University and college classes start today for one of the most cash-strapped, debt-burdened, under-employed cohorts of post-secondary students this country has ever seen.[1] But that’s not the story. Instead, on the radio, in the newspaper, online and among many university instructors, the focus is on “entitled” students, “coddled” first-years, and
Continue readingTag: students
The Liberal Scarf: "Students putting students first" – Ontario Student Trustees’ Association calls Putting Students First Act "a fair deal", but will the NDP and Catherine Fife listen?
The NDP and Catherine Fife have already come out against the Putting Students First Act, but will they listen to the students of Ontario themselves or their big union money interests? Here’s what the Ontario Student Trustees’ Association says about the Liberal government moving to make sure students are in
Continue readingThe Liberal Scarf: With education on the line, will Tim Hudak flip-flop on a wage freeze like he did on full day kindergarten?
We know Tim Hudak’s position on full day kindergarten for Ontario families has gone from this: To this “Tim Hudak…condemned the program, which is to be fully rolled out by 2014″ with Hudak’s double flip-flop backed by Kitchener-Waterloo Progressive Conservative candidate Tracey Weiler: “Weiler said that she “supports the leader’s position”
Continue readingCANADIAN PROGRESSIVE WORLD: A CLASSE act for Quebec’s next provincial election
Should an election be called, the more militant group of the Quebec student protest movement will mobilze students against ideology and neo-liberal politics. That’s according to CLASSE’s new manifesto, recently launched by Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois (pictured), the organization’s spokesman. The manifesto focuses on four core themes: democracy, feminism, social justice and
Continue readingelementalpresent: How to Eliminate Tuition Fees (and do it right)
Quebec student group CLASSE has come forward with an offer of what it would take to end their almost four-month strike: the elimination of tuition fees by 2016. The plan is based on taxing banks, starting at 0.14 per cent per cent this year, and rising to 0.7 per cent
Continue readingLeft Over: The Little School Board that Could….
Okay, kids, gather around, and I’ll tell you a tale of courage and honesty that you will be sure to think is fiction, but, no, it really happened, once upon a time..it’s really true. In the wilds of the kingdom of Canada, in the little valley of Cowichan, far, far
Continue readingTattered Sleeve: Paint It, Red
But the sound wasn’t sad!Why, this sound sounded merry!It couldn’t be so!But it WAS merry! VERY! Reports are the casserole protests continued tonight. Thousands marching up St-Laurent Blvd earlier this fine evening. Good for them. “That’s the spirit,” as my eight-year-old son likes to say. You know, for months I
Continue readingTattered Sleeve: Paint It, Red
But the sound wasn’t sad!Why, this sound sounded merry!It couldn’t be so!But it WAS merry! VERY! Reports are the casserole protests continued tonight. Thousands marching up St-Laurent Blvd earlier this fine evening. Good for them. “That’s the spirit,” as my eight-year-old son likes to say. You know, for months I
Continue readingTattered Sleeve: Paint It, Red
But the sound wasn’t sad!
Why, this sound sounded merry!
It couldn’t be so!
But it WAS merry! VERY!
Reports are the casserole protests continued tonight. Thousands marching up St-Laurent Blvd earlier this fine evening. Good for them. “That’s the spirit,” as my eight-year-old son likes to say.
You know, for months I was reluctant to get behind this particular student-led movement. It really left a bad taste in my mouth every time I heard about “striking” students thwarting others from attending classes. And like many others I spoke with, “strike” (or its french equivalent, “grève”, rhymes with Bev) seemed a misnomer. If anything, these guys were boycotting their classes, or at the very least, “protesting”. But calling it a strike seemed disingenuous.
I am however, a tolerant Canadian, so I did not quibble with them throwing bricks on subway tracks to get attention when the hardline Quebec Liberal government of Jean Charest refused to even meet with them and hear their grievances. It was not very becoming of Charest, but then again, he is a pompous ass, and when you knowingly elect a pompous ass, you have to expect to live with that devil you knew and know. He was, after all, merely a young pup when learning the tricks of the trade within Mulroney’s cabinet.
But once he had had enough of these unwavering protesters, his pomposity grew to such outbound proportions with his Bill 78 that I knew in a heartbeat that rather than making a Swift, Decisive, Strong Leader decision, he had instead impetuously shat the provincial bed.
I look on it now as my Grinch moment. It awakened me.
There I was, hand cocked to ear, sitting atop Mount Crumpet with all the self-righteousness of the many people like me, feeling unlawfully hindered from wending our little ways through the workings of life to get to our woefully underpaid jobs. I was fully (gosh, naively) expecting to hear the mea culpas from CLASSE spokesperson Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois and the others. And like all those who’d poo-pooed the movement and quietly categorized them as uber-brats, I had expected them to back down and accept that they were about to be firmly screwed again. The way I got screwed. The way we all have been getting screwed by the untenable but nonetheless well-embraced mantra of neo-liberalism that doesn’t know anything other than sucking every ounce of life from the 99.9% to feed the self-important point-0-one.
But this generation of students? Nuh-uh. They wouldn’t – and won’t – have any of it, even though Bill 78 meant these students had just had their whole semesters scuppered.
But just like the Whos in Whoville who had been robbed of all their worldly possessions, the “entitled” young buggers came right back out into the commons anyway. They came out in numbers much greater than what wept for Maurice Richard’s passing, and they sang their protest song on Tuesday, May 22nd, 2012. Over a hundred thousand people marched in bold defiance of a law that so obviously contravenes our utmost rights (bestowed by the people to those that rule us, remember, not the other way around), even the dimmest of voters could not help but see it.
We all heard them; me from the 8th floor office on de Maisonneuve Blvd where I earn subsistence wages for an American company that constantly insists none of us may take a sick day without later furnishing a Doctor’s note, never mind that it’s against Quebec law to ask for that for absences of less than three days.
I went down to the street on my break and watched the marchers head down Peel Street. They were joyously defiant. They had all the violence of a John Lennon or Ghandi.
They were on the right side of history, I figured.
For what I had heretofore failed to see was that the tuition increase wasn’t all they were protesting. The increase, or “Hausse” was more like the straw that broke the camel’s back – the camel that the mass media was always looking beyond because it figured nobody cared so much about camels as about Kardashians. And if it’s sad that they are right in that assumption, it’s also true that they had a big hand in making it so.
I guess I didn’t relate because my own experience in university was that tuition kept going up each year, but my parents (what foresight!) had been saving for me and my sister since we were tots to make sure we had money to get a degree. And they had expected it to be a lot more expensive than it turned out to be.
My first year at Concordia University was also the last year of a long-standing tuition fee freeze (1988), and my contract for a full year’s study, including extra administrative costs, was all of $750. After that, there was books and living expenses of course. And I did my bit. I toiled unrewarded as a volunteer student journalist; I paid my way and switched to studying part-time once the $350-a-year increases kicked-in in 1989, working minimum wage at McDonald’s – a real Flaherty job if ever there was one.
Since graduation, I have found the market for my writing, my reporting, indeed the sum of my skills learned within the two departments of Journalism and Communications, to be drier than a James Bond martini. The jobs just haven’t been there, and when they were, I jumped at them, only to find myself jammed-up with numerous others, like the hammers of an old manual typewriter all struck at once, with none eventually hitting the ribbon, but left with no recourse save full retreat.
I am 43 years old, with two dependants and an ex-wife. I had to start over last year, grateful as hell to find employment that provides good family benefits and a measure of security (not maternity-leave replacement or fixed-term contract work, but permanent, full-time with vacation), despite the fact it pays less than I made twelve years ago as a McDonald’s manager.
So if the greater message is that this society is just not providing opportunity for the average Joe and Josephine, yeah, I get it.
And as someone who is squarely in the red, living in a tiny apartment with no money to go on vacations and unable to set aside anything for my kids’ education, let alone my own retirement (which I imagine won’t come before I am 70, if not 67 – unlike the tsk-tsk-ing well-heeled Boomer generation that is so disgusted by all this protesting), you bet I get it. Even Arcade Fire and Mick Jagger get it.
So I am with you. Sorry I wasn’t listening earlier. That’s what happens when you’re working for the clampdown. I always loved that song. Now I’ve lived it.
Not the way I’d hoped.
*Photo: thanks, Aly Neumann!
Continue readingelementalpresent: On Strike from Life as we Know it
The Quebec Government just announced a “special law” intended to bring an end to the 14-week student strike in that province. The law would postpone the rest of this semester and allow current students to finish it in August before starting school again in October. The announcement came on the
Continue readingTattered Sleeve: Québec Students: You’re Coming Along
After school is over you’re playing in the parkDon’t be out too late, don’t let it get too darkThey tell you not to hang around and learn what life’s aboutAnd grow up just like them, won’t you let it work it outAs I type this, thousands of youth are ou…
Continue readingTattered Sleeve: Québec Students: You’re Coming Along
After school is over you’re playing in the parkDon’t be out too late, don’t let it get too darkThey tell you not to hang around and learn what life’s aboutAnd grow up just like them, won’t you let it work it out As I type this, thousands of youth are
Continue readingTattered Sleeve: Québec Students: You’re Coming Along
After school is over you’re playing in the parkDon’t be out too late, don’t let it get too darkThey tell you not to hang around and learn what life’s aboutAnd grow up just like them, won’t you let it work it out As I type this, thousands of youth are
Continue readingCo2 Art: Should Quebec Students’ Strike for Lower Tuition be Spread to Rest of Canada?
Students in Quebec have been protesting a 75% tuition increase over five years announced by the provincial government.there are two sides to this storyIn favour of keeping lower tuition1. many countries, such as Norway, Sweden, Brazil, the Bahamas and…
Continue readingCo2 Art: Should Quebec Students’ Strike for Lower Tuition be Spread to Rest of Canada?
Students in Quebec have been protesting a 75% tuition increase over five years announced by the provincial government. there are two sides to this story In favour of keeping lower tuition 1. many countries, such as Norway, Sweden, Brazil, the Bahamas and Scotland, have free university education, and it is
Continue readingCo2 Art: Should Quebec Students’ Strike for Lower Tuition be Spread to Rest of Canada?
Students in Quebec have been protesting a 75% tuition increase over five years announced by the provincial government. there are two sides to this story In favour of keeping lower tuition 1. many countries, such as Norway, Sweden, Brazil, the Bahamas and Scotland, have free university education, and it is
Continue readingArt Threat: Education versus war – Friday Film Pick: War Made Easy
As students wage a massive strike in Quebec, over proposed tuition hikes that will nearly double rates in a few years, and with police responding like violent fascists—blinding the eye of one young student only two days ago—it seems an apt time to reflect on the hierarchy of values, matched
Continue readingThe Scott Ross: BC Teachers On Strike Yet Still Teaching
This week Teachers in BC haven’t even been in the classroom, yet they’ve still managed to teach their students one of the most important things; how to take a stand. Critics will point out at how young people are already too self-assured and that they already have no respect for
Continue readingThings Are Good: Kids Should Fail
A prevailing attitude in North American schools is that students shouldn’t be able to fail, but really what better place than a school to learn from mistakes? Thankfully people are noticing that letting kids not excel at something is actually a good thing. Interestingly, it’s in the world of games
Continue readingThe Scott Ross: We All Lose In BC Teacher Labour Dispute
Who will win in the latest labour dispute between BC teachers and the provincial government? It doesn’t matter, we are already losing. Now a politician isn’t going to tell a province this, a union representative isn’t going to hold a press conference to point it out, and people aren’t going
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