Solidarity with the Student Encampments!

Freedom for Palestine!

The Young Communist League – Ligue de la jeunesse communiste (YCL-LJC) extends our solidarity and militant greetings to the students on campuses across the country fighting for freedom in Palestine.

The YCL-LJC welcomes the continuation of the solidarity struggle with the Palestinian people.

The world demands a ceasefire, a political and diplomatic solution to the ongoing genocide in Gaza. In response, Canada and the imperialist countries continue to reaffirm the myth of Israel’s right to defend itself. Let us be clear, there is no right to occupation, let alone a right to commit genocide. The imperialists do so in a context where the danger of globalized conflict is growing daily, particularly in the Middle East, but also elsewhere in the world.

The mainstream corporate media in this country says the conflict that has killed 40,000 people, including 20,000 children in Gaza, began on October 7th. They do so to obscure more than a century of struggle for national liberation. The ruling class tries to criminalize any expression of solidarity with the Palestinian people’s struggle. The YCL-LJC denounces the attempts by the bourgeois media to frame international solidarity by peace loving forces as anti-democratic and war-mongering.

We condemn the repression and use of force against peaceful protestors.

The struggle of the Palestinian people is neither ethnic nor religious. This is a fight of national liberation directed against the plans of Western imperialism in the region and against its global hegemony. It is a fight for peace and international solidarity, and that is why it disturbs the warmongers, especially in a context where Western imperialists such as Canada are called to increase their military budgets.

Students, faculty, and campus workers have long been mobilized for solidarity with the cause of Palestinian liberation. A significant resurgence in the movement on campuses began in the 2007/8 school year when several local assemblies at university and Cégep campuses across Quebec voted to support the Boycott Divestment Sanction (BDS) campaign against Israel. The organized campaign was supported by Fédération nationale des enseignantes et enseignants du Québec (FNEEQ) Quebec’s largest college level teachers union. The campaign reached a new level when the Association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante (ASSÉ), the historic student union that led the 2005 and 2012 student strikes, voted to support the international BDS campaign at a Quebec-wide level in 2008.

Students in English speaking Canada followed the lead from the Quebec student movement, with at least 16 student unions in the rest of Canada passing resolutions in support of the Palestinian people’s cause and some if not all aspects of the BDS movement from 2012-17.

The Canadian Federation of Students-Ontario assembly in 2014 (CFS-O) representing 300 000+ members passed a resolution endorsing the BDS campaign. This was followed by a winning motion at the CFS annual general meeting in 2018.

In 2022 alone students at Simon Fraser University, University of British Columbia, McGill, Concordia, and University of Toronto passed resolutions in support of the struggle of the Palestinian people and against the apartheid and occupation of Israel. This included motions calling for boycotts and/or divestments of Israel.

This year, the Université du Québec à Montréal became the first university in Canada to have all of its student unions adopt BDS mandates.

The resolutions and motions have required immense levels of organization from students. Passing BDS endorsements have led to attacks from administrations on student democracy, including the withholding of dues in some cases. But with the brutal war on Gaza and the increased drive for settlements in the West Bank, students across Canada have answered the call and once again began to mobilize for the liberation of the Palestinian people.

We reiterate our statement from October of last year: “We recognize ourselves in neither the ideology nor the methods of Hamas. However, we understand that its popular support is the result of decades of Zionist colonization, invasion, occupation and blockade, with the tacit support of Western governments, the manifest failure of the Oslo Accords and an ossified Palestinian Authority riddled with internal contradictions … We therefore denounce all forces that try to shift the burden of these attacks onto the Palestinian resistance, and reiterate our demands for the creation as soon as possible of a viable Palestinian state within the 1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital, the guarantee of the 1948 refugees’ right of return, and the dismantling of all Zionist settlements (illegal under international law). These demands may not solve the entire Palestinian problem, but they are the only ones that could pave the way for a lasting solution to this conflict. Finally, we offer our full solidarity to our sister organizations in Palestine and throughout the region”

The YCL-LJC as a member of the World Federation of Democratic Youth, the largest anti imperialist youth organization in the world, reiterates the demands from our sister organisations in Palestine, such as the General Union of Palestinian Students. At our 2023 Central Convention, the highest decision making body of the YCL-LJC, we prioritized building the BDS and solidarity with Palestine movement in Canada, and exposing the profiteering of the Canadian capitalist monopolies in occupied Palestine. We commit ourselves and call on all democratic, working-class forces, unions, progressives; all supporters of true lasting world peace from coast to coast to intensify this fight and to demand:

– The creation of a viable and independent Palestinian state within the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital, in accordance with UN resolutions;

– The guarantee of the right of return of the refugees of 1948;

– The denuclearization of Israel and the end of the apartheid regime;

– The severance of commercial and diplomatic relations between Canada and Israel, starting with an embargo on the shipment of weapons and military equipment, and including academic boycotts, as long as the occupation continues;

– Canada’s positioning in favor of an immediate and unconditional ceasefire on the part of Israel;

– Furthermore we call for Canada to withdraw from all military alliances such as NATO and NORAD and to end the senseless arms race by slashing the military budget by 75% and investing the savings into universal public social services such as free post-secondary education for all

Palestine will live, Palestine will win!

Post-Secondary Education is in Crisis

Our Generation Needs to Take up the Fight for Education for all!

Central Executive Committee YCL-LJC

“A schoolmaster is a productive labourer when, in addition to belabouring the heads of his scholars, he works like a horse to enrich the school proprietor. That the latter has laid out his capital in a teaching factory, instead of in a sausage factory, does not alter the relation.”

Das Kapital, Karl Marx

Post-secondary education (PSE) in Canada has reached a crisis point. This crisis is demonstrable by the recent announcement by the federal government of a cap on international student enrollment in addition to the news that many PSE institutions are running substantial budget deficits.

Notably, Queen’s University in Ontario announced that in response to their projected budget deficit, they will introduce major cuts. Queen’s Provost Matthew Evans stated at a December town hall, “I’m concerned about the survival of this institution. Unless we sort this out, we will go under”. The cuts include eliminating all undergraduate courses with less than 10 students next year, introducing a hiring freeze, and laying off adjunct professors. The cuts at Queen’s are being introduced despite the university having the fifth largest university endowment in the country, valued at over $1.4 billion. Additionally, Queen’s has $600 million of accumulated surplus compared to a $62 million projected deficit pre-cuts or $48 million post-cuts.

Nearly half of universities in Ontario, 10 out of the province’s 23 public universities, are facing fiscal deficits this year.

In October of last year, the Quebec government made the controversial decision to increase tuition for Canadian students from outside Quebec from $8,992 a year to $17,000, while international students would pay a minimum of $20,000. The move was made under the auspices of protecting the French language. However, the impact will not just be on the out-of-province students at the three English-language universities in Quebec, but first and foremost on Franco-Canadian students who rely on the Quebec PSE system due to inadequacies in their home provinces.

The Canadian immigration system is designed to maintain an abundance of temporary immigration statuses in order to ensure a steady supply of precarious, non-union, low-wage workers to tamp down wages and working conditions for all. Universities, colleges, and a growing number of private institutions have been using international students as a replacement for dwindling public financial support, since international students pay higher tuition fees. The international student cap has been introduced because the ruling class does not have the same need for expanding the reserve army of labour to put a downward pressure on wages. Now inflation is getting the job of reducing wages done for them. Reducing international student enrollment can help manufacture a crisis in PSE so they can undergo corporatised restructuring and accelerate the commodification and exclusivity of education as we have already seen at Laurentian University.

The ruling class will have us believe the roots of this crisis lay in tuition fees not rising fast enough or ‘inefficiencies’ such as workers salaries. But the truth is the crisis stems from the general crisis of capitalism. We are in this position because of decades of underfunding from provincial and federal governments of all political stripes as well as the corporate leadership of PSE institutions pushing for a commodification of education.

The expansion of for-profit colleges and universities, including their partnerships with public schools, leads to an unacceptably low quality of education. It also changes the dynamic from a merit-based system to a consumer-oriented one, where students see PSE as a financial investment that opens the door to a higher salary, rather than viewing PSE as an opportunity to develop critical thinking as well as important technical skills.

We have already seen provincial governments in Ontario, Alberta, and Manitoba introduce “performance-based” funding in which public funding would be pinned to labour market needs. Under this scheme, PSE institutions would no longer receive funding based on enrollment, an arrangement that is already inadequate especially for smaller institutions and those in areas outside major urban centres. Instead they would be financially supported according to student outcomes such as hiring rates and employment earnings. Without a doubt, this will benefit professional programs and those that are linked with specific industrial entities at the direction of the school’s board of governors who come from Bay Street and big business. Performance-based funding will come at the expense of a huge range of liberal arts, humanities and languages programs, and critical intellectual inquiry.

This crisis will not only affect current and future students. PSE is a major industry in all provinces. The economy of Canada relies on having an educated pool of labour. The majority of people in Canada have received some form of post-secondary accreditation. According to the OECD, Canada’s population has the highest rate of tertiary education completion in the world. PSE accounts for more than $40 billion in government revenue annually or approximately 1.2 percent of the GDP of Canada. In Ontario alone, it is estimated that the economic impact of its 21 public universities and 24 public colleges is more than $120 billion a year. The PSE sector in Canada directly employs more than 440,000 people across the country and contributes another 300,000 indirect jobs.

What is needed now is a serious investment of public funds into PSE. The reliance on tuition fees, particularly from international students, over public funds has created an unsustainable funding model that is leading to a major contraction of the PSE sector.

Public funding to PSE in Canada has been slashed from 80 percent 30 years ago to under 50 percent today. Public funding for PSE has been stagnant or decreasing for more than a decade, despite soaring inflation. From 2008 to 2020, student enrolment increased by more than 20 percent whereas income from tuition rose by nearly 70 percent across Canada. Big business, which dictates most of government policy, has made it clear that it is not concerned with expanding access to quality education in Canada. The capitalists are lobbying hard to limit access and take direct control over universities and colleges.

We must fight for an expansion of quality and accessible education for all. The layoffs and tuition hikes being proposed by administrations across the country will exacerbate the crisis, not resolve it.

We cannot fall for the cynical traps offered by the bourgeoisie — the argument that liberal arts education is a luxury, that only “employable” studies should be offered, or that free education will subsidize the wealthy by taxing workers.

Our role as young communists in the broad student movement is to build unity in action, inject ideas of class struggle, and try to navigate away from adventurous or reformist dead ends. Student unions and their federations have been moving away from their necessary role as fighting bodies to becoming service providers for dental plans or ISIC cards. As the YCL-LJC, we must put forward the demand for a public monopoly on PSE that provides free education for all. Our clubs that are based on campuses must work to build up a student movement that can stand with workers and their unions against cuts in classes and services; that can fight against tuition hikes; that can mobilize students in the hundreds of thousands like we have seen before in this country.

Ultimately, our role is to build the fight for socialism, which will provide a real barrier-free democratic and emancipatory education for all that work for it.

“The Communists have not invented the intervention of society in education; they do but seek to alter the character of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class.”

Manifesto of the Communist Party, Marx and Engels

With students heading back to school, young communists ask what happened to the Liberals’ Student Service Grant?

The $900 million Canada Student Service Grant (CSSG) was announced as part of the $9 billion emergency benefit package for students announced in May. As of yet, not a single student has received a single dollar from the CSSG.

The CSSG has been critiqued by the bourgeois press and bourgeois political parties for being a crony deal for Prime Minister Trudeau and former Finance Minister Morneau’s families and political allies. Little has been written about the actual content of the program, however, the CSSG offered students a maximum grant of $5000 in exchange for 500 hours of service. This amount is below the minimum wage and cost of living, and less than the amount for full-time tuition for the majority of post secondary students. The CSSG program was announced when young workers and students were in desperate positions and potentially willing to take below minimum wage, as the unemployment rate for people under 25 was nearly 30% and the rate for returning students was nearing 40%. We reject the proposal by NDP whip Rachel Blaney which would turn over the $900 million to private businesses as part of the Liberals wage subsidy program that has failed the working class and lined the pockets of the ruling class. This failed Liberal exploitation project is proof as to why young workers need a federal Workers’ Bill of Rights and students need a federal Right to Education Act akin to the Canada Health Act to enforce gains made by students and workers and guarantee decent work and quality education for all.

The Canada Emergency Student Benefit (CESB) program is now coming to a close just as post-secondary instruction begins in the fall semester. We have made our position as students and young workers clear: the CESB was not enough to cover the cost of living or full-time tuition for the vast majority of students. Furthermore, this $9 billion program proves that the long-standing narrative of federal governments that education funding is an exclusively provincial matter is false. The total amount of grants from this benefit could have easily been distributed in a more just and effective way through the establishment of universal programs. This $9 billion in short term emergency benefits was only $1 billion short of the annual cost of completely removing tuition fees and fully funding a public post-secondary education system for all post-secondary students in Canada, and enforcing crown education treaty obligations to First Nations.

It is necessary for students to take a leadership role in the fight for universal public social services. Many workers in the post-secondary industry have been laid off or furloughed, and this loss of employment for workers is also a loss of services for students. Too many students will be forced to withdraw from their studies this fall for purely financial reasons. Thus, it is now more than ever time to fight for universal, completely publicly-funded quality education.

Central Executive Committee , September 2020

CESB does not answer students’ needs

The YCL-LJC rejects the narrow limitations for the CESB (Canadian Emergency Student Benefit) and expresses the urgent necessity to include all students without confining them to poverty. While students can finally access their own emergency plan the CESB does not address the fundamental problems with the condition of students. We also reject the need to provide documentation to be constantly looking for work that pays poverty wages in unsafe conditions to receive such benefit while still trying to balance commitments to studies.