Until recently, the Cégep Maisonneuve’s admin made a habit of systematically forcing a making up of the school calendar after strikes. For every day of striking, they added a day of classes. By attacking the tactic of the local student union, the SOGEECOM1, the administration wished to render it useless. That was before students got involved and ruined that plan.
During the winter of 2025’s semester, after having adopted a mandate against makeup days in General Assembly, students organised a true escalation of pressure tactics. It culminated, in May and June of 2025, by multiple days of hard striking, an injunction by the courts and exams under police surveillance. This authoritarian fiasco left a mark of teacherMs and students’ mind, so much so that during the semester of fall 2025, following 5 days of striking– two days more than during the winter of 2025 –, the admin changed their strategy. Result : no making up of “striked days” to the school calendar. The escalation of pressure tactics worked. Coverage and interview on the development of a local victorious campaign.
Makeup days, a demobilisation strategy
To understand the escalation of the 2025 winter, we need to go back to semesters before the pandemic quarantine. During the two years preceding this campaign, the admin forced making up : the fall of 2023 – after the Front Commun’s strike – students finished the semester in january 2024, in the fall of 2024 – after the strike against the NATO summit – admin forced makeup days as well. Every time, those makeups are justified by the « rule of the 82 days* » a part of the regulations regarding cégeps and universities.
What is the rule of the 82 days ?
The “rule of 82 days” is a clause in the « Regulation on the regimen of collegial studies », a section of the Law on the general and professional general teaching colleges. Article 18 of that regulation stipulates that every semester shall consist of « a minimum of 82 jours dedicated to classes and to evaluation » and that any admin that plans a semester of less than 82 days must ask “the approval of the minister”.
In practice, it is common that cegeps bureaucracies do cheap tricks with calendars to conform to the minister’s requirements. One of the most frequently used tactics is to consider the fall and winter “week break” as a week of “classes and evaluation”, hence the use of the term “week of support to success” in French.
These mesure created frustrations around student strikes amid the students. Mélianne B. Quintal, employee SOGEECOM, remarks, it was frequent to hear members of the union saying contesting the usefulness of striking : « Why strike at all if we always make up on classes? In what way is that tactic useful if we always make up? ». Make ups created discouragement, demobilisation, and members of the executive council considered that they attacked the “principle of why we strike”.
How to begin escalation?
In the past, SOGEECOM had already voted mandates against make up days. The thing is, generally, the absence of a clear plan and feeble mobilisation on that matter made it so that mandate was never applied. As Wassim Terki, student in the double DEC in Human sciences et Natural sciences, highlights, after the strike against NATO, « we voted a position against makeup days, but we let it slide a little bit, we didn’t really wage war against makeup days at that point”.
During the winter 2025, the SOGEECOM’s executive council plans to avoid the laissez-faire, applying the mandate in a strict manner. As Elki Mercier, student in Nursing, highlights, the union is ready to act immediately after the strike, starting in April : “we wait for the admin to release the new calendar, and as soon as they do, we remind the strike mandate to students”.
After that release, members of the executive council adopted a massive communication campaign, the first step in the escalation of pressure tactics : “We decided in the executive council that we will communicate to everyone. We wrote to teachers, we wrote to workers unions, we wrote to the admin. We wrote to everyone who have a “cmaisonneuve” email. We sent many emails. We printed all those letters, and put them in the pigeonholes. We did leaflets, we did a newsletter.”
Everyone we interviewed highlighted that this proactive communication strategy contributed to the success of the campaign. According to Elki Mercier, this strategy allowed them to receive “a pretty unanimous response from departments and from unions. They won’t put exams there, it’s not their intention to do so.” This contrasted with the “radio silence” from the admin at the same time.
So, in the beginning of May, almost every department succeeded in moving their exams before the makeup weeks from May 26th to 28th. Only one exam was left : the second Biology class touching approximately a hundred students who’s supposed to happen on May 27th. Despite the wishes of teachers and despite many concrete proposals of change to the exam schedule, the cegep’s admin refused any change and stayed deaf to proposals2. It is now time to continue escalation of pressure tactics.
Picketing, injunction, exam under police surveillance
The first two days of the makeup days strikes happened without any major problems. The picketing begins early and cegep students can count on the help of students from other cegeps and universities answering their call to solidarity. After that first show of force, the admin adds a day to the school calendar. They send the modification by mail, without ever getting out of the building to speak with strikers, without negotiating. The next day is “striked”. At this point, everything points to the admin’s strategy being wearing out strikers : as the semester is over, the picketing will stop by itself.
But, a turn of events occured : the admin decided to force the makeup days through the courts. On May 28th, they send a cease-and-desist letter to present and former members of the student union’s executive council through their union email. The court date is only the following day. After a sleepless night spent working on the trail with the lawyers, the court decided in favor of the injunction, thus ordering the end of the strike. The student union is obliged to follow the power of the law, under the threat of heavy fines. A question is then on everyone’s lips : how to fight back against this judicialization ?The answer to judicial escalation will come from activist networks autonomous from the student union, and from individual students who will then decide to disturb the exams. This extralegal response gets organized without the union and lets go of the picketing tactic in favor of a repertoire of more mobile actions. Thus, in the first week of June, as many police squads enclose the cegep in order to force makeup days, we get a cat mouse game between protesters and cops on the campus grounds. The end up succeeding in delaying exams by many hours while causing quite a bit of chaos and making up makeshits barricade3. A small mocking of the courts.
Hindsight look in Fall 2025
According to the interviewed participants, the struggle of winter 2025, despite the loss before the courts, bore fruits long term. It led to the abandonment of the exercise of making up on striked days after the end of the semester, before the next semester.
For Mélianne Quintal, the last moment of escalation led to « financial and political costs [for the admin]. It doesn’t make the college very popular to make cops intervene to force an exam to happen. The conclusion of the semester, the lack of makeup days, leads us to believe that, yes, the escalation of pressure tactics worked. What was outright refused in the past, revising the calendar so that the “weeks for student success“ are included in the 82 days, was accepted this semester without needing to do any pressure tactic whatsoever.» Furthermore, the struggle brought together the student union and the worker’s unions, who now see « clearly immensely anti-union behaviours from the admin ».
Same story for Elki Mercier who considers the campaign a victory : « During winter 2025, the admin held a hard line on the “rule of 82 days”, saying it was illegal and impossible to include the “days of student success” in the 82 days [of the school calendar. Yet, during the Fall of 2025, we don’t hear about it when we negotiate with the admin. Nobody does anything to enforce the rule, and we don’t hear about the risks of the ministry refusing the new calendar. »
This campaign also convinced them of the relevance of the strategy of escalation of pressure tactics : “What I keep from the strike of makeup days, it’s that pressure tactics that are properly organized, which are included in an escalation, leads to gains. And, that, I hadn’t seen it applied often. I knew the theory of combative syndicalism, but the fact I witnessed this victory, it proved to me, and to us that admins and governments don’t have their hands tied. We can make a change by organizing, by blockading, doing petitions, communicating among ourselves and by showing solidarity. And that, that absolutely motivated me to do more struggles.”
- The Société générale des étudiantes et étudiants du collège de Maisonneuve. ↩︎
- Elki Mercier reports seeing the department coordinator, who « assured that there was another spot to do that exam outside of the makeup days.The coordinator told me that she sent a message to the admin. She wrote that she found a spot in the schedule and a room to give the exam. Her mail ended with “ Is it okay? “ The admin never answered. There was clearly a strategy, here, by the admin. » ↩︎
- See the Front Rose coverage on that subject: https://frontrose.gay/maisonneuve-cest-pas-brebeuf/ ↩︎