MONTREAL - After months of fighting a tuition increase through countless demonstrations, of banging pots in frustration and even squaring off with riot police, students got a call on the morning after the election that made them feel like the winners of this late-summer campaign.

“We had a call from the PQ assuring us they will cancel the tuition increase and Bill 78,” said Martine Desjardins, president of the Fédération étudiante universitaire du Québec, noting students will also meet with Parti Québécois Leader Pauline Marois. “They said they will reimburse any students who have already paid.”

She said the call was a relief for students, who were concerned that a minority PQ government might be blocked from making those changes.

“Although we will really celebrate when there is a decree, this is really a victory for our cause,” Desjardins said.

While a cabinet decree might be hard for opposition parties to contest and political experts say they don’t believe the opposition would want to topple the government over such a budgetary measure, the fact is Quebec’s universities have budgeted for this year based on the tuition hike and are now facing upheaval — and deficits.

A statement from the Conférence des recteurs et des principaux des universités du Québec expressed its willingness to collaborate with the new government, but McGill University principal Heather Munroe-Blum was more direct in her assessment.

“What this does is deepen dramatically what was already a very substantial hole in the funding of Quebec’s universities,” she said in an interview. “We’ve just taken a giant step toward increasing the deficits of Quebec’s universities, over and above what is close to a $700-million annual gap in funding.”

She said Marois is a smart woman whose ideas she was keen to hear, but “I’m not seeing the silver lining.”

Less than 24 hours after the election, the prospect of peace was already taking shape.

Four of the most militant university faculties, which supported a boycott of classes up until election day, voted Wednesday to go back to class.

Those were: cinema at Université de Montréal, anthropology and sociology at Université Laval, art history at U de M and language and communications at U de M.

Desjardins said those decisions were probably indicative of what will happen with the 20 or so most ardent associations that had waited for the outcome of the election before deciding how to vote.

But some members of the Coalition large de l’association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante were a little more skeptical. On Facebook, CLASSE noted that “we blocked the increase ... for now!” It also pointed out that the PQ planned to index tuition to the cost of living, and that students must still mobilize and fight for the free education they want.

Bruce Hicks, a political science professor at Carleton University, said that while students might have won their tuition battle, they haven’t won the war.

“Their victory was getting the PQ to put the tuition issue in their platform,” he said. But most of the population voted for parties (the Liberals and Coalition Avenir Québec) that are in favour of tuition hikes.

“With two-thirds of Quebecers willing to have a fee increase in spite of the potential for more social unrest, that’s hardly a victory.”

However, Desjardins saw it differently. “The CAQ proposed a moratorium for the fall as well, so that means a lot of people voted for a moratorium and a resolution to the conflict,” she said.

kseidman@montrealgazette.com