", an offense which in the traffic law is specifically not applicable to demonstrations. These attacks on teachers have led to a wave of resolutions from campus teachers' unions declaring that they will not be used to force students back to class, that the government should negotiate rather than criminanilize the strike, and in some cases even that charest should resign and call elections!

Teachers have staged small rallies, in one case dozens showed up and tried to "pre-emptively" hand themselves over to the police for contempt of court, saying that when injunctions come to their schools, they plan on refusing to follow them, so they might as well get it over with and arrest them now, to save gas and work.

The government, after some incidents which got heavy media attention, declared it was willing to negotiate with FECQ and FEUQ but not CLASSE, until it agrees to "condemn violence". This was obviously an attempt to discredit CLASSE and divide the movement, a game on her part. The president of the FECQ (cegep students' federation) said that they would be willing to meet with her. Within an hour, the president of FEUQ had contradicted him by refusing, saying they have a mandate from their members to demand that CLASSE be present at any discussion. Looking like an idiot, the president of FECQ reversed his position immediately, saying he won't be one at the negotiating table. CLASSE told her that it would have to be discussed at their congress, which was held yesterday.

While the congress was going on yesterday, and CLASSE debated the condemnation of violence, the FECQ president, once again, put his foot in his mouth. He called on CLASSE to "denounce violence" and said he was willing to go to the table without them if they didn't. And again, FEUQ contradicted him. They proposed to the CLASSE congress that even if it didn't "denounce violence" and the minister refused to let them in, they could go as part of the FEUQ delegation so they could be in the room whether the minister likes it or not.

At the same time as the CLASSE congress was ongoing, another monster demonstration happened, exactly one month after the last one. This one was for "earth day" and funded by quebecor was a capitalist greenwashing maneuver. But organizers say 250,000 showed up, mostly not students (smoker comrades had to search for ten minutes to find a spot far enough away from the strollers that were everywhere). But red squares were everywhere, and the crowd was generally against Plan Nord. Chants of "charest demission!" and "degage!" could be heard, even though the organizers did not want slogans. Comrades chanted students and workers same fight, and the Rio-Tinto contingent joined them in it."

See video of the massive Earth Day demonstration

"Today Line has accepted to meet all unions, meeting is at 4 PM, but with the condition that they end "economic disruptions" for 48 hours. I don't think this is unrelated to the showing yesterday."

Comrades in Quebec have also produced a statement condemning the use of injunctions and calling on the wider trade union movement to take solidarity action with the student movement, including a 24h general strike, as the only way forward. 

In the next few days we hope to provide further updates. You can also follow the websites of Fightback and La Riposte.  See also the strike website greve2012 and the CLASSE website for more info. 

A more updated report can be read here: Police repression and injunctions fail to stop the Quebec student movement (Joel Bergman, April 24)