On March 28, 1969, over 10,000 CEGEP and McGill students, trade unionists, unemployed workers, and activists turned to the streets, beginning from McGill campus and heading toward the Université de Montréal (UdeM) as part of Opération McGill. Chants of “McGill aux travailleurs,” “McGill aux québécois,” and “McGill français” were shouted from Roddick Gates, pushing for McGill to become francophone, pro-nationalist, and pro-worker. It was the largest public demonstration in Quebec since the World War.
The demonstrators were protesting inequalities in Quebec higher education, which was epitomized by McGill’s position in society. From 1960 to 1965, the student population at McGill grew from 8,795 to 12,728. According to Sean Mills in The Empire Within: Postcolonial Thought and Political Activism in Sixties Montreal, “To the eyes of young activists, the school had come to symbolize much more than a prestigious site of ‘anglophone’ education; it was a symbol of both the privileges of settler colonialism and the technocratic and inhuman nature of American imperialism.”
At that time, although francophones made up 83 per cent of Quebec society, three out of six of Quebec universities were English. Anglophones made up 17 per cent of the population but made up 42 per cent of all university places and received 30 per cent of Quebec government grants. McGill’s research budget equaled UdeM and Laval’s combined. According to The Daily at the time, 51 per cent of McGill graduates worked outside Quebec.
The march began from St. Louis Square and headed toward McGill campus.
After the Mouvement pour l’intégration scolaire (MIS) protests in the fall of 1968, the first organization meetings for Opération McGill were held. They consisted of anglophone radicals and largely francophone organizations of the extra-parliamentary opposition. The MIS was formed to defend French-language schooling in the district of Saint-Léonard and throughout the province and was led by Saint-Léonard architect Raymond Lemieux. In addition, Bill 63 was passed in 1969, which guaranteed parents the right to choose the language of instruction for their children, with the Ministry of Education ensuring that children taught in English acquire “a working knowledge of French.”
According to The Empire Within, many of the writers for The Daily went on to establish The Last Post, an English-language journal seeking to connect readers with radical political movements in Quebec. It is the one of the major English-language Canadian publications born out of the fight for Quebec decolonization.
1967: The Union Nationale government opened the first seven CEGEPs, replacing Quebec’s classical college system.
September 1968: 16 additional CEGEPs were established. Quebec government officials announced that 20,000 CEGEP students would not find places in universities in the fall of 1969 and these numbers would get worse in the following year.
October 1968: Quebec students – following the example of the demonstrations in France earlier that year – occupied schools and protested in the streets. According to The Empire Within, “For two weeks, the CEGEP system stopped functioning. Students barricaded themselves inside their buildings, hanging portraits of the world’s best-known revolutionaries, from Lenin and Marx to Castro and Mao. Students wrote tracts, demonstrated in the streets, organized teach-ins and performed revolutionary theater. In one of the more dramatic occupations, students at the École des Beaux-Arts took over their institution and proclaimed it a republic. As the red flag flew above, those inside exercised their creative faculties and put art in the service of humanity.”
Montreal’s only French-language university at the time was UdeM. English-language universities included McGill, Sir George Williams University, and Loyola College.
October 21, 1968: Between 5,000 to 10,000 students marched through the McGill campus chanting “étudiants-ouvriers,” before making their way to UdeM to hear speeches by student leaders.
October 24, 1968: Stanley Gray, a young lecturer in the Department of Political Science and Economics, publishes “For a Critical University” in The McGill Daily Review.
December 3, 1968: Activists close to MIS stormed the McGill campus and occupied its computer centre as a protest against Premier Jean-Jacques Bertrand’s proposed guarantee of English-language schooling rights in the province. Principal Rocke Robertson called the police and the riot squad stormed the building at 1 a.m. Le Devoir reported on December 5 in an article titled “McGill ne déposerait pas de plainte contres ses onze ‘occupants’ francophones” that the 11 students inside had enough provisions for the week but the police had no trouble clearing them out.
February 5, 1969: Demand by Radical Students’ Alliance was published in The Daily and presented to Senate. Under its education section, the Alliance demanded that, “McGill must give immediate priority to instituting a Functional French Program to provide rapid and effective training to speaking French, so that by 1972 all candidates for degrees and all teaching personnel be able to speak the language of Quebec.”
February 6, 1969: Edward Goldenberg and Julius Grey publish an article in The Daily titled, “Bourgeois leftism in the student movement,” which speaks against McGill’s student leaders taking stands in favour of unilingualism and independence of Quebec, calling it “not progressive,” and that an independent Quebec would “not be a socialist paradise.”
February 8, 1969: A teach-in sponsored by the Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU) on CEGEPs was held to “to provide information and stimulate discussion on the major changes about to take place in English-language post-secondary education.”
February 10, 1969: Stanley Gray publishes “McGill and the rape of Quebec” in The Daily. [ed. note: The Daily’s editors do not support the use of this language, but chose to print the title here in the interest of historical accuracy.] The article stated, “It is not only as workers, but as French workers, that Québecois are exploited.” Gray further discusses McGill’s “rather peculiar relationship” to Quebec society, in its service to giant anglo-American corporations, saying that the corporations McGill worked with were “similar to that of the United Fruit Company to Latin America banana republics – absentee owners of the economy, plundering the nation’s natural resources and taking profits out of the country.”
February 11, 1969: Stanley Gray given notice of his dismissal from McGill based on his disruption of a Board of Governors meeting, although many believed his dismissal was due to his activism at the university and in the city. The Sir George Williams Affair – the largest student occupation in Canadian history – ends after two weeks when riot police arrest almost 100 Sir George Williams students.
February 12, 1969: Daily journalist David Turoff reports on the occupation of the Sir George Williams computing centre that had been ongoing for two weeks. Students were charged with arson, conspiracy, and public mischief; at that time, arson constituted a minimum sentence of seven years and a maximum sentence of life imprisonment, as reported by The Daily. Dean of Students Magnus Flynn called the police, who arrived at 5 a.m. on February 11.
February 17, 1969: Daily journalist Chris Neubert reports on the Engineering Congress, which calls for McGill to “speak French.”
February 25, 1969: Daily journalist René Sorell reports that McGill’s Faculty of Arts and Science rejected a proposed five-year undergraduate program, affirming its preference for a four-year program with the first year to be phased out as places became available in CEGEPs.
March 5, 1969: The Daily reports that the Students’ Council passed a motion on March 4 that a special French edition of The Daily be published after March 28, although they had authorized the previous week an extra $1,000 for printing an additional 90,000 copies. The extra expenditure, however, was passed unanimously. The special French edition at question was called Bienvenue à McGill, which was distributed in schools, factories, metro stations, and political meetings.
March 18, 1969: Montreal police arrest The Daily’s editor-in-chief Mark Starowicz and staff member Robert Chodos, Louis-Bernard Robitaille from La Presse, Stanley Gray, and other activists that included CSN militants, members of the Mouvement de liberation du taxi, a professor, an unemployed man, and a bureaucrat. They were returning from a Montreal Central Council assembly.
March 26, 1969: Flyers announced a teach-in in the ballroom of the University Centre featuring talks by, amongst others, Léandre Bergeron, Michel Chartrand, Raymond Lemieux, and Stanley Gray.
March 28, 1969: 10,000 to 15,000 CEGEP and McGill students, trade unionists, members of the unemployed, and activists turn to the streets, beginning from St. Louis Square and heading toward McGill campus as part of Opération McGill.
April 2, 1969: Daily Review editor Mark Wilson wrote a retrospective about Opération McGill, writing that, “The true division of forces was not on lines of language or race; there were English and French on both sides. It was a division between oppressors and oppressed. One side has people, the other has money and guns.”
Organizers of Opération McGill published a statement on violence and oppression in The Daily, denouncing “the police State [that is] developing,” including but not limited to the blatant surveillance of homes, searches of organizers’ homes and confiscation of written materials, and arbitrary arrests.
Daily editor-in-chief Mark Starowicz published an analysis of the press coverage of Opération McGill called “Terrorism in the Press,” calling out the refocusing of the issues brought forth by Opération McGill from a worker-accessible and more socialist McGill to one focused on the linguistic divide.
Opération McGill ultimately failed, and in its wake, McGill has continued to be a primarily English-speaking institution. Though students can submit written work in French, and outlets and initiatives such as Le Délit cater to the francophone population, McGill has largely retained an anglophone culture. That culture comes with a sense that McGill remains separate from the rest of the city – hence the widely-used term “the McGill bubble” – and that non-Quebecer students often leave Quebec upon graduation. Despite the lack of a modern-day Opération McGill, it is crucial for McGill students to be cognizant of the role they play in perpetuating that tension, and to work to better integrate themselves into Montreal and Quebec culture.