The contexts are different but the photos are similar: a collection of colourful tents grouped together on the University of Calgary campus.
One image is from March 1999, when students set up an impromptu camp in protest of planned tuition hikes.
The other image is from a quarter-century later, in May 2024, when pro-Palestinian protesters set up tents in what they described as a student-led effort to pressure the university to review, disclose and sever financial ties with Israel.
The campers stayed in place for several days in 1999 and dispersed after the university agreed to soften its planned tuition hike. A similar encampment spanned the better part of a week in 2003, again in protest of tuition increases.
The campers in 2024, by contrast, were declared to be trespassing by university administrators the day they arrived and ordered out by police that evening.
Those who remained were forcibly removed by armoured officers using shields, batons and flash-bang explosives. Five people were arrested.
Police and university officials are being criticized for the violent arrest of pro-Palestinian protesters at the University of Calgary. Similar protests have lasted weeks on other Canadian campuses, while the UofC’s lasted just hours before being removed by force.
The speed and scale of the response has prompted an ASIRT investigation of police actions and raised questions about the university’s decisions. Among them: Why was this encampment treated so differently from those of two decades earlier?
“I think the University of Calgary should have looked at historical precedents around this,” said Graham Sucha, a member of the university’s senate.
“Encampments have happened on the campus in the past,” Sucha said. “They were politically motivated and had a political nature to them. The University of Calgary allowed for those to be there. You can actually find photos of them on their website.”
The University of Calgary, itself, didn’t make anyone available for an interview but issued a written statement regarding the differences between then and now, highlighting the fact that wooden pallets were erected around last week’s encampment and the tensions surrounding recent campus protests in other cities, which have been in place for weeks, in some cases.
The U of C statement said: “The university can’t speak to decision-making at that time [in 1999 or 2003], but there are some material differences — most obviously the presence of makeshift barricades and the risk of counter-protests.”
It went on to say the pro-Palestinian protest camp was removed based on sections of three university policy documents, all of which were created after the tuition-protest encampments:
The 2019 document on free expression details the right for university members to gather for on-campus demonstrations but also states the university may “reasonably regulate the time, place and manner of expression to ensure that it does not disrupt the ordinary activities of the institution.”
Law profs say Charter rights ‘likely violated’
An open letter signed by more than a dozen professors in the U of C Faculty of Law, however, criticized the actions of both the university and the police, saying they likely contravened protesters’ Charter rights.
“Students who have erected temporary encampments for the purpose of peaceful protest were served trespass notices almost immediately after setting up and without meaningful engagement, severely constraining their right to protest,” the professors wrote.
“In the absence of meaningful engagement, discretionary trespass notices and the decision to call in police to enforce such notices are not reasonable and proportionate limits on Charter rights.”
The professors had similar criticisms of the actions taken against protesters at the University of Alberta.
“By enforcing trespass notices that appear to have been based only on the fear of safety risks and potential operational concerns, the Calgary Police Service and Edmonton Police Service likely violated the Charter rights of students,” they wrote.
Compare and contrast
Matt Stambaugh camped out at both the 1999 and the 2003 protests. In fact, he helped organize the latter, as the president of the students’ union at the time.
He recalls the entire atmosphere surrounding those protests as fundamentally different from those of last week.
“Especially in ’99, there was never a feeling like this was a charged up or a tense situation,” he said. “It was very calm and it was very respectful, too.”
He said the 1999 event started spontaneously but the students’ union ultimately “took responsibility” for the gathering and was in communication with university officials and campus security to keep it safe, clean and contained to a particular area.
In 2003, he said the students’ union was directly involved from the get-go and again maintained open channels with the university.
While each of the encampments lasted several days, Stambaugh said there was a clear end date in mind both times: a looming board of governors meeting on tuition hikes.
The content and contexts of the protests are relevant, too, in his view
“To compare tuition protests to one on Israel and Palestine is challenging in many different ways,” he said
“This is not to excuse the University of Calgary’s conduct … but this was kind of a local concern. It was a tuition concern versus these very emotionally charged geopolitical issues.”
Current students’ union view
The current students’ union says it wasn’t involved in organizing last week’s protest, and president Ermia Rezaei-Afsah acknowledged that as a key difference between it and the tuition protests of 1999 and 2003.
That said, he described the administration’s decision to call in the police and break up the protest as “a mistake that put students in harm’s way.”
“I’m still in shock that that happened. I think the shock’s just catching up to me now,” he said.
“There was no need for police at the Thursday encampment because it was peaceful the entire time. Things really only escalated when people found out there were police coming. It was like the administration started the fire by calling the police.”
The students’ union has also disputed the university’s description that the protest “devolved” with the arrival of counter-protesters, culminating “in shoving, projectiles being thrown at officers, and — ultimately — flash-bangs and arrests.”
Calgary police have said a small group of counter-protesters arrived near the end of the protest, but Chief Mark Neufeld has also said that, in terms of the police response, “the counter-protest didn’t play any part at all.”
Neufeld defended the police actions, saying protesters had “ample opportunity” to leave the encampment before officers used force to remove those who remained.
As pro-Palestinian encampments pop up on university campuses across Canada, there’s a renewed focus on freedom of expression.
Rezaei-Afsah believes the force used against the demonstrators will have a lasting effect on campus.
“It traumatized the University of Calgary, as a community, and trust was broken between students and administration,” he said.
Stambaugh, for his part, said he’s now too far removed from the specifics of the situation on campus to comment on anyone’s actions but said it was disappointing to witness what happened last week, after his experiences with the tent protests in 1999 and 2003.
“It does make me a little sad that we’ve gotten to the point where there’d be a group of students at the U of C that would have to be forcibly removed by police,” he said.