Occupy on steroids: Quebec’s Long, Costly Student Strike Drags on
The nastiness that’s been going on in Quebec the past three months is Occupy on steroids.
A highly disruptive strike by college students in Quebec province is attracting international attention, and hurting the French-speaking province’s economy. As of yet, most Americans don’t know much about this big, persistent Canadian economic and political struggle.
Bridges have been blockaded. So have office buildings. Truckers have been forced to park their rigs for hours while student protests close the ports. It almost goes without saying that many bank and business windows have been shattered.
“Aux barricades!” is the same rallying cry you hear during massive and disruptive student protests in Paris, and it’s spread to “la belle province.”
The 13-week-long (and counting) strike is angering a lot of mild-mannered, liberal-minded Canadians who have had enough of the highly vocal student group that’s striking and protesting daily, even those with a progressive bent. Quebec’s already fragile economy, burdened by decreasing productivity for years, is taking a further beating.
“When are you going to write something about these hooligans?” a Montreal female friend of many years demanded of me last week. “This is really hurting business here.”
She was disgusted with nightly traffic tie-ups in the city’s downtown area created by marches — all over a proposed, paltry-seeming C$325 yearly tuition increase by the government at the province’s four-year colleges and CEGEPs (junior colleges).