Dawson College in Montreal shut down classes for almost 10,000 students on Thursday, after students voted 447-247 in favour of a strike to demonstrate solidarity with Gaza.
The closure of the public college was prompted—according to academic dean Leanne Bennett in a letter to the Dawson community—by “numerous emails and calls from members of the community expressing concerns about the safety of students and employees on the day of the boycott.
“After carefully considering these concerns and reviewing all available information about the planned actions, we have decided to cancel classes and close the college on that day.”
All spaces, labs and facilities were inaccessible to Dawson’s 9,900 students and nearly 1,200 faculty and staff.
Dawson Student Union posted about the strike across “so-called Quebec” in solidarity with Gaza and Palestinian students, and invited people to demonstrate with flags and keffiyehs at the main entrance of the shuttered college in the heart of downtown Montreal.
About 100 demonstrators gathered outside Dawson’s campus Thursday—watched closely by about a dozen Montreal police (SPVM) on bicycles and motorcycles.
One of the Jewish students who showed up at Dawson says he supported demonstrators’ right to strike and protest, but said he was “pissed that I can’t go to school because Dawson closed the campus.”
Asked if he came to counter-demonstrate, he said “No. A bunch of us are down the street packing boxes of food for hungry families. We’re trying to bring light into all of this.”
The crowd left after an hour, marching east to Concordia’s Hall building, where they met up with more strikers, the crowd swelling to approximately 250 as dozens of SPVM officers on bicycles, horseback, motorcycles and in cruisers and vans blocked off and patrolled the area.
Concordia—which had a phalanx of security guards manning the doors, SPVM officers inside the lobby and large panels of plywood on the inside of their windows—and McGill remained open, while dozens of their student associations voted to strike Thursday and Friday.
A Université de Montréal student strike Friday will have students demonstrating against NATO, and a few French CEGEPs have also held strike votes, with administrations there saying they’ll consider closing if people block entrances. In all, groups representing more than 50,000 Quebec students voted to strike.
Dawson students will have to make up the day later in the academic year.
A teacher from Dawson who was passing by told The CJN “this is pathetic. They closed the school, we can’t go to work because a few people voted and fewer came to stand there in front of the door?” He said teachers are “fed up” and would be taking action with the administration over their decision.
Meanwhile, outside Concordia’s Hall building, some 20 Jewish and pro-Israel demonstrators waving Canadian and Israeli flags, surrounded by more than 25 cops, faced off against the larger crowd waving Palestinian, Lebanese and communist flags, the groups chanting and taunting each other for more than an hour, moving closer to each other before police set up an additional line to divide the groups. Students continued to file into Concordia through one entrance under the watchful eye of security guards and police to attend class.
Some protesters took turns posing with their foot on a paint-splattered Israeli flag, and others mocked the pro-Israel crowd shouting “how pathetic, you are only a few here!”
“We have jobs and lives you loser!” one woman shouted back as the groups chanted “Bring them home.”
A number of Jewish students at Concordia reported to police that they had been threatened in English, Arabic and Hebrew, and one woman was seen walking through the striking crowd making raised-arm Nazi-style salutes toward the Jewish group. Another woman walked up to the Israel supporters and spoke of the “final solution” coming soon.
There were other fracases, including two men with their faces wrapped in keffiyehs who pushed past a woman on the pro-Israel side, screaming at her and calling her a “stupid Zionist bitch.”
“What did you say?” she shouted as she spun around and marched towards them. The man replied: “I called you a genocidal bitch!”
“Take off your mask you coward!” she shouted. “What are you afraid of?” When another woman stepped in, telling them to watch their language, the man’s companion yelled “It’s freedom of expression. We have the right to speak.”
“You don’t have the right to speak to women that way” she replied, while the other woman again stepped forward, laughing:“You’re still wearing your mask you fucking chickenshit.”
Police maintained a close watch on the crowds and all pedestrians in the area.
A crowd of protesters also arrived at the Quartier des Spectacles outside Place des Arts in the eastern end of downtown, where they carried and displayed a mock missile with anti-Israel messaging.
Political reactions to the action
Quebec’s Higher Education Minister Pascale Déry did not respond to queries last week from The CJN about the strike and some of the rhetoric circulating on campus and social media leading up to the Nov. 14 vote.
But this week, Déry announced an investigation, stating on social media that “the climate in some CEGEPs is becoming more and more toxic. The situation has escalated, and the incidents have piled up: hate speech, students being bullied and fearing for their safety.”
While she did not name Dawson College specifically, Déry asked her department to prepare an investigation mandate to shed light “on what is really happening in CEGEPs where this is of particular concern. The safety of students and their right to study in a healthy environment is non-negotiable, and for an institution to feel forced to close its doors is unacceptable.”
Federation CJA and the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs declared concern over the decision to close campus “in response to radical agitators participating in an internationally organized ‘student intifada.’”
“Campuses across Quebec are facing threats from local demonstrators inspired by calls from the U.S.-based organization, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP)—a group with alleged ties to Hamas—to strike and shut down academic institutions this Thursday. Dawson’s decision to capitulate to extremist voices from an aggressive and vocal minority, allowing them to hijack more than 10,000 students’ access to education, sets a dangerous precedent that must not become normalized.”
Students have the right to attend class and engage in free academic discourse says the joint statement, and “university and CEGEP administrations must remain unwavering in their commitment to ensure equal access to education and uphold a safe academic environment. For the sake of our treasured values and institutions, as well as thousands of students across Quebec, academic leaders must choose strength over weakness and stand firm against intimidation, threats, and hate.”
In a French-language radio appearance on Nov. 20, Déry insisted schools must remain open and accessible and rejected comparisons to Quebec’s student protests in 2012 where hundreds of thousands went on strike and blocked access for thousands more over tuition costs and other issues.
“We are bringing a conflict that is very, very, very far from us and it is becoming more and more frequent… for more than a year there is this tense situation (between) the two communities, Jewish and Muslim. I think it’s important that we don’t import these conflicts. Whether for climate, internship remuneration or what we’ve seen in recent years, we’re going a little beyond the limits of all that and inside the institutions themselves. It creates a toxic, unsafe climate. There are students who want to change CEGEP.”
Montreal attorney Neil Oberman has served Dawson with multiple letters and notices throughout the year, including a demand this week on behalf of an unnamed student client for answers from Dawson’s legal affairs and accountability officers, to know what analysis the school did before concluding that it could not maintain a safe environment.
Social media posts by Dawson’s Muslim Students Association inflamed the debate even further, said Oberman. In a post titled “Letter from the Islamic Front,” the association speaks of the “barbarism” of the “Zionist entity” and the “sadism” of the enemy faced by Muslims, noting, “the Islamic world has endured profound trials over the past century, following the fall of the Caliphate that once unified our people under the banner of Islam. The Ummah has faced relentless hardship across these lands, from the fierce resistance against European colonizers in Algeria to the courageous stand against the brutal Serb regime in Bosnia.”
To those considering voting against the strike, it said, “your vote cannot alter the destiny that awaits the Zionist entity. Efforts to obstruct justice will be in vain. The liberation of all the Islamic homeland is inevitable. As long as the spirit of Salahuddin lives on within the hearts of our people, the colonizer will be defeated. History will bear witness to the triumph of Islam. Remember Hittin.” (Hittin was the site of a 12th-century victory of Salahuddin over the Crusaders.)
Mount Royal MP Anthony Housefather posted on social media that “students and teachers have a right to access buildings and go to class without fear or intimidation. This is true for Sir Robert Borden in Ottawa, Dawson in Montreal or any other school. The same is true for places of worship and community centres. We need bubble legislation now.”
Housefather told his constituents that he has been in almost daily contact with Déry, and said he had met with Dawson leadership “to get an overview of why they made the decision to close and to let them know how that decision (and the entire process impacts our constituents who attend Dawson or whose kids attend Dawson)” and to seek a commitment that there would be no further campus closures in this type of strike situation.
“I very much appreciated the frank conversations and was pleased that they committed that they would not be closing in the event of a future vote of this type and that they would work with police to ensure that students and faculty would have safe access to the school.”
Oberman, who is nominated as the Conservative candidate for Mount Royal in the next federal election told The CJN that Dawson has been “under scrutiny since Oct. 8, 2023.”
Back in June, he wrote on behalf of student clients asking for a special investigation under Quebec’s Colleges and Vocations Act over the lack of safety and security on campus. “It’s about time that Déry announced an investigation,” he said. “The vote should not have taken place, and was not conducted in a proper, transparent or democratic manner. You can’t have a process take place with fear of violence,” referencing to the provocative posts.
“It’s been a cesspool of hate for more than a year, with antisemitic newspaper articles, anti-Canadian and anti-western and antisemitic graffiti all over the school, calls for violence against minorities and teachers tabling hate and pushing inaccurate narratives… It’s not safe for the students’ psychological or physical well-being that they have to go through this gauntlet of hate including through teachers, tabling hate, and propaganda spewed in classrooms by people employed to teach, not to preach,” Oberman said.
Oberman says that his clients have received threats “to their physical person” and 10,000 students at Dawson “should not be held hostage by a few hundred people… It’s an admission on the part of the college that they cannot secure their own campus from jihadis and haters and aggressors. They’re saying to the public at large: ‘We don’t control our campus. We can’t safeguard rights of our students we don’t have effective control over these small groups.”
“It’s a sad day for public institutions” he told The CJN, calling Thursday’s events “the fall of public education in Quebec, as it sends a message to ripple through all colleges and institutions across Canada that the line in the sand was drawn and the haters crossed it. The only people who suffer will be the good citizens of this province.”
Déry said her investigation is not about curbing rights to free expression on campuses, but said there are cases where “students have been bullied because they do not vote in favour of a strike or prevented from going to their classes and going to study. More and more classes are being cancelled. If a student wants to go on strike, to demonstrate, they can go” said Déry. “But they must also be able to go there and study, and not be intimidated by it… The establishment must remain open and remain a very safe place.”
Jeremy Levi, the outspoken mayor of the small island suburb of Hampstead, called it “nothing short of a national disgrace that Canada—a proud G7 nation—has reached a point where its second-largest city, Montreal, must shut down a college for an entire day because it cannot guarantee the safety of its students and teachers. This is not the Canada we claim to be.”
Israeli campus club Startup Nation and StandWithUs Canada posted on Wednesday about Concordia’s Political Science Student Association (PSSA) voting 71 percent in favour of a motion to endorse a strike “aimed at disrupting classes and creating hostility on Concordia’s campus on Nov. 21 and 22.”
The motion cites UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese’s declaration of Israel’s actions as ‘genocide’, and ‘Israeli apartheid’ practices that “parroted and aligned itself with the false and slanderous claims of the discriminatory and divisive Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.
“By endorsing this agenda, the motion encourages hatred and creates a campus climate steeped in chaos and animosity, as opposed to dialogue and coexistence, all the while undermining the safety and educational rights of all students at Concordia.”
The groups called on Concordia’s administration to uphold the right of every student to access their education “without fear of intimidation or disruption on Nov. 21 and 22 and expect decisive action to ensure campus safety.”
