Performing “in the red”: transformations and tensions in repertoires of contention during the 2012 Quebec student strike

Abstract

The longest and largest student strike in Canadian history began in Quebec in the spring of 2012 in resistance to proposed tuition hikes and the increasing privatization of education and public services that this signaled. The symbol of the student movement, the red square (denoting ‘squarely in the red’ or ‘squarely in debt’) quickly went ‘viral’. At its height, an estimated 300,000 students were striking – nearly 75% of Quebec’s post-secondary student population; on May 22nd some 500,000 people marched in support. The strike continued for six months, ending only after the government was overturned and a new government cancelled the tuition increase. The redeployment of local protest repertoires, including traditional tactics such as picket lines combined with inclusive and creative tactics popularized in alter-globalization movements. Formal student associations combined with various ad hoc coalitions and organizations, as well as communitarian groups, in an uneasy alliance to create a mass mobilization that some commentators dubbed Québec’s ‘Maple Spring’. This article documents the transformation of what Tilly has called ‘repertoires of contention’ within the context of the Quebec student movement. In so doing, it highlights some of the principle debates concerning social values and distributions of agency that resurfaced in connection with the diverse tactics that formed the ‘new’ combinational repertoire.

Keywords:

• Student strike
• Quebec
• Maple Spring
• student movement
• protest tactics

Notes

1. For the numbers of students on strike during various periods see Ancelovici and Dupuis-Déri’s Un Printemps rouge et noir: regards croisés sur la grève étudiante de 2012, pp. 16–17.

2. For a discussion of embodied social values and distributions of agency within performance repertoires (see Taylor, 2003).

3. There is little question that the student movement, and the controversial laws brought in to control it, was a major election issue in 2012. Premier Jean Charest cast the election as ‘a plebiscite on the type of society in which Quebecers want to live: one where a student has the right to access their classroom, he said, or one marked by chaos and where no such right is respected’. See Quebec Election 2012: Jean Charest bids farewell to government as Liberals lose to PQ. http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2012/09/05/quebec_election_2012_jean_charest_bids_farewell_to_government_as_liberals_lose.

4. My translation.