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Spartacist Canada No. 174
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Fall 2012
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Plus ça change...
1978 Quebec Student Strike Against PQ
Amid the social turmoil that has shaken Quebec this year, the
bourgeois-nationalist Parti Québécois has postured as a supporter of the
students and their demands. But as the following article recounts, the PQ’s
austerity attacks during its first term of office in the 1970s provoked an
earlier, massive student strike. This underscores the fact that when in power
the PQ is a brutal administrator of the capitalist profit system against
workers, students and the poor, and that the program of nationalism is
counterposed to the interests of the working class. Marxists advocate Quebec
independence, and simultaneously fight to break workers and youth from illusions
in the PQ as well as its left appendages like Québec Solidaire.
The article was originally published in SC No. 33
(February 1979) under the title “100,000 Students Strike Against PQ.”
In one of the most militant student strikes in North America since
the sixties, thousands of students from community colleges (CEGEP) across Quebec
walked out for six weeks during November and December to protest a Parti
Québécois (PQ) government white paper on college education. The PQ’s white paper
proposed a whole series of budget cuts which would establish more direct control
over the academic life of the CEGEPs and reduce the accessibility to higher
education in Quebec. In particular, the report advocated establishing more
restrictive enrollment quotas and tying bursary allocations to the needs of
business.
The strike began in Rimouski on November 7, but rapidly spread to
other CEGEPs across the province. By the end of November close to 100,000
students were out on the streets demanding free tuition and guaranteed bursaries
indexed to the cost of living for all students. While the strike was strongest
among French-speaking students it is significant that it was joined by students
at at least one English-language CEGEP (the Lennoxville campus of Champlain
College).
When he was hustling votes to boost the bourgeois nationalist PQ
into power, party leader René Lévesque wooed Quebec students with the promise of
free education. Now that the PQ is in office, Lévesque has dropped his populist
appeals to student voters in the name of the “economic stability” so necessary
to marketing the bonds of an “independent” capitalist Quebec on Wall Street.
When the CEGEP students struck in protest against the white paper, PQ Minister
of Education, Jacques-Yvan Morin castigated them for their “greed” and wailed
that if the students won their demands it would cost the government $204
million. So much for free education. Meanwhile 600 students from Rimouski
rallied on November 15 (the second anniversary of the PQ’s electoral victory)
and burned copies of the PQ’s program and its white paper on education.
The PQ hardlined it from the beginning. At least three student
occupations were brutally broken up by the police. On November 23, 1,000
students who had marched to the Ministry of Education offices in Montreal to
press their demands were forced to call off a brief occupation of the offices
under threat of a riot squad attack.
The following day Lévesque told 3,000 students at Laval University
that the government had no intention of knuckling under to the CEGEP students’
demands. Nevertheless, Lévesque would prefer not to alienate Quebec’s student
population which comprises an important part of the PQ’s popular base.
Therefore, early in December the government announced a few cosmetic “reforms”
in its student aid program—a promise to “take into account” high student
unemployment and a minimal reduction in the parental contribution to educational
costs. By mid-December the strike had fizzled out at most colleges.
Students by themselves lack the social weight to wring significant
concessions from the capitalists and their government. The PQ’s education
cutbacks are of a piece with its attacks on public sector unions and its record
of strikebreaking. The same cops that were sent in to break up the student
occupations have been repeatedly used by the PQ to herd scabs and break strikes.
Thus Marxists seek to link the fight against educational cutbacks on campus to
the struggle of the labor movement against the bosses’ across-the-board
austerity offensive.
Lévesque once held out the promise of “free education” to win
student support for the PQ’s program of bourgeois nationalism. Today however
this promise has been ripped up and Lévesque is making it perfectly clear that
it is the working class, the exploited and the oppressed that are supposed to
foot the bill for “sovereignty” for the Quebec bourgeoisie.
Despite the PQ’s willingness to make demagogic promises of “a
better life for all” in an independent Quebec the CEGEP strike demonstrates that
Lévesque and Co. are as committed to the maintenance of capitalist class
privilege as any other bourgeois politicians. Education will be the right of all
and will genuinely serve the interests of the masses of the population only when
the workers of Quebec and English-speaking North America unite to sweep away
capitalism through socialist revolution.
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