One year after its 'Maple Spring,' Quebec hosts long-awaited tuition summit

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Protesters opposing Quebec student tuition fee hikes demonstrate in Montreal, May 20, 2012. Not even the most militant of Quebec's student federations expects this week's education summit to plunge the province into another Maple Spring. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Graham Hughes

MONTREAL - Not even the most militant of Quebec's student federations expects this week's education summit to plunge the province into another Maple Spring.

Quebec gained international attention last year when a dispute over proposed tuition hikes boiled into a months-long uprising.

The unrest, dubbed the Maple Spring, saw thousands of protesters swarm Montreal streets night after night. The crisis eventually faded away, in part because the Liberals lost power and the incoming Parti Quebecois government cancelled the tuition increases.

The PQ stickhandled its way through the perilous political issue, during the election, by promising to come up with a new tuition policy at an education summit.

Some students are feeling disillusioned and boycotting the two-day summit, which starts Monday, because they believe the new government has tuned out some of their ideas.

The ranks of the restive, however, appear smaller than last year.

"We are aware... that there will not be a new Maple Spring," said Blandine Parchemal of the ASSE student federation, one of the more militant groups within the movement.

"The Maple Spring is over."

The once-powerful ASSE, led by its charismatic former spokesman Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, suffered several setbacks last week after it failed to gather support on a strike vote from a number of its associations.

The most symbolic setback came at a college near Montreal known as a bastion of activism, which was the first school to declare a strike last February in an event that kicked off the movement.

This time, College de Valleyfield not only voted against the strike, it tabled a motion to disassociate itself from ASSE.

That doesn't mean the tuition divide between students and the government has disappeared.

One of the major sticking points is the PQ government's intention to freeze rates, which are the lowest in Canada, but to introduce small increases indexed to inflation.

Some student federations that made up last year's protest movement have drawn a line in the sand at an absolute tuition freeze.

They say they refuse to accept indexation.

ASSE, meanwhile, decided to boycott the summit completely over the government's refusal to debate the group's desire for zero tuition.

They view free university as an achievable goal, if only policy-makers would make it a priority like in many other jurisdictions. Former premier Jacques Parizeau, who as a young civil servant in the 1960s helped build the province's university network, expressed support for their cause.

The federation is now planning to take its battle back into the streets. ASSE has planned to stage a protest Tuesday outside the summit venue.

With memories of last year's clashes with demonstrators, Montreal police pledge to be present in large numbers and will maintain a security perimeter around the summit's building.

Student associations representing junior colleges and universities affiliated with ASSE have also voted to hold a one-day strike on Tuesday.

But any protest revival from within ASSE faces an uphill climb. Several of its member unions voted last week against the strike, including those from some of the most militant schools during last year's uprising.

"There's a lot of exhaustion," said Parchemal, ASSE's secretary of academic affairs. She was referring to the compressed, intensive academic schedules students have had to endure after the 2012 strikes cancelled sessions.

She maintained, however, that the associations that voted against the strike still oppose indexation and support free tuition. Parchemal added that some schools that voted against strikes last year, actually supported the most recent one.

That stood in contrast to places like College de Valleyfield — where the vote was 366 against the strike and 124 in favour of it, said a student-union representative.

"We didn't expect to be crushed like that," said Cedrick Mainville, himself a supporter of the strike.

He blamed the loss on student fears that a Yes vote would lead to a prolonged strike like last year.

ASSE's approach is much different than that of FEUQ, the largest student group in the province. The organization, which says it represents 125,000 students, plans to take its concerns to the summit's negotiating tables rather than into the streets.

FEUQ president Martine Desjardins believes the student movement still has many potential avenues to explore before presenting a strike vote.

"Before that, you need to prove that you've tried everything that you could," said Desjardins, who led FEUQ during last year's protests.

When asked if students in her federation would be prepared to strike over indexation, she said it's too early to know.

"We're not planning strikes, for example, in two weeks," she said. "It will take much more time to convince students to ramp up the pressure."

Desjardins disagrees with ASSE's decision to boycott the summit, a step she believes could hinder the process.

Last year's student unrest was ignited by opposition to the Liberal government's proposal to boost tuition rates by $325 per year, over five years. The government later tweaked the planned increases to $254 per year, over seven years.

Even though the hike still would have left Quebec with some of the lowest tuition in Canada, many students insisted they opposed the increase out of principle.

Some demanded a freeze to keep fees from inching closer to the higher rates in other provinces. Others called education a right that should be free, just like in some European countries.

The Marois government appears to be aiming for the middle ground with indexation, somewhere between a freeze and the increases proposed by the former Liberal government.

A recent poll suggested the PQ's middle-ground indexation solution had strong public support.

That's a far cry from the spring, when the PQ's early alignment with the protesters — such as wearing red squares in the national assembly and banging on pots and pans in the streets — came to be viewed as a political liability.

But the PQ did take some steps to try distancing itself from the protesters in the weeks before the election.

It ditched the red squares, and started side-stepping questions about its own tuition policy by promising a summit.

Now that the moment has arrived, university administrators worry the meeting won't address the serious issues they say are facing post-secondary institutions.

Relations between the PQ and the universities are already strained after the government announced a $124-million cut to universities in December, midway through the fiscal year.

Universities have gone on the offensive in the lead-up to the summit. At one of a series of town hall meetings, McGill University's provost called the cuts "an unprecedented attack" on higher education.

Alan Shepard, president of Montreal's Concordia University, said he's concerned the summit will get bogged down in the debate over tuition fees and proposals like that one won't see serious discussion.

Even with an increase tied to inflation, Quebec universities would remain woefully underfunded, he said.

"The difference is substantial when you compare the financing we have per student compared with the rest of Canada," he said in an interview.

One idea being floated by Shepard and others is to introduce differential fees based on the subject, so that a student in dentistry or law school would pay substantially more than a history student.

If the funding issue isn't somehow addressed, Shepard said Montreal risks losing what he called an "enormous jewel" - a hub for research and student learning at its four major universities.

Universite de Montreal rector Guy Breton said post-secondary institutions now realize they need to do a better job explaining their role. Last spring, he felt they were drowned out in a debate dominated by students and the government.

"The student message was two letters — n-o," he said.

"Ours is much more complicated."