The International Students for Social Equality (ISSE) is holding an emergency meeting in Montreal this Sunday to discuss the way forward for the militant, two-month long strike that university and CEGEP (college) students have mounted against the Quebec Liberal government’s plans to raise university tuition fees by 75 percent. [For details of the meeting, please scroll to the bottom.]
The student strike is now at a crossroads. The government, courts, and corporate media are mounting a concerted campaign to break the strike, using court injunctions and police violence and by brandishing the threat that the current semester will be cancelled.
Behind this ruling class intransigence lies its recognition that the strike is an implicit challenge to the austerity programs being implemented by all levels of government across Canada and its hostility to the students’ championing of the notion that quality post-secondary education should be a social right.
Sunday’s meeting will critique the futile, single-issue protest strategy being pursued by the rival student associations and their efforts to promote the big business Parti Quebecois as an alternative to the Liberals.
It will advance the need for students and their supporters to turn to the working class—the only social force that is capable of opposing big business’ drive to make working people pay for the capitalist crisis and of reorganizing socio-economic life so as to make social needs, not private profit, the animating principal.
The meeting will elaborate the ISSE’s fight to make the student strike the catalyst for the mobilization of the working class across Canada, independently of the pro-capitalist trade unions, to oppose all concessions and cutbacks and fight for social rights, including the right to free education for all at all levels.
We strongly encourage all participants in the student strike, their supporters, and WSWS readers in the Montreal area to attend.
Montreal
Sunday, April 15, at 1:30 PM
Centre St-Pierre, Room 202
1212 Panet (near the Beaudry Metro Station)