The entire student strike stemmed for the announcement back in early March that the Charest government was planning to nearly double the tuition rates over the next five years.

The situation is very much a grey issue. On one hand, the Quebec government is haemorrhaging money, and the only reason the province is staying afloat is due to the money provided by oil-producing provinces like Alberta. On the other hand, the government is notoriously bad at handling money (read: corrupt), and wasted billions of dollars on construction projects that never came to fruition, so it would be unfair to push austerity on university students rather than to simply cut back on wasteful spending.

I go to McGill, which has a pretty sizable international student population as well as a lot of students from other provinces, so the student population was pretty divided on the issue of whether or not to strike. The Quebecois have much more of a stake in the issue, so they tended to be more vocal and supportive of a student strike. From what I saw, students from other provinces and international students tended to be sympathetic towards the issue, but were generally less willing to go on strike since their tuition rates are quadruple that of the Quebecois.

Personally, I was neutral about the situation at first, since I am a Canadian citizen and pay a pittance for education compared to what I would have been paying in the states. However, the actions of the more radical members of the pro-strikers really disgusted me over the past few months. McGill is organized into faculties that are governed separately, and each faculty within the university must hold a referendum on whether the student population supported an unlimited student strike. This led to some of the biggest voter turnouts in the history of the university. To bypass this restriction, the pro-strikers in the Faculty of English called for a referendum on a student strike on the next day, and conveniently "forgot" to advertise the vote, except to those who supported the strike. Obviously the vote passed, and the pro-strikers gained the prerogative to physically block people from entering classrooms holding English classes, forcing several professors to hold their lectures outdoors. Of course, these are only a few radical members, so it would be unfair to judge an entire movement based on the actions of a few, but I generally noticed a trend in the striker movement that people were willing to use any shady method they could to prevent people from attending classes

As for the protests in the street, I noticed that the vast majority of protestors are just high schoolers looking for an opportunity to lash out at the Montreal police department. If you look at the twitter hashtags for the protests (#manifencours and #ggi), you'll notice that a sizable portion of them are just people venting about the police. Our police force is notorious for using excessive force, and the incident back in March where a striker was hit in the eye with a gas grenade did nothing to dispell the stereotype.

The striker movement actually lost a lot of steam over the past few months. The apex of the movement was late March, where 150,000 people formed a 2 km line of protestors that clogged the centre-ville area for an entire afternoon, but this dwindled down to about 300 people protesting at night and vandalising storefronts in April. However, the movement is picking up a lot of steam again, after the Quebec government passed Loi 78, which pretty much made the entire student strike movement illegal.

So if you're planning to visit Montreal any time this summer, be aware that the situation may escalate, and stay away from any protests or riots unless you want a police baton or gas grenade in your face.