Last week, Jacques Parizeau, former Quebec premier, announced that he believes free tuition is a viable option for Quebec. Only two weeks from Quebec’s education summit, Parizeau’s comments come at an ideal time for the student movement that changed the province, (and got the country thinking).
Translated from a February 12 interview with Le Devoir, he said “for more than 20 years, Quebec society has operated on the basis of a free education that eventually would come,” referencing Quebec’s close history with tuition and post-secondary. To combat an English-dominated Canada, Quebec froze tuition from 1968–1989 in an attempt to strengthen the French professional class. Parizeau is stating that it was always Quebec’s intention to have free tuition for accessibility to education for all classes.
However, as we saw last summer, Quebec’s intention is clearly not free tuition. The Maple Spring movement, one of the largest public protests in Canadian history, is fresh in the minds of Canadians. After a proposed tuition increase by the provincial government, an estimated 500,000 protesters filled the streets of Montreal each night for approximately 208 days.
In the end, Pauline Marois and the Parti Québécois won the provincial election on September 4, 2012 and immediately repealed the proposed tuition hike, providing a succinct but awkward win for the Maple movement.
Now, a year later, tensions are high once again. The association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante (ASSE), an organization that speaks on behalf of over 70,000 students which helped organize last year’s protests, is boycotting the Summit on Higher Education. In an interview with the Montreal Gazette, Spokesperson Jérémie Bédard-Wien said free education is not viewed as feasible by the Quebec government, so going to the summit would be a waste of time. “We could just as well be talking about pink elephants,” he said.
The government may also propose tuition indexation tied to inflation, meaning Quebec’s tuition would rise slightly each year. “We want to send a message that this is strong and clear that indexation is unacceptable,” said Bédard-Wien.
So, this leaves Quebec’s students and government at odds once again.
This also raises the yearly question of whether or not Quebec needs or deserves the low tuition it has. During the Maple Spring, much of the sentiment from people young and old in other provinces spoke to the fact that Quebec’s tuition was already too low, and that the proposed increases were realistic. But this may not actually be the case.
In Newfoundland and Labrador, for example, tuition freezes (and even decreases) have been the norm for over a decade. The provincial government has made enrolment and affordability its highest priority, allowing Memorial University and the province’s other post-secondary institutions to flourish. This is due, in part, to the vocal student demographic that protests tuition hikes every year—similar (but smaller in size) to the Maple Spring.
With affordability being a firm barrier in stopping students from continuing studies past high school, Quebec and Newfoundland may be on to something.
The steps Quebecois students are taking now could beneficially impact the entire post-secondary landscape in Canada tomorrow. Students in other provinces were not quick to jump on-board and protest on their streets last year, but if free tuition is on the table, students across the nation may stand up and fight.
Should free tuition be an option? Are we one spring away from accessible education?

James Michael McDonald is the editor of Jobpostings Magazine and jobpostings.ca. He has passions for human rights, gaming, and the Oxford Comma. Follow him on Twitter @mcjamdonald