written by Deborah Ostrovsky

I’m sitting in a café and I am surrounded by red squares.

The waitress is wearing a red felt square attached to her collar with a safety pin. The barista’s red square is made of wool, knitted in a garter stitch and attached to the buttonhole of his shirt. The elderly woman sitting next to me is wearing one, too. She is fawning over my baby daughter who is sleeping soundly against my chest despite the red cotton square on the woman’s beret dangling over her tiny, newborn face.

If you are from Quebec, you are familiar with the red square. It’s a symbol of solidarity with our college and university students who are currently protesting government tuition hikes.

To my friends from the U.S., where the cost of university tuition can bankrupt a middle class family, the proposed increase of $325 each year over the next five years seems piddly and trifling.

In Quebec, we subsidize education in order to make it accessible to everyone. The students have decided to take this promise of subsidized education very seriously. In fact, some students interviewed by the media are putting their own academic future on hold to ensure that the next generation will not have to pay more to go to school.

You may not be in favour of the student strike. Some of my friends find the student strike intolerable, particularly after the recent bouts of violence during protests (this violence must be condemned; although it comes from a tiny fraction of students and most has not been caused by the students at all).

But if you are an environmental or breast cancer activist, you cannot hide from some of the unpleasant truths the students are trying to reveal about the connections between education, health, the environment and social justice. And like all sensitive, dedicated activists, they are aware—despite being so, so young—that even small incremental changes can hurt a population as much as a swift and sudden blow.