The Ontario Student Strike Training Camp was organized and convened from July 27–29 by members of the U of T Graduate Students’ Union. Intended to give Ontario student activists the benefit of Quebec student strikers’ political and tactical experience, the event was mostly held at the Earth Sciences building on U of T’s St. George Campus. It was my first encounter with the strikers and their ideas. I had, until that weekend, been nurturing vague suspicions about the strikers, founded on no concrete information. The expectation of seeing that suspicion vindicated was one part of my motive for registering. The other was curiosity about my fellow participants, many of whom would like to import student strikes to U of T and other Ontario universities. When the weekend had ended, my hostility to the Quebec strike and the would-be strikers had abated. This story is only incidentally about politics and protest. It is, however, a faithful account of the condiments and hot beverages supplied at the training camp’s four complimentary meals.
BREAKFAST
The cream cheese, if there ever had been any, was gone by the time I arrived at the Ontario Student Strike Training Camp on Saturday morning. The only condiments available for the large remaining volume of bagels were olive oil-based margarine and a vegetable paste that did not appear to be baba ganoush.
Although I had been registered and provided with a program for the weekend with great efficiency, supervision of institutional-size coffee makers next to the bagels in the Domtar Student Lounge had been neglected, and the massive urns had been allowed to empty. No one in the adjoining area would admit either the responsibility or the ability to deal with them.
I had tea.
First PLENARY
The first plenary session began only slightly behind schedule. The room was about as full (approximately one-third) and as energetic (approximately not very) as at the early morning lectures it might usually host. It seemed to me that I was not the only one to whom the insufficiency of coffee must have come as an unpleasant, disabling surprise.
The logistical announcements occupying most of the plenary were uncontroversial, except for the cancellation of the morning workshop entitled “Building a Diverse Student Movement.” This occasioned rancorous comment from one of the audience. “Shame,” she said. The plenary leaders explained, unashamed, that the cancellation was due to the unexpected absence of the workshop’s facilitator.
SESSION 1, WORKSHOP 1: GETTING THE WORD OUT
There were 19 people in the room, including two facilitators from Quebec and two people from the media — a reporter for the Socialist Worker, the publishing arm of a Canadian organization called the International Socialists, and me.
After their presentation, the facilitators of the workshop took questions. When asked how to deal with “hostile media,” they advised us to avoid the mainstream media entirely and proposed, as an alternative to independent campus media outlets, student union-controlled papers “halfway between propaganda and fact-based news.”
The facilitators’ final message for us: formulate bold messages and bold demands. “Don’t be reasonable,” they said.
Second PLENARY
Before the plenary, I noticed that many of the people in the Domtar Student Lounge were carrying Starbucks cups. I regretted that it hadn’t occurred to me to compromise with corporate power in exchange for coffee, since our own supply had still not been renewed. Later, one of the leaders of the plenary reminded us that we were exploited academic labourers.
During the plenary, the organizers announced, for the second time, that strikers in Quebec would be converging on Montreal in mid-August to block the re-entry of CEGEP students to classes. They invited the audience to join them on a “fieldtrip to Montreal” and “see an actual picket line.” Then they read out a list of cancelled afternoon workshops.
SESSION 2, WORKSHOP 8: GENERAL ASSEMBLIES
At the door of the General Assemblies workshop they took down the names and student numbers of everyone entering. What I briefly and apprehensively believed was an attempt to catch training camp infiltrators turned out to be part of a simulation: the workshop was conducted as a mock General Assembly (GA).
Although we were now subject to solemn rules of order, the atmosphere in the Reichmann Family Lecture Hall was informal and cheerful. I credited this partly to the Starbucks, partly to the excellent vegan chili served at lunch. I made a note to get the recipe from one of the organizers (at press time, the organizers had not replied to requests for comment on the chili).
One of the workshop’s facilitators, who had been to France, described the raucous atmosphere that prevails in student General Assemblies there. Apparently, smoking cigarettes and imputations of fascist sympathies are common. Brawls are also an occasional feature.
Third PLENARY
The organizers had divided themselves into two teams: one erected pickets outside the doors of the Reichmann Family Lecture Hall, while the other played irate students trying to access the room. The scabs attempted frontal assaults and flanking manouevres; eventually it was the weakening resolve of the picketers, whose success was delaying the plenary, that ended the blockade. Strikers and students dismantled the barricades together.
The Quebec students, the organizers, and some of the participants had evinced some hostility to the CFS. Later that day, one of the organizers, Ashleigh Ingle from U of T’s Graduate Student Union, announced that she would be happy if “the CFS stayed the fuck out of my business.”
When an organizer renewed the invitation to go to Montreal, he noted that anyone who came would be welcome to stay longer than Aug. 13–17, the dates of the scheduled convergence: “it just occurred to me that you can’t just picket on the first day [of CEGEP classes]”. As it transpires, all of the striking CEGEPs voted to return to classes, making any pickets, and any Ontario picketers, superfluous.
One of the audience asked whether Quebec laws like Bill 78 apply to Ontarians in Quebec (they do). Her question prompted a spirited debate about whether anyone has actually been charged, tried, or convicted under Bill 78. No consensus was achieved. The law’s first ever application occurred August 27 at the Universite de Montreal, one month after the training camp.
SESSION 3, WORKSHOP 16: THE STRIKE AS A TACTIC
Corey Scott, the UTSU’s vice president internal and services, arrives 15 minutes late. Later he would reflect on the successes that UTSU has achieved in fighting fees at U of T. The significance of these achievements seemed diminished by comparison to a CEGEP in the Gaspésie mentioned by one of the Quebec students, where the General Assembly approved resolutions rejecting the bourgeoisie and to “approve of communism.”
Strategy Session: U of T, York, Ryerson, George Brown
Among those attending the strategy session for the Toronto area were a whole firmament of UTSU and CFS stars: Scott, VP university affairs Munib Sajjad, former CFS-O chair and current UTSU executive director Sandy Hudson, former UTSU President Danielle Sandhu, and Sarah Jayne King. Repeated requests were made to them for comment on the position of the CFS or UTSU on a strike in Ontario. All the current members of the UTSU and CFS executives demurred.
In the back of the lecture hall, one member of the audience concentrated on his beard, grooming it ceremoniously with what appeared to be a specialized brush for most of the session.
The strategizing, which had not produced a plan for fomenting a strike in Toronto, ended with an exhortation from one of the participants to emulate the ethnic and cultural tolerance that had been characteristic of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia.
THE FINAL PLENARY
The final plenary was conducted as another mock GA. A considerable number of motions were proposed and debated, amidst questions about the legitimacy of the GA, which, some held, did not really represent anyone and so could not make decisions on their behalf. Eventually, it was resolved that all of the resolutions, including ones proposing a one day strike, a day of action, a series of wild cat strikes, and an effort to democratize the CFS would be approved “symbolically.” This the General Assembly proceeded to do: 17 in favour, one against, six abstaining.
