University of Calgary tolerated protest camps in the past. What made this one different?

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 protestors 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.

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."

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 protestors' Charter rights.