Trampling student movements: a growing trend at Canadian universities

Suppression of Palestine protests highlights a new and dangerous context for campus activism

A Montreal riot police officer strikes a demonstrator in the face at a pro-Palestine demonstration on McGill University campus, October 7, 2025. Photo by William Wilson.

It was nearing midnight on May 9, 2024, when around 50 police officers in protective armour, helmets, and round shields advanced on what remained of the pro-Palestinian encampment at the University of Calgary. 

Erected just 18 hours prior as part of the global uprising against Israel’s ongoing military assault on Gaza, the protest reiterated previous demands that the institution disclose investments in Israeli institutions, divest from companies complicit in the genocide, and provide academic and mental health supports for Palestinian students.

But, insists journalist Jeremy Appel, their “fate was sealed before a single tent was pitched.”

The administration was never going to allow student protesters to invade what they view as their private property.     

The cops they sent, Appel reports, “violently dismantled the protest camp, firing 15 pepperball rounds and four pepper grenades at the participants and using a degree of physical force that gave at least two protestors [sic] traumatic brain injuries.”

Two days later, following public encouragement from podcaster-turned-premier Danielle Smith, the University of Alberta took similar action and, just before dawn, Edmonton police in tactical riot gear advanced on that camp. They dismantled it using batons and what appeared to be tear gas, according to reporting by Global News.

A university-commissioned report later concluded that these were reasonable precautionary measures though its author, a retired judge, wondered why campus leaders hadn’t simply spoken with protesters. Or sought a legal injunction. 

The latter was the strategy chosen by administration at the University of Toronto and McGill University. 

At the University of Toronto, a university spokesperson told the student paper that while they respected students’ right to protest, it “must not interfere with the ability of students, faculty, librarians and staff to learn, teach, research and work on campus or disrupt or impede other university activities.” University administration also sought an injunction to use police force to dismantle the campus encampment for Palestine claiming concerns over antisemitism and violence.

On July 2, 2024, Ontario Superior Court Justice Markus Koehnen ruled that the encampment was not violent or antisemitic but did interfere with the right of the institution to control its private property. Participants agreed to leave as a pre-emptive measure to prevent expected university-directed violence toward their community.

Such responses were unprecedented in Canadian history. 

Meanwhile, vice-president of administration and finance Fabrice Labeau recounted to the Montreal Gazette that McGill had investigated “all possible options, including asking Montreal police to remove the protesters, which they refused to do; filing for an emergency legal injunction to have the protesters removed, which was rejected by a Quebec Superior Court judge; and negotiating with the protesters, which Labeau said went nowhere because they refused ‘to move an inch.’” 

Finally, on July 10, after 75 days, the university hired a private security firm, Sirco, to end the encampment. According to a report in the Montreal Gazette, Montreal police and officers with the Sûreté du Québec, many in riot gear, assisted by setting up a security perimeter around the campus.

Such responses were unprecedented in Canadian history. 

History of student suppression

Sure, administrators have called police to campus before. 

Their interference in the 1969 occupation at Sir George Williams (now Concordia) University against anti-Black racism even caused a riot that led to $2 million in damages and 97 arrests.

It wasn’t until 2022 that Concordia issued an apology acknowledging that their crackdown on the protests, “had serious lasting consequences for many individuals [...] from jail sentences to deportation, psychological trauma, physical injury, social alienation, loss of employment and the disruption of – even to the point of not finishing – academic degrees.” 

In 1972, University of Toronto acting president John Sword asked law enforcement to end an occupation of Simcoe Hall – the main administrative building on campus – undertaken to demand equal access for undergraduates to the John P. Robarts Research Library. He argued that “the University cannot condone the seizure of buildings carried out in order to impose solutions on matters under consideration by responsible [governing] bodies.”

The following day, over 2,000 students rallied against police interference on campus and Sword ultimately promised not to involve external authorities unless there was “a clear and present danger to the essential functions.”

Twenty-five years later, in November 1997, botched security at an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit at the University of British Columbia (UBC) meant students (and others) protesting the neoliberalization it represented were pepper-sprayed, arrested, and strip-searched. A $10 million federal inquiry later blamed “high-ranking police officials and the federal government” for the inappropriate violence and recommended “that university campuses not be used as venues for events where delegates ‘are to be sequestered and protected from visible and audible signs of dissent.’” 

During the 2012 Maple Spring protests against a tuition hike in Quebec, the provincial government – not university administrators – deployed law enforcement in an effort to break the powerful student movement. Officers took extreme measures including using pepper spray, tear gas, plastic bullets, and kettling, and “[c]ountless people reported being struck, stepped on, slammed to the ground or against a wall, choked, pulled by the hair, dragged along the ground, or repeatedly punched, kneed, or kicked.”

The strategy backfired, ultimately mobilizing the general public against this authoritarianism and toppling the government. In 2023, the city of Montreal had to apologize and pay $6 million to those unlawfully arrested during the protests. 

This might be one reason the Service de Police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM) refused McGill’s request to clear the pro-Palestinian encampment the following year. 

It does not, however, explain why university administrators at McGill and elsewhere responded so aggressively, so uncharacteristically, to the spring 2024 protests. 

Or why, as a recent Briarpatch investigation by Ted Rutland and Lena Andres demonstrates, institutions have since implemented policies to restrict the type and location of protests on campus, banning tents, occupations, disruptions, and, in the case of the University of Toronto, the use of chalk, paint, video projectors, megaphones, and/or amplification equipment. Surveillance has also intensified, including more cameras and gates, guards and private security – some empowered to make citizen’s arrests – and, at the University of Toronto, vigilante groups have patrolled the campus.     

Demanding divestment

It is not as though divestment is a new issue for student movements. 

“As we would not invade Vietnam,” suggested University of Toronto mathematics professor Chandler Davis, “we should not be a cog in a machine which is invading Vietnam.

During the Vietnam War, for example, organizers demanded that their universities (and the Canadian government) end their complicity in the American-led intervention. 

In my 2007 article, “The Backdrop Against Which Everything Happened,” I explained: “Most disturbing for many was the continual flow of arms and munitions manufactured in Canada for use by the American military in Vietnam, allowing Canadian companies and the government to profit from the death of millions of Vietnamese citizens.” 

“As we would not invade Vietnam,” suggested University of Toronto mathematics professor Chandler Davis, “we should not be a cog in a machine which is invading Vietnam.”

By the 1980s, students (and others) had turned their attention to South African apartheid and, encouraged by the African National Congress, campaigned for institutional divestment from the racist regime. 

“To profit from racial oppression,” activists at McGill told their board of governors, “is itself racist,” and by contributing to and benefiting from this system, they explained, every student was made a collaborator. Complicit, in the words of their Sixties predecessors. 

Similarly, 21st-century student activists are exposing the many ways that universities are intertwined with the corporations responsible for climate change including through research, governing bodies, funding, and curricula.

“Our university’s money,” argued Dalhousie organizers in 2014, “should not be supporting the social and environmental destruction caused by the fossil fuel industry.” 

“What good is it to mould future leaders,” asked one UBC student in 2012, “if our investments ensure there will be no future to lead?” 

The students’ tactics were also familiar. 

In November 1967, approximately 80 University of Toronto students and faculty blocked the entrances of the Placement Service building. For three hours, the registrar, Robin Ross, and a representative of the Dow Chemical Company, William White, were essentially locked inside.

Protesters opposed the use of university facilities by the primary manufacturer of napalm, a highly flammable, gelatinous chemical weapon used extensively in Vietnam, and they only released their captives once the university agreed to cancel future interviews and review institutional policies.

No police or security were involved. “We would just make placards and protest,” remembers Lizanne Chicanot. “[N]o permits or anything. We just did it.

Twenty years later, anti-apartheid activists engaged with institutional governing bodies, submitting reports and motions to decision makers, but they also rallied support for divestment referenda and regular protests. 

At Queen’s University in 1986, protesters constructed a shantytown outside the administration building and, on more than one occasion, interrupted board of governors meetings.⁠

“This is our university!” participants shouted at the governors. “Go back to your corporations!” “Three-piece suits and blood-stained hands!”

No police or security were involved. “We would just make placards and protest,” remembers Lizanne Chicanot. “[N]o permits or anything. We just did it.”

At McGill, 1,200 individuals participated in an “unrelenting four-hour protest” outside the meeting where student activist Amy Kaler, elected specifically for the purpose, presented an official motion. The pressure was enough that, in 1985, McGill became the first Canadian university to divest from South African-related investments. 

York, Dalhousie, Western, Queen’s, UBC, Carleton, and Toronto soon followed.

“There’s some symbolic significance to [McGill being first],” Kaler reflects, “because it is such an Anglo bastion of propriety and old money in Canada [but] they had to be dragged into it kicking and screaming. And it was the anti-apartheid movement that was doing the dragging.”

Now it is proudly identified as part of the institution’s heritage. 

By the 21st century, the fossil fuel divestment movement created strategies focused both inside and outside the university and included lobbying, referenda, tabling, class talks, marches, and rallies. 

At Dalhousie in November 2017, students held a 10-day encampment, “the longest on-campus campout for fossil fuel divestment in Canadian history.”

It earned them speaking time at the board of governors meeting where they pushed for full and immediate divestment. Afterwards, they simply “rolled up their sleeping bags and folded away their tents. The cleanup,” explained the student newspaper, “was quick and went largely unobserved by students preparing for exams.”

No cops necessary.

By 2025, many major universities across the country had announced full or partial divestment from the fossil fuel industry, including, four months before the spring 2024 encampments, McGill University. Even the notoriously recalcitrant University of Toronto agreed, in 2021, to divest, “beginning immediately.”

Student movements were once again at the forefront of progressive social change, their institutions forced to evolve. 

Palestine exception

Universities have never been neutral sites of power, always deeply enmeshed in settler-colonial and capitalist projects at home and abroad, and have extensive academic, financial, political, ideological, and other ties with Israel that make them susceptible to pressure from the pro-Israel lobby. 

Previous campus movements were largely white, though the increasingly female and femme-identifying leadership was susceptible to what feminist scholars call the “double-bind,” gaining legitimacy from their presumed roles as wives and mothers – as caretakers – but losing influence as supposedly irrational and passive individuals.

“These affiliations,” Andres and Rutland suggest, “are so important to universities that [administrators] are willing to attack their own students, ban public events, and construct or augment elaborate webs of private and public security.”

There is also the deep-rooted racism, particularly after 9/11, that positions Muslims (and other Brown people) as terrorists and erases Palestine and the Palestinian people from public life. 

Previous campus movements were largely white, though the increasingly female and femme-identifying leadership was susceptible to what feminist scholars call the “double-bind,” gaining legitimacy from their presumed roles as wives and mothers – as caretakers – but losing influence as supposedly irrational and passive individuals. 

But Muslims (and Palestinians) are regularly portrayed as “prone to violence and fanaticism,” while African Americans (and Black people in general) are viewed as aggressive and menacing. In Canada, similar assumptions are made about supposedly “savage” Indigenous peoples. As such, protests led largely by racialized groups and individuals are frequently portrayed as dangerous and disruptive, regardless of evidence to the contrary.

Additionally, universities have transformed into businesses, governed by secretive corporate-dominated boards more concerned with donors, returns on investments, and the brand than on learning and freedom. 

Their students are fee-paying customers; the campus, private property; and institutional operations, essential to profit-making.

In this context, organizing becomes more challenging, more dangerous, and more urgent. 

Because, once again, students are on the right side of history.

Free Palestine.