Student Strike
During their January 29-30 2005 congress, the students' unions members of the ASSÉ (Association pour une Solidarité Syndicale Étudiante) and other independent students' unions decide to form the Coalition de l’Association pour une Solidarité Syndicale Étudiante Élargie (CASSÉÉ) to coordinate the upcoming strike campaign. ("Cassé" is a French word equivalent to "broke".)
The strike was initiated on February 21, by a member of the CASSÉÉ, the anthropology students' association from University of Montreal (Association étudiante d'anthropologie de l'Université de Montréal). But the real start was given on February 24 when over 30,000 students members of the CASSÉÉ, and a few other unions joined the strike.
The FECQ and the FEUQ, federations of CEGEP and university unions, called for a student strike on March 4 and March 9 respectively. By March 15, over 100,000 students were on strike. This turn of events surprised many, as these organizations were traditionally opposed to strikes/boycotts as a negotiation tactic.
On March 16, 2005 students from traditionally more moderate institutions like École Polytechnique de Montréal, as well as from Concordia University and McGill's Post-Graduate Student Society joined the strike for 24 hours. Between 10,000 and 100,000 students (80,000 being the number most reported) took the streets for a peaceful march in Montreal, creating the largest student protest staged in Quebec until March 22nd, 2012. At its peak, over half the entire student population (230,000 out of 450,000) of Quebec were boycotting class simultaneously.
The École des Hautes Études Commerciales de Montréal and McGill University undergraduates Students' Society of McGill University joined the strike on March 18 for 24 symbolic hours, though the McGill boycott went largely unobserved and further action was rejected by the student body through an online poll. This constituted the first strike since 1967 for the HEC and the first strike in 40 years for Polytechnique.
On March 24, a 10,000 person march took place in Quebec City. A group of radical protesters came late and happened to take the lead of the march. When the march stopped in some locations, the radicals attempted to cause damage to buildings and to force the demonstration to degenerate; however, the intervention of pacifist marchers prevented such events from occurring.
Read more about this topic: 2005 Quebec Student Protests
Famous quotes containing the words student and/or strike:
“A black sun has appeared in the sky of my motherland.”
—Wuer Kaixi, Chinese student leader. Quoted in Independent (London, June 29, 1989)
“Too long we prayed
God in the thunder,
wonderful though he be
and our father;
too long, too long in the rain,
cowering lest he strike again.”
—Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961)