Quebec students protest steep out-of-province tuition hike

Quebec’s plan to nearly double tuition for out-of-province students sparked a rally in downtown Montreal on Monday 30 October, with students pouring in from outside the city to protest, writes Kalina Laframboise for Global News.

Many participants at the protest, which stretched the length of two city blocks, wore purple, the colour of Bishop’s University, in Sherbrooke, Quebec, the province’s only English-language university outside Montreal. Alex O’Neill, a second-year student at McGill University who helped organise the protest, said students, teachers and universities were not consulted about the increase for the 2024-25 academic year. “We’re absolutely prepared, tentatively, to challenge this,” O’Neill said, if the government’s tuition increase goes ahead as planned. “We’re not going to give up since we have so much momentum.”

The Quebec government announced earlier this month that tuition fees for students from other provinces will rise to CA$17,000 (US$12,400) from CA$8,992 starting next year. The changes are expected to disproportionately affect the province’s three English-language universities, which welcome more out-of-province students than their francophone counterparts.
Full report on the Global News site