camping out against cuts

A bunch of students have been camping out in downtown Montreal to protest Quebec Premier Jean Charest's cuts to post-secondary education. The CBC has some coverage online, but it is shoddy. Aside from playing the usual game of making the protesters seem like idiots and framing the police as humble, peace-loving folk, this article spends only a sentence or two discussing the issue being protested:

"Quebec students, who pay the lowest tuition fees in the country, have been demonstrating for weeks against a plan to convert millions in grants to loans."

That first part, by the way, is not only irrelevant, it's also misleading: Quebec universities are packed with out-of-province students who end up paying twice as much as Quebec residents do, bringing their tuition rates much closer to (if not higher than) the national averages.

Update: Optimus Crime raises a crucial point: "don't get me wrong, i think charest is out to lunch with this plan... but your riposte is also misleading. though many out-of-province students pay double the tuition, out-of-province students are not eligible for the program that is at the centre of the controversy."

Thanks, OC. Consider me corrected. The CBC article still sucked, though, and the fact that Quebec tuitions are the lowest in the country does not have any bearing on the protesters' arguments.