Carrés Rouges

I've written about the sad contemporary state of academia, both about who's got it good in academia these days and about the inaccessibility of research to the general public, but I haven't said much (at length, in this blog) about the situation in Quebec that's been going on for the last few months. I volunteered some time ago to give a talk on the situation at the Philosophy Goes Public lecture series at the Guelph Public Library, and so finally my arm has been twisted and I've been forced to sit down and sort out my ideas, as well as my reasons for holding those ideas. The talk will be in about ten days, and hopefully this entry will serve not only as a way to fill people in who won't be there but would like to be, but also as a way for me to get some feedback on the structure (and content) of the talk beforehand. I'm therefore looking forward, probably more than was the case with any previous blog post, to the commentary this receives. Without any further ado:

Carrés Rouges: Quebec's tuition hikes and student protests

1. History

I'll start with a quick timeline of events I consider to be salient, for which I'm heavily indebted to Cayley Sorochan. From 1963–2012, Quebec has more often than not had a tuition freeze in place for university education. These were not gifts from the government, of course, but goals achieved through the hard work of past students who demonstrated and protested when previous hikes were proposed/declared. In 2010, the Quebec Liberal Government, led by Jean Charest, proposed an increase of 75%, to take place between 2012 and 2017. This proposal, calling for students to pay their "fair share," was met with student resistance from the very beginning, and was seen to undo the hard work of many previous generations of students. In effect, it would bring Quebec tuition up to the levels of other provinces, where there is not the same history of students keeping tuition down. Requests by student groups to meet with the Charest government on this issue were denied.

After two years of getting nowhere, CLASSE, an umbrella organisation with representative democratic structure for 342 000 students, voted for a general student strike. Their counter-proposal to the Quebec government was a 0.7% tax on banks, which would effectively raise enough money not only to cover the government's perceived shortfall, but also to cover tuition fees entirely throughout the entire province. On March 22, 200 000 students demonstrated in an attempt to get the attention of the government, who still refused to meet regarding this issue.

Institutions and students against the strike filed an injunction against the protestors, prompting the institutions to hire additional security to profile students and identify them for disciplinary action. Where picket lines (composed of students as well as professors) stood strong in the face of these tactics, riot police were called in to disperse them and prevent them from entering campus buildings.

In a vote on April 22, CLASSE changed tactics, voting unanimously in favour of civil disobedience, but unanimously denouncing violence. Roads and bridges were blocked by protestors, bags of bricks were on a few occasions thrown on metro tracks to disrupt commuting, the office windows of education minister Line Beauchamp were painted red (for the red square, which was already at this point quickly becoming the symbol of this protest movement), and windows of some businesses were broken. Police often responded to this civil disobedience with violence, and violence was cited as the reason for Beauchamp refusing to meet with student groups.

On April 25, Beauchamp finally agreed to meet with students, but only to discuss loans and bursaries, not the hike. At this meeting, the Liberals proposed to raise tuition at a slower rate over seven years instead of five, but ultimately this worked out to more than the 75% increase that was initially proposed. After some subsequent meetings, Beauchamp believed that she has nothing left to contribute to the resolution of this issue, and resigned as minister of education.

The government still claimed that it was willing to negotiate in good faith, but on May 16 proposed Bill 78: the content of this bill illegalises any demonstration that does not submit its route to police at least eight hours ahead of time, or any demonstration within 50 metres of an education institution. Fines are stipulated for offending students, student leaders and student groups. In the case of an infraction of the bill, institutions are free to stop collecting and passing along fees to the student groups in question, and these penalties apply not only to offending groups, but also groups that are judged not to have done enough to prevent their members from acting. On the same day, the city of Montreal passed a bill outlawing the wearing of masks during public demonstrations.

On May 18, Bill 78 passed into law. A massive, peaceful demonstration that night was met with rubber bullets and tear gas from riot police. Those who were arrested were not charged under Bill 78, but rather fined for illegal assembly. The outcome of this is that the legal contestation of of these charges could not serve as a venue to examine the legality of Bill 78 in court. May 22 saw the largest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history, as an estimated 400 000 people demonstrated in defiance of Bill 78. Though no arrests were made that night, 500 people were arrested the following day in a kettling operation by police. Once again, a change of tactics came about. On May 26, rather than marching in a single large demonstration, thousands of protestors demonstrated in dozens of small groups through Montreal, walking through the streets at night and banging pots and pans. These demonstrations inspired solidarity marches across Canada and the world.

On May 28, the Quebec government made a new proposal to the students. However, the offer was retracted despite the fact that the student groups were willing to negotiate and compromise. One of the big problems throughout these negotiations was that while the government delegates representatives to negotiate with the students, the student groups have a representative democracy: their representatives are just the mouthpiece that passes along the will of the students as expressed through a vote. They have no power to make decisions on the students' behalf.

In June, Bill 78 was upheld in Quebec lower court. In July, the Quebec Human Rights Commission denounced Bill 78 as undermining the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The Bill is set to be heard in Quebec Supreme Court in the fall of 2012. September 4 saw the Liberal government voted out of office in a provincial election, with Jean Charest losing the seat in his home riding of Sherbrooke. He subsequently stepped down as head of the Quebec Liberals. Pauline Marois, whose Parti Québecois promised to abolish the hike, became the new premier of Quebec. However, it is a minority government, and so it remains to be seen how this situation will play itself out. (Added in an edit on Sept. 24, 2012: The PQ has actually followed through on their promise and abolished the proposed hike.)

2. Value of education

Having laid out the historical groundwork, I now want to raise three sets of issues. The first is about the value of education. During times such as these, one I think has to reflect on whether education is a luxury good or an important social good. Clearly individuals benefit economically from being educated, but it seems that society as a whole benefits as well, and not only in economic terms.

Conceiving of education as a luxury good alone is a non-starter in virtue of those social benefits that come from having an educated populace. Certainly in Quebec, people have long been party to the idea that education is emancipatory, that it is the key to freedom. The philosopher John Dewey would certainly have agreed, as he claimed that education should not be conceived solely as creating human capital for the workforce. Rather, education should be teaching us to learn and to solve problems, not simply to hone a craft and send us out into the economic market. That doesn't even make good business sense considering the pace with which markets change and old skills become antiquated: we need to learn not only what will be successful today, but the skills we'll need to learn and innovate what will be successful tomorrow.

When education becomes financially inaccessible, we limit not only the quality of our workforce: more importantly, we limit access to intellectual freedom (from persuasion) and thus ultimately limit access to political equality. Pricing education out of the range of the masses therefore undermines its very value as emancipatory because the playing field can only be equalled among those who can afford it financially. (This take on education undermines the claim that students can boycott but not strike, likening the students to customers who withhold their patronage from a certain business.)

3. Accessibility

Taking up the conception of education as emancipatory, we then have to ask about the second of three issues: accessibility. Specifically, what is the "fair share" for a student to pay? Of course, whatever isn't covered through tuition must be covered by the government, which collects money from the people and industry through taxation; so perhaps a good way to reformulate this question is to ask what would constitute a fair distribution between student tuition and social contribution through taxation. According to the commodity view of education, many will claim that the students are gaining financially from their degrees, thereby justifying a larger portion of costs being covered by students.

However, society as a whole also benefits greatly from having an educated populace: middle-classers typically contribute huge amounts to the public coffers, not to mention the fact that the velocity of money in a society greatly increases as disparity falls. Furthermore, the private sector gains an awful lot from public research funded by the government, and the great number of university graduates in society makes the bargaining position of businesses that much better at the negotiating table because they know that their (prospective) employees don't have a plethora of other offers on the table, whereas the employers have many eager beavers knocking at their doors. The market is flooded with educated workers, not with jobs requiring that education. So yes, there certainly is an economic benefit for the students that might translate into a reasonable expectation that they cover some of the cost. However, there are also benefits for society at large as well as private corporations, and those benefits should translate the same way.

Everything gets more expensive over time when money is inflating, and so it seems reasonable to expect education contributions to go up as well, not just for students but across the board. From 1985–2005, the proportion of Canadian university costs covered by tuition went from 14% to 30%. In Quebec, to cover tuition costs alone required 4 weeks of full-time work in 1978, 2.8 weeks in 1989, 6 weeks in 2000, 6.7 in 2012, and is estimated at 8.8 weeks of work by 2015. Life is indeed getting more expensive, but why is the burden being shifted proportionately more and more onto tuition?

CLASSE proposed a 0.7% bank tax in Quebec, which would cover all tuition costs (including the proposed raise) for the entire province. The Big Five banks in Canada declared $21.8 billion in profits in 2011. By contrast, the federal government owns $14.5 billion in student debt; the average student debt in the Maritimes rose from $21 000 to $28 000 between 1999 and 2004 (a 33% increase in 5 years); Quebec has the lowest average in the country at $13 000; estimates vary between 7 000 and 30 000 when trying to anticipate how many Quebec students would lose access to higher education as a result of the proposed increase; in 1963, corporate taxation represented 55% of the federal tax collected, whereas in 2011 the corresponding figure had plummeted to 18%. Life gets more expensive because of inflation, but why so much more expensive for some and not for others?

Specifically, the increase in tuition hits people at a terrible time in life, financially speaking. Paying this increase through taxation later in life, when financial matters are more stable for most people, means that we end up paying drastically less in interest to the banks that offer these loans. Furthermore, it allows us to distribute the burden according to one's means (one of the main benefits of differential taxation). Though on average there is an advantage, not everyone who goes to university will be financially successful. Paying for education through taxation allows us to shelter those who would otherwise live under the yoke of their student debt. We do the same thing with health care in Canada. Increasing tuition is a simple way to inject money into the education system, but we should not therefore come to the conclusion that it is the best way to do so simply because it is the simplest.

Another reason that is often given for increased tuition being reasonable is that it would bring Quebec more into line with the tuition levels of the other provinces, which are of course far lower than the levels one finds in the United States. However, while we're on the topic of financial matters, it makes sense to ask whether these systems fit into a wider financial situation that we see as enviable. Does the debt situation in the US seem all that appealing? Is that really the road down which we want to go? The rest of Canada rightly points out that Quebec's financial matters are not in great shape, particularly Alberta, the source of much transfer payment money.

However, is that to say that the kind of social democracy towards which Quebec strives is untenable? The Scandinavian countries stand as an obvious counter-example to that claim. Denmark has no tuition fees, and they manage to run a pretty successful shop, economically speaking. Their social services are incredible: the difference is that their level of taxation is completely different from ours. For instance, there is a 100% tax rate on automobiles, much of which certainly fills the coffers of public transit systems, offered as the green alternative to private transit. Such nations have among the highest standards of living, with great records of social parity. By contrast, the United States has an attrocious record when it comes to wealth disparity and environmental matters. When choosing one's reference class for comparison, how do we (Quebecers, Canadians) really see ourselves proceeding in the future: towards the American or the Scandinavian model?

Other comparisons are historical: many Baby Boomers criticize current students for wanting everything handed to them on a silver platter, when the Boomers see themselves as having had to work for what they have. While undoubtedly that is true, the Baby Boomers lived in a period of great economic prosperity: the figures cited earlier about the number of weeks of full-time work required to cover tuition demonstrate that what students these days are asking for is actually a situation comparable to what previous generations actually enjoyed (and not "unfairly" enjoyed, those previous generations seem to say).

Students are fighting for the opportunity their forebears had, and the declining contribution of the wealthiest segment of society explains why they have to fight. In times of booming economy, Canadians lived well. Money flowed through the economy, with taxes taking a slice at every turn, providing the funds necessary to support the social programs of the era. Those same generations were not saying at the time that they ought to cut back for the future, nor are they rushing to give back their wonderful benefits now that we're in an economically trying present. Who was the last MP who refused their indexed pension claiming that the economy just couldn't afford it?

It is claimed that the education system in Quebec, as it is presently organized, cannot sustainably run on its current levels of funding. The simple solution to this is just to throw more money at the system, and the simplest way to do that is just to raise tuition for the people who use the service that that system provides. Just as one may ask whether other sources of funding are more appropriate, so too may someone ask whether the structuring of the system needs revision. After all, Quebec already spends more on higher education per student than any other province, though only marginally so. Why, then, is the money falling short there in particular? In the Quebec education system (in general, not specifically in higher education), 10 cents of every $1 spent goes to administration. Whereas Denmark has 50 administrators/1 000 000 students, Quebec has 5 000 administrators for that same number (figures from 1988). If the Scandinavian model is informing our ideal of social democracy, perhaps we should be following their streamlined administrative practices rather than moving further and further from their tuition-free funding structure.

In the two decades from 1988–2008, administration costs rose from 12% to 20% of total spending at Canada's 25 biggest universities. Teaching costs dropped from 65% to 58% of the total over that same period. In Quebec, university administration fees jumped 83% from 1997-2004. Additionally, we have seen a trend away from expensive tenured professorships towards relatively cheaper sessional positions, in addition to larger class sizes. We now expect academics to teach more students for less money, while the administration eats up the surplus generated thereby, all the while crying poor and requesting more money of the university's students. All this in the face of growing pressure to form partnerships with private industry, SSHRC and NSERC money going to the development of ideas for private profit.

The quality of education suffers from large classes, as well as overburdened teaching staff who are remunerated less and less. Furthermore, administrative costs are eating up more and more the budget, leading to an untenable funding situation where students are being asked to pay more to support a system that invests less and less in their education and ever more in private interests. Those interests, however, are being taxed less and less for the benefit that they receive from this research. This picture of universities as economic stimulators does not sit well with the emancipation model of education; it furthermore raises some very troubling questions about the degree to which public money ends up in private pockets.

4. Wider democratic issues

What do the actions of the Quebec government tell us about our democracy? First off, raising tuition suggests that money is lacking in the higher education system, which as discussed earlier is an important institution for emancipation and democratic practice. Money really is lacking, and one need only look at the state of repair of buildings on university campuses to see it. However, raising tuition suggests that they are exploring the simplest option to close the gap. Refusing to negotiate with students suggests that the structure of university funding is not open for discussion: the government knows what's best on this matter and will dictate it to their public rather than working with them (or for them, horror!). It suggests not only that the financing of higher education is off limits for conversation, but also that the same is true of the structuring of higher education. The government will not discuss the social values that underlie these decisions.

What about Bill 78? This is a much more troubling point, and really what turned an education issue into a full-blown social issue, touching everyone in the province (and many, many beyond), leaving no one indifferent. The fact that the government claimed to be negotiating in good faith with the students when they introduced Bill 78 suggests that they have no scruples about duplicity. Furthermore, they will not hesitate very long before applying pressure while refusing to sustain nearly any applied to themselves. (Remember that CLASSE voted in favour of peaceful civil disobedience, and that in most cases it is the police who are believed to have sparked the small number of violent outbursts. In fact, the very small amount of violence and low cost of damages for such a large movement, and one so prolonged, suggests that these protests were actually quite orderly and civilized.)

Our politicians are far too ready to dictate values to us, and far too reticent to have any discussion on the matter with the general public: to ban peaceful protest and general assembly is to silence the voice of the public. Ultimately, it should raise serious questions for us about the role of our politicians. Namely, are they not in place (ideally) in order to help us translate our values into the structuring of our society? And how should we respond to the paternalistic attitude that they have our best interests in mind and will protect us from ourselves?