Student struggles in Canada

Excerpt from the 25th Central Convention documents of the Young Communist League of Canada on the struggle of high school and post-secondary students.

The primary contradiction in the struggle for increased access to education is: corporations want a trained workforce but they will not pay for it through corporate taxes, forcing the people to pay for education through wages, savings and especially debt. The working people want accessible, emancipatory education.

This class perspective is often obscured. The struggle for access is presented as a simply universal fight against the government. Right-social democratic ideas in the student movement deliberately avoid class perspectives and misrepresent the state as neutral. Yet the state’s decisions are, generally, in line with the banks and businesses. And the single largest group of youth impeded and excluded from post-secondary are youth from the working-class majority.

What way forward for the student movement now?

J. Boyden
From Peoples Voice newspaper

One of the contentious resolutions at last month’s Canadian Federation of Students general meeting condemned the recent massacre of the Tamil people in Sri Lanka. After this debate, what is new and significant in the Canadian student movement?

Of course, context is needed. The CFS is the most numerically significant component of the Canadian student movement, although it excludes the two militant student organizations in Quebec with tens of thousands of members. It also excludes the Canadian Alliance of Student Associations (CASA), deliberately engineered as right-wing split over a decade ago.

The CFS is, potentially, the ‘tip of the spear’ of the student fight back in English-speaking Canada. The CFS meeting therefore had some significance, not least with today’s Harper Tory government attacking public funding public post-secondary education.