So, what does the Red Square mean?
Photo: R. Mehreen
The red square – you might have seen this small, subtle square pinned onto bags, shirts or caps: It all started in 2005 during the student strike that managed to save $103 million in bursaries for Quebec students.
It comes from the French saying “carrément dans le rouge,” which means “squarely in the red” or basically, that students were in debt because of tuition increase and cuts in bursaries.
In 2005, some students even hung a gigantic red square off of the Mount Royal cross, with a sign underneath it saying “ArrĂŞtons de sacrifier nos enfants” (“Let’s stop sacrificing our children.”)
It’s usually made out of felt, but the idea is that it can be made out of any spare piece of red clothing or material, so it doesn’t cost anything to get one!
So if you want to show your solidarity with tuition freeze you can cut one out for yourself and pin it to your knapsack with a safety pin. Or, if you have no red cloth kicking around, just pick one up a red square at the GSA! It’s one very easy way to support the struggle against tuition increase.
Once you start wearing it, you’ll start noticing them all around you on people in the metro, in the bus, around Concordia, and all around the city!
This work by http://freeeducationmontreal.org is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
