In February 2012, as the Occupy movement tapered off, a strike broke out against austerity measures in the Québécois higher education system. Prevented from occupying buildings as it had in 2005, the student movement shifted to a strategy of economic disruption: blockading businesses, interrupting conferences and tourist events, and spreading chaos in the streets. At its peak, the resulting unrest surpassed any protest movement in North America for a generation.

While the Iron Is Hot -- Student Strike & Social Revolt in Quebec, Spring 2012

Part 1

In February 2012, as the Occupy movement tapered off, a strike broke out against austerity measures in the Québécois higher education system. Prevented from occupying buildings as it had in 2005, the student movement shifted to a strategy of economic disruption: blockading businesses, interrupting conferences and tourist events, and spreading chaos in the streets. At its peak, the resulting unrest surpassed any protest movement in North America for a generation.

In this comprehensive report, we chart the strike action by action, from its awkward beginnings through the high point of the revolt and the emergency measures with which the government attempted to suppress it. At each stage in its development, we explore why the strike assumed the forms it did, and analyze the forces competing to push it forward, suppress it, or coopt it. Like the Oakland port blockade of November 2, 2011, the strike suggests a path forward out of the strategic impasse resulting from the Occupy evictions; it also demonstrates that building a capacity for confrontation is an infrastructural project, no less so than any community institution.

Cast of Characters / Glossary of Terms

The CÉGEP system is composed of every collège d’enseignement général et professionel, or cégep, in the province of Québec. Most Québécois students enter these schools at age seventeen, at the same time that students elsewhere in North America would be entering the twelfth grade. There are two main options at cégep: pre-university programs, which usually last two years, and vocational training programs which usually last three years and provide students with some kind of trade certificate at the end. For anarchists, the most interesting characteristic of cégeps is that they are full of teenagers who aren’t yet quite as jaded as their older peers, and understand that criminal records before the age of eighteen are less serious.