Students from the team that negotiated the Quebec government’s offer to end the province’s three-month student strike say the published version of the proposal differs in major ways from what they agreed to.

The report of the negotiating team for CLASSE, the largest of the student unions involved in the process, says that government negotiators slipped the changes into a final revision of the document (link in French), which was presented as a last-minute technical revision addressing a variety of smaller issues. The students say they checked over those passages, and seeing them in order, approved the document.

They claim, however, that unbeknownst to them, the government had eliminated three important provisions of the agreement, including sections dealing with the mechanism by which cost savings would be applied to tuition reduction, the length of an agreed-upon tuition freeze, and the procedure for electing the chair of the committee.