MONTREAL – Student protesters triggered a monster traffic jam in Montreal by blocking off access to a bridge Tuesday in one of the more dramatic acts during the ongoing opposition to tuition hikes.
Several dozen students stood across the Champlain Bridge during rush hour in an attempt to pressure the provincial government to back down.
The bridge is notoriously congested on regular days – sometimes even on weekends – and it was traffic bedlam around the city Monday morning.
The students were eventually rounded up by provincial police and fined $494 each. Police are warning other students that there will be zero tolerance for anyone blocking fast lanes.
But there have been, and will continue to be, large protests on regular city streets against the Charest government’s fee hikes.
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The province is nearly doubling tuition fees over five years, to about $3,800, after a series of $500-a-year increases. However, the rates for in-province students are so low that they would still be among the lowest in Canada, after the hikes.
Students say it’s a question of principle – that even modest fee hikes will reduce access to education. More than 200,000 have joined a wave of “strikes” and walked out on their classes.
But it remained to be seen whether Tuesday’s tactic by that relatively small group would have the desired effect on broader public opinion.
Social-networking sites were filled with reaction, much of it irate.
It was a similarly hot topic around some breakfast tables.
One Montrealer muttered to his waiter at a diner on Mont-Royal Avenue that only the loud people get heard – the ones blocking bridges, staging sit-downs in streets, and wearing little red squares on their lapels to protest the fee hikes.
But he said there’s silent agreement from many other Quebecers.
“I think I’m going to start wearing a green (lapel) square – to demonstrate support for the increase,” the man told his waiter as he dove into a plate of eggs benedict.
One well-known Quebec humorist offered a more tongue-in-cheek reaction. He referred to the regular frustration many Montrealers feel whenever they use the Champlain Bridge, which is considered among the busiest in Canada.
“If students really want to make a splash that’s out of the ordinary,” Stephane Laporte wrote on Twitter, “they would be unblocking the Champlain Bridge.”
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