Québec Students Teach the World a Lesson
Sur CanadianDimension.com
.
Eric Martin and Simon Tremblay-Pepin
.
(Les deux auteurs sont chercheurs à l’Iris, Institut de recherche et d’informations socio-économiques.)
« At the beginning of May , the British newspaper The Guardian reported that the student struggle against tuition fee hikes in Québec represented “the most powerful challenge to neoliberalism on the continent.”
.
Even Paris Match, a French tabloid typically given to celebrity gossip, wondered whether “the first large-scale socio-ecological movement could be emerging in the Belle Province.” Just as we write this article, La Presse, a major Québec daily, is predicting that a worldwide student strike is being planned for the fall, noting that the red felt square worn by protesting students has now become a “symbol of student struggle well beyond Québec’s borders.” Following in the footsteps of the Chilean student protests, the mobilization of Québec students has ignited the fuse of a growing powder keg of popular anger against neoliberalism in Québec, in Canada and in other parts of the world. We are witnessing an unprecedented mobilization to defend public education and with it the very idea of the common good, against the privatization of social relations. »
.
Even Paris Match, a French tabloid typically given to celebrity gossip, wondered whether “the first large-scale socio-ecological movement could be emerging in the Belle Province.” Just as we write this article, La Presse, a major Québec daily, is predicting that a worldwide student strike is being planned for the fall, noting that the red felt square worn by protesting students has now become a “symbol of student struggle well beyond Québec’s borders.” Following in the footsteps of the Chilean student protests, the mobilization of Québec students has ignited the fuse of a growing powder keg of popular anger against neoliberalism in Québec, in Canada and in other parts of the world. We are witnessing an unprecedented mobilization to defend public education and with it the very idea of the common good, against the privatization of social relations. »