L’ASSÉ appuie le mouvement étudiant du Royaume-Uni

To our fellow students in the United Kingdom,

It is in the spirit of fellowship and camaraderie that we, the Association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante (ASSÉ), the major national student union in Quebec, Canada, offer you our most profound solidarity in the wake of the November 4^th demonstration and of your growing strike movement against the government’s attacks on education.

We’ve watched with grave concern as the Conservative government announced its plans to transfer financial aid from grants into loans, which means that students can fall more than £50,000 in debt by the end of a 3 year undergraduate degree. The prospect of massive debt is yet another barrier to post-secondary education. At ASSÉ, we consider education to be a right, and therefore all its economic barriers must be eliminated in order to guarantee a truly accessible and just education system.

We see these attacks on education not as an economic necessity, but as an extension of a program of austerity and privatization that seeks to drastically transform public services. While we consider education to be a collective and public service, dedicated to the elaboration and continuation of our arts, sciences and humanities, the ideologues of neoliberalism seek to make post-secondary education serve the market’s interests rather than those of society. Free, accessible, and quality public services are means that we’ve given ourselves to reduce social inequalities. Austerity seeks to dismantle the social safety net in favour of privatization.

We’ve observed over the years that the only tool at our disposal that can make a government back down from its attacks on students and education is the general unlimited strike. We are students. We are young intellectual workers, and we have the right to suspend our work in a collective and organized manner until we’ve successfully defended our collective interests. In 2005, the Quebec provincial government announced its intention to transfer $103 million from grants into loans, and therefore dramatically increase student debt in Quebec. We achieved victory after a student strike forced the government to reverse its decision.

We see you proudly wearing the red square as we did in 2005 and 2012, and it reminds us that from common attacks stem common struggles. It is in that spirit that we offer you our full support and solidarity in your just and necessary fight against austerity.

In struggle and solidarity,

Association pour une solidarite syndicale étudiante (ASSÉ)