Students protesting worldwide aren’t a threat to anyone’s safety, writes University of Waterloo student Nadia Khan, they are simply standing up for the Palestinians in Gaza who’ve been denied it. We deserve a say in where our tuition dollars go, and until our institutions take our demands seriously, we’re not going anywhere.

The politics of power and resistance are raging on Canadian university campuses. As Judi Rever reports, through occupations at post-secondary institutions across the country, students protesting against Israel’s mass crimes in Gaza are demanding their schools disclose and review all holdings in companies profiting from Israel’s onslaught.

Instead of negotiating with pro-Palestinian protesters whose demands have broad support among the university community, the administration wants to force the police to intervene. As Yves Engler writes, perhaps the McGill administration should listen to the cops: talk to the students. Negotiate. Compromise. Settle peacefully.

In the wake of the Hamas assault of October 7, journalists indignantly called out feminists for not addressing this violence sufficiently. The same critics have had little to say about the countless overlooked and ignored examples of sexual violence perpetrated against Palestinians in Israeli prisons and by IDF soldiers before and since that day.

Liberal law purports to give everyone the right to think what they like, say what they like. Capitalism makes sure that this admirable goal can never be fully attained. John Galsworthy, writing in the The Forsyte Saga, captured this very nicely: “If a man had money, he was free in law and fact, and if he had no money he was free in law and not in fact.”

York administration has made a bad situation worse. Faculty, staff and students are exhausted by management’s growing infringement on the academic freedom of faculty members, attacks on collegial governance, and the lack of adequate public funding and respect from governments. This broad assault against education and public services must end.

Students from all four Montréal universities came together over the last week to express their solidarity with the Palestinian people and pressure their institutions to cut ties with Israel. Following the lead of the camps protests in the United States, they set up an encampment on the grounds of McGill University on April 27.

The genocide in Gaza is the moment of moral conscience for this generation, as Vietnam was in the 1960s. As Derek Sayer writes, Israel’s violence and the repression on American university campuses are intimately connected. It is time we lifted our heads from our everyday evasions and diversions, our compromises and complicities, and started to listen to the kids.

We are seeing opposing world views play out in clashes between police and professors and their students across American college campuses. It is a harbinger of encampments that have already started to sprout here. Let us hope that authorities and institutions do not see fit to trample upon free speech and academic freedom, mistaking a call for life for its opposite.

More and more ECEs and care givers are leaving the sector in search of better paid work. Current early childhood education students are uncertain about their futures. Many are opting out of pursuing a career in this field altogether. Indeed, the province could be short 8,500 ECEs by 2026. Ontario needs to do better and pay its ECEs and child care workers a decent wage.