{"id":565899,"date":"2026-03-28T05:25:23","date_gmt":"2026-03-28T05:25:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/565899\/"},"modified":"2026-03-28T05:25:23","modified_gmt":"2026-03-28T05:25:23","slug":"thousands-of-students-protest-education-cuts-in-downtown-montreal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/565899\/","title":{"rendered":"Thousands of students protest education cuts in downtown Montreal"},"content":{"rendered":"

Thousands of students gathered at Dorchester Square, Friday, to protest austerity measures and growing financial insecurity.<\/p>\n

The demonstration, organized by the Coalition de r\u00e9sistance pour l\u2019unit\u00e9 \u00e9tudiante syndicale (CRUES), wrapped up a week of strikes and called for reform to student bursaries and increased funding in post-secondary education from the Quebec government.<\/p>\n

\u201cRight now, students are struggling just to eat and to find a place to live. We need help to deal with the rising cost of living\u2014and yet financial aid hasn\u2019t been updated since 1986. That\u2019s a real problem,\u201d said\u00a0Elki Mercier, a coordinator with CRUES.<\/p>\n

\"\"Demonstrator holding a sign in Dorchester Square on Friday (Johanie Bouffard, CityNews)<\/p>\n

With trumpets and bagpipes blaring, students marched in downtown Montreal to protest cuts to education.<\/p>\n

CRUES said hiring freezes were hurting student services and leaving campus infrastructure to crumble\u2014something Daphn\u00e9e Lussier said she sees every day at CEGEP Saint-Laurent.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe place looks like a mental hospital. There\u2019s no life there. It\u2019s really depressing,\u201d Lussier, a theatre student said. \u201cMost of the cinema students that go to the CEGEP building are fully isolated from the rest of the student population, which really sucks.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOur school buildings are also falling apart. We\u2019re calling for major re-investment in school infrastructure,\u201d added Na\u00efma Le N\u00e9dic, internal coordinator, CRUES.<\/p>\n

\"\"Na\u00efma Le N\u00e9dic and Elki Mercier, coordinators with CRUES, pose during a student strike in downtown Montreal on Friday (Johanie Bouffard, CityNews)<\/p>\n

\u201cHonestly, we\u2019re kind of being pushed to the limit right now. The cost of living is so high. Inflation keeps going up. And on top of that, tuition fees\u2014both at university and at CEGEP\u2014are just outrageous,\u201d added Le N\u00e9dic.<\/p>\n

Students like Emylya Bouchard said they worried about theirs classmates struggling to make ends meet.<\/p>\n

\u201cSome people live very far away, so they have to come here and pay on their own. And they\u2019re very young. So I think it\u2019s very useful for them to have the support that they need to help continue their studies because some people just have to stop studying because of that. \u00a0So personally, yeah, I think it can impact a lot of people,\u201d said Bouchard.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve like struggled so, so, so much just finding an apartment after three years of renting, a good credit, everything, it\u2019s like the housing crisis is crazy. I can barely feed myself and it shouldn\u2019t be like that. We need to treat the root of the problem,\u201d said Josiane\u00a0Morin-Gagn\u00e9.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Thousands of students gathered at Dorchester Square, Friday, to protest austerity measures and growing financial insecurity. The demonstration,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":565900,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[194292],"tags":[49,48,2338],"class_list":["post-565899","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-montreal","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-montreal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/565899","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=565899"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/565899\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/565900"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=565899"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=565899"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=565899"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}