Nova Scotia students walk out in first province-wide strike

The student unions at four Nova Scotia universities have voted in favour of strike action beginning Monday.

The week long provincial student strike was spearheaded to demand affordable tuition for all students and institutional divestment from weapons manufacturers.

The Nova Scotia chapter of the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS) called on students to participate in the strike late last month.

“The demands of the student strike are affordable tuition and divestment,” Alexina St. Pierre-Farrow, the chairperson of CFS-NS, told CityNews. “Students are demanding standardization of tuition, which means the abolition of differential fees for international and out-of-province students, and an immediate 20 per cent decrease to all tuition fees for all students at every postsecondary institution in the province.”

On Mar. 10, the provincial government announced that it had reinstated education grants for Indigenous and African Nova Scotia students. But St. Pierre-Farrow said this is the bare minimum.

“[It] does nothing to address the ongoing lack of safe and accessible housing for many students, the absolute gutting of the arts, the prioritization of extractive industries on unceded Mi’kmaq land, and the ongoing disregard for treaties and Indigenous sovereignty,” she said. “The Nova Scotia government can compartmentalize these as non-student issues, but students are still struggling to afford to pay rent and buy groceries, students in the arts sector are still left with few options other than leaving to contribute to a different economy, and Indigenous students are still feeling the economic and ecological impact of treaties being broken.”

The Dalhousie Student Union (DSU) says its strike was organized independent of the CFS’s call, but the strike will still happen next week. The other students unions partaking in the strike from March 15 to 21 include those at University of King’s College, Acadia University and NSCAD University.

This will mark the first province-wide strike of post-secondary students in Nova Scotia. St. Pierre-Farrow said a strike is defined as the withholding of academic labour which can include not showing up to classes and not handing in assignments.

“The hope is that, by uniting to strike even for one week, students in Nova Scotia can set a precedent for more sustained actions in the future,” she said.

“And I’d remind my fellow students that this isn’t easy work, but we don’t do it because it’s easy. We don’t strike because it’s easy or fun, we’re striking because we as students make up a massive chunk of this province’s population, we’re angry about the conditions in which we’re forced to live and work and study, and we’re in a position to try to change them.”

The strike comes as provincial governments across the country have been making cuts to post-secondary education. At the beginning of the month, Algonquin College in Ottawa announced it was cutting 30 programs starting fall 2026 as a result of budget cuts and low levels of provincial funding.

Many of the cuts include programs considered arts, cultural and environmental studies.

“There’s been this cultural and political shift to the right that’s been happening slowly for years now, and there’s the cutting of the DNR [Department of Natural Resources] and funding to the arts. It’s terrifying,” St. Pierre-Farrow said.

She said no student should feel obligated to strike but that fearmongering around the strike is unnecessary.

“A lot of it relying on the concerns about the safety of international students to discourage striking,” she said. “While these are very valid concerns, I don’t think they’re a reason to encourage students not to strike, especially if they’re at less of a risk — part of any effective resistance movement is that those who are less vulnerable show up where the most vulnerable can’t.”

“[And] participation does not always have to look like being on the front lines of every action.”