One year has passed since the full force of student protests against a proposed 75% tuition rise gripped Quebec. Since then, it is clear this “Printemps Erable” has not translated well into English-speaking Canada. The Ontario government recently okayed a 3% annual rise in tuition rates for the foreseeable future, marking the achievement of a 100% tuition increase since 2003. I don’t need to tell you that the average Ontario student now pays $7 000 a year in tuition fees while Quebec’s rates have hovered around $2 500 for fifty years. What you do need to know is how the different attitudes towards the role of higher education in Quebec and Ontario, as well as the methods each province’s youth have used to combat rising tuition, has resulted in successful tuition hike avoidance in Quebec and not Ontario.

First, there exists in Quebec an ideological component to low tuition and accessible education absent in Ontario. This fundamental difference in attitude towards higher education and the government’s role in it marks the greatest barrier towards any successful tuition challenge in Ontario. In Quebec, higher education is regarded as a public good existing for the benefit of everyone, an investment society makes where the return is a population of intelligent, productive individuals.

In contrast, Ontario overwhelmingly views post-secondary education as a private investment an individual makes to increase their personal labour value. This outlook supports the notion that the quality of a university education is related to its cost, with more expensive degrees increasing the value of an individual’s labour most. A privilege, not a right, the very fact that university degrees are not universally accessible is what makes them valuable. A social revolution on the scale seen in Quebec cannot succeed in a province where post-secondary education is viewed as a private enterprise with value derived from the number of people who don’t have one.

Another hurdle for student revolution against tuition hikes in Ontario is the province’s lack of protest culture or reliable means of organizing students into mass mobilization, a method long-standing and successful in Quebec. There, it is widely expected that today’s youth continue the struggle towards free post-secondary education begun in the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, 2012’s riots marking the ninth major tuition protest in the province’s history. A testament to its effectiveness, mass movements have been the weapon of choice for decades of students set on protecting their “sacred right” to accessible education. These movements consistently achieve crowds of over a quarter-million demonstrators grinding government to a halt.

While this environment of social change has been fifty years in the making, Quebecers provided Ontario’s students with the blueprint to achieving low tuition in the face of unresponsive governments using the power of student union coalitions. The Quebec student protest movement mustered the massive numbers it did through the creation of CLASSE, a coalition of 67 independent student associations from 4 universities united in their fight for accessible education.

At a university where individual colleges, let alone their respective student associations, do not communicate, in a province where discourse between universities and their student unions is virtually non-existent, it is no surprise that a similar revolution has not occurred at U of T or beyond. Quebec students believe that “if student associations act separately, they will be ignored by the government”. To achieve low tuition and accessible post-secondary education in Ontario, students must force policymakers to hold the province’s youth at a higher priority for government funding using the power of mass mobilization so successful in Quebec. Only then can Ontario hope to at last enjoy its very own Maple Spring.

 This article appeared in an edited version in The Varsity here.