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Reviewed by:
  • Generation Rising: The Time of the Québec Student Spring by Shawn Katz
  • Xavier Lafrance
Shawn Katz, Generation Rising: The Time of the Québec Student Spring (Halifax and Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing 2015)

The 2012 Québec student strike acquired global exposure. It was also the first student strike in the province that saw massive participation by Anglophone students. Unlike previous student strikes in Québec, this last one also caught the interest of English-speaking Canada. Shawn Katz’s presentation and analysis of this historical mobilization is a testimony, and will hopefully be a further stimulant, of this newfound interest.

Katz offers a thorough and rich description of the unfolding of the different steps of the student strike and of the broader popular movement – the “maple spring” – that shook Québec in 2012. The book proposes a well-informed and necessary contextualization of the student spring, discussing the neoliberal restructuring of post-secondary education undertaken by a government embroiled in mounting corruption scandals. Katz, as did many striking students in 2012, understands and eloquently explains how the tuition hike that sparked the strike was part of a broader series of reforms that undermined the democratization of Québec’s education system in the wake of the “quiet revolution” of the 1960s. This restructuring is an attempt to turn access to education into a personal responsibility and an investment in one’s “human capital.”

The student and popular mobilization encountered severe repression. Katz offers a vivid description of the paternalistic way in which Jean Charest’s Liberal government reacted to the student strike by refusing to bargain for a long period, before engaging in bad faith bargaining, all the while resorting to severe police violence that left some activists injured for life. The repressive strategy deployed by [End Page 286] the Liberals was actually remarkably in tune with their broader post-secondary education reforms, as Katz aptly demonstrates. The injunctions granted by judges restraining picket lines in front of classrooms, as well as the adoption of Bill 78 threatening, among other things, participants in street and campus demonstrations with astronomical fines – all of this was wrapped within a discourse bringing forward an individualized right to education. The strike, reduced to an aggregation of individual “boycotts,” had to be stopped, so that students that had paid for them could get access to their courses.

In stark opposition to this conception of an atomized society of self-entrepreneurs, the myriad of often highly creative protest activities that punctuated the six months of Quebec’s longest spring contributed to replenishing the social fabric. And this might be where Katz is at its best. His descriptions of the numerous defiant night marches or of the casserole banging sessions that gathered thousands at a time in the streets of Montreal’s neighbourhoods and in many other cities and towns are rich and vivid. Katz beautifully depicts the emotional load of these actions in a way that allows the reader to understand – in a way felt by actual participants – that, through them, solidarity had ceased to simply be a means to build a balance of power, and was becoming an end in itself.

Maybe less convincing is the way in which Katz depicts this historical social mobilization as a war of generations that pitted privileged baby boomers against a youth left with precariousness and an eroding welfare state. The author is right, of course, to point out that different polls taken during the strike showed that younger people supported the students while elderly citizens tended to oppose them. These poll results are of course not in themselves very surprising, and at least in part reflected active efforts by the government and several columnists to consolidate this generational divide by insisting that young people should pay their “fair share.” Opposing the reduction of the whole issue to a clash of generations, the Coalition large de l’Association pour une solidanté syndicale étudiante (classe), the left-leaning and main student organization behind the student strike, made sustained efforts – as did the Association pour une solidanté syndicale (assé) since its creation in 2001 – to explain that what appeared as a generational conflict was in fact...

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