Quebec tuition hike: Students planning day of protest in downtown Montreal
CTV
Potentially thousands of students from Montreal's two English universities are expected to skip class and march through the streets on Oct. 30 to denounce the Quebec government's plan to hike tuition for out-of-province students.
Potentially thousands of students from Montreal's two English universities are expected to skip class and march through the streets on Oct. 30 to denounce the Quebec government's plan to hike tuition for out-of-province students.
The one-day strike action, dubbed the "blue fall protest," will see students march from Dorchester Square in downtown Montreal at 1 p.m. to McGill University's Roddick Gates.
McGill student Alex O'Neill told CTV News he is organizing the student-led movement alongside Noah Sparrow, a student at Concordia University. The pair is spreading the word on social media and has reached out to the student unions at both universities to get their support, as well as the Université de Montréal and Université du Québec à Montréal.
Earlier this month, the higher education minister, Pascale Déry, announced Quebec would nearly double the tuition fee for Canadian out-of-province students from roughly $9,000 to $17,000 beginning next fall. Under the measure, the provincial government would also collect the first $20,000 from international students and reinvest that money in the French university system.
The ruling CAQ government justified the plan as a way of reversing the decline of French, saying that out-of-province students largely come to study in English institutions and leave after graduation, and that Quebec taxpayers shouldn't be subsidizing students from the rest of Canada.
Quebec's three English universities — McGill, Concordia, and Bishop's University in Sherbrooke, Que. — are poised to be disproportionately affected by the tuition hikes as they receive the highest numbers of students from outside the province than French universities.
"It's really quite disheartening for myself to see just the same cards being dealt and then played again by the Quebec government to these same groups of people," said O'Neill, who said he sees the move by Quebec as an attack on access to education.
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