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Just two weeks after provincial elections in Quebec, Canada which led to victory for the Parti Quebecois (PQ), Montreal’s student movement is claiming a massive victory: the tuition hikes that thousands of students had been protesting since February have been dismissed, and a draconian law curbing people’s right to protest, passed by the Liberal party, was overturned by the PQ.

The Parti Quebecois has announced its desire to see future university tuition increases tied to the rate of inflation. However, it has pledged to organize a conference to discuss the issue at length. Now that the hikes have been repealed, Quebec students will continue to pay the lowest tuition in the country – a little over $2,000 Canadian dollars a year, less than half of the average $5,500 a year for students across Canada.

While two of the three student unions leading the lengthy strike are content with the turn of events, the third student group, CLASSE, considered the most radical, organized a march several hundred strong, on Saturday, demanding not just inexpensive, but free education. Two people were arrested during the demonstration.

In an op-ed for the Toronto Star, two spokespeople for CLASSE said “[I]f we are guilty of anything, it is of questioning the dogmas of the rich and powerful, who have spent the last decades trying to lower our expectations for what is politically possible. The purveyors of such dogmas insisted we be quiet and content, because our tuition was already the lowest in Canada. But it remains lowest precisely because we have fought our government every time it tried to raise it.”

GUEST: Éliane Laberge, President of the FECQ (Quebec Federation of College Students), Jeremie Bedard-Wien, spokesperson of CLASSE (Broad Coalition of the Association for a Student Union Solidarity)

Visit www.fecq.org and www.stopthehike.ca for more information.