The Student
Protest of Quebec in 2012 started in February 13th in objection to
the raise of university tuition proposed by the Executive Council of Quebec.
The fees for university were to be raised from 2’168$ to 3’793$ over five
years, from 2012 to 2017. This means an increase in tuition fees of 75%. Considering
that I will be starting university this autumn, until 2016, this raise would
have deeply affected me.
On
September 4th 2012, Pauline Marois was elected, being the first
female prime minister of Quebec.
On September 8th, the protest comes to an end and on the 20th,
the raise is cancelled. Although, it came back later, reduced to a few % each
year.
Although I
wasn’t sure at the time whether I’ll go to university or not, I was against the
raise. Every time a general meeting took place, that was almost every Tuesday,
I would go and vote red, for the student protest to keep going and opposing the
increase in tuition fees. Yet, everyday there was more and more student voting
against the protest. Those were the green guys; they wanted to stop protesting
in order to go back to their studies. Of course most of them were graduates.
This began
some hostilities between students who were against the raise and those against
the protest. Honestly I didn’t like their arguments during the meetings. The
reds kept repeating the same ideas (in different words) each week and the
greens had no argument other than bashing the reds’ way or saying that “It’s
been long enough”. Still, one of them made a point saying that missing a whole
year mean much more when you were a graduate and that they would miss their
chance to get to university next autumn.
After a
while, I didn’t really care about how it would end anymore and when I went to
the meetings I started to refrain from voting. Mid-April, the protest stopped
in Rimouski and
we returned to class. After a month of not going to school, it was a pretty
hard wake-up call, but I managed to get back on track. At least the protest was
not for naught, with Pauline Marois being elected and at least easing the
raise. Though I still think that those who are still asking for free education
and asking for way too much.
