The energy was high, even if the crowd was modest at a Toronto rally last night in solidarity with striking Quebec students.
A couple hundred people, mostly, though not all of them young, gathered outside George Brown College, and then marched up George Street chanting such slogans as “Education under attack, what do we do? Stand up fight back!” and jeering Quebec Premier Jean Charest – something very common at Quebec protests.
Many also banged pots and pans – a protest act which began in neighborhoods in Quebec in response to the draconian Bill 78 and is now occurring weekly in cities across Canada. The masses then marched to Ryerson University.
The rally was organized by the recently formed Ontario Students Mobilization Coalition, which has the support of the Canadian Federation of Students.
The coalition is made up of a small network of Ontario students with large aspirations. Several organizers and participants spoke of their desire for a “maplespread” – meaning the spreading of Quebec’s vibrant student protest movement developing to Ontario and across Canada, with the ultimate goal of making education free and accessible for all.
Roxy Cohen, a second year undergraduate at the University of Toronto, who is looking after external communications for the coalition, chuckles a little when I ask if she expects this rally to spark student strikes across Ontario. “My idealistic self is like absolutely student strike everywhere, but more realistically there’s definitely a lot of challenges when you look at U of T’s campus. It’s a really apathetic crowd… and yet at the same time as much as I can talk about apathy, everyday I see more red squares on the street (the symbol of the Quebec student protest movement).”
Roxy also sees a definite upside to being a small group right now. “We can afford to have loftier and more general goals.” She believes though that “…as we start mobilizing students and if we go towards a strike, we will definitely have a more narrow focus of, you know, here’s the ten steps that we propose of how to get to free education.”
Wouldn’t that be nice. I want to share Roxy’s optimism, but I was a student in this province for a long enough to know the apathy she speaks of all too well. Sometimes when I read about the 60s counter culture I feel I was born in the wrong decade, but lately, I’ve just been feeling as I watch things unfold in Quebec, that I was born in just the wrong province.
Xavier Le France, an organizer of 2005 Quebec student strike puts things in perspective, speaking to the assembled crowd outside the Ryerson Student Union Building. “Let’s be honest, this is a very good turn out tonight. I’m really excited about that, but it’s too small right? We know that.”
He then reminds the crowd that in 2004 CLASSE (the student group most active in the Quebec student strikes) was just a few hundred activists. “And guess what? ” He tells the couple hundred people gathered around him, “you are this network of activists!”
You have to start somewhere or you’ll certainly get nowhere. These students and allies also know, as Le France points out, that they need more than just ambition. “We need, we should and we will build a culture of general assemblies, of general membership meetings on campuses right here in Ontario,” he says.
Another member of the Ontario Students Mobilization Coalition, Laura Dolan, a McGill graduate, who describes herself on a “mobilizing mission” from Quebec, says that (a network of general assemblies across campuses) “is how Quebec did and that’s how we are going to do it.”
The rally concludes and most people disperse into the streets, though a small group, maybe 30 people, stay behind and forms a circle. I overhear one of the students explaining that one wiggles their fingers instead of clapping to agree – an instruction that is very familiar to anyone who has attended an Occupy General Assembly…
Maybe it was something they put in the lollipop they handed out in their info packets combined witH it just being one of those summer evenings when the air is both warm and cool enough for one to believe that just about anything could happen, but it wasn’t hard to imagine that circle growing and growing to hear the familiar ‘mic check’ echoing and echoing on campuses across the province, maybe even the country.
