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Quebec student groups and the provincial government are set to resume talks Monday in the hopes of breaking an impasse over tuition fee hikes.

Representatives from the four main student groups will meet with the province's education minister in Quebec City.

Student leader Martine Desjardins said Sunday she will be at the negotiating table, but would rather discuss a tuition freeze, rather than an increase.

"Just to talk about the tuition fee hike at the table would be a step forward, because every time we've been discussing with the government it's never been put on the table," Desjardins told CTV Montreal.

The Quebec government had announced a $325 hike in fees each year for the next five years. However, the government said it would spread the increase over seven years, to equal $254 per year, after students objected.

Since then, students and their supporters have taken to the streets in protests that at times have turned violent, leading to property damage and dozens of arrests.

Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, spokesperson for the student group CLASSE, said Sunday he is sceptical that students' voices will really be heard during the meeting.

"It's difficult for us to really know what are their real intentions," he told CTV Montreal. "Is this negotiation table only an operation of public relations? It's also possible."

Leo Bureau-Blouin, another student leader, said the latest round of talks represent the "last chance" for the government to end its standoff with students.

"If we don't succeed in coming to an agreement acceptable to both sides, I think it will be very hard to come out of this crisis, because the students are no longer in class and the social climate is becoming more and more heated," he said.

The government is facing increasing pressure to settle the issue, as the busy summer tourist season nears and business owners fear a loss of revenue as tourists cancel bookings to avoid getting caught up in the violence.

Montreal Mayor Gerald Tremblay held a closed-door meeting with various stakeholders Sunday, and emerged to say the city is "trying to find concrete solutions as soon as possible."

Former premier and Parti Quebecois leader Jacques Parizeau spoke out about the issue for the first time Sunday, criticizing the government for letting the conflict drag on.

He said the students "aren't always right," but also said the government should not beat them into submission.

Protests ‘contagious'

Earlier Sunday, a panel of political experts said the almost nightly protests in Montreal have transcended the student movement's opposition to tuition fee hikes and are now more about the future of the province and basic rights.

While the movement isn't exactly surging in public opinion polls, it's starting to attract international attention through its use of social media -- particularly to spread its rejection of Bill 78, a new Quebec law designed to crack down on street protests.

But the recent tactic of banging pots and pans and generally making noise has increased the volume of that opposition and drawn more people from the sidelines to the frontlines with kitchen utensils in tow.

"I think now it's become contagious and people are just letting their steam out, people are mad about corruption, about lack of ethics . . . shale gas, anything you want," political analyst and former Liberal MP Jean Lapierre told CTV's Question Period Sunday.

In the beginning the student marches were primarily a Montreal phenomenon, but they have since spread to communities like Val D'or and Gaspe, Lapierre said in an interview from Montreal.

"The people want to be heard."

It's also possible recent social unrest is a reverberation of the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s when students, artists and intellectuals realized parts of Quebec society were poor, uneducated and backward.

And, that's led to resurgence in the social belief that groups such as students are intellectual workers and should be paid through means such as free tuition, William Johnson, columnist and former president of English lobby group Alliance Quebec, said as part of the panel discussion on Question Period.

That's not necessarily a view shared by McGill University associate professor Antonia Maioni, who argues the protests are really a larger debate about Quebec's political and economic future.

"We've been having a debate in Quebec for at least a decade about what's next," she said.

That debate has centered on global changes and how the province manages that upheaval in the future, she said.

"A community and a society that's divided on the question and that wants to have a way of expressing its point of view," Maioni said about the movement's motivation.

Premier Jean Charest came to power with a plan to change the state, she said, and take the province on another track.

"I think what we're seeing in some of the protests is a bit of pushback, which I think now is way beyond simply the student movement," she said.

Lapierre said what he's noticed is the lack of reference to Quebec sovereignty in the demonstrations, and more talk about the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms with regard to Bill 78.

"In a way, it's quite a different scene than what we've heard for the last 30 years and I must say, I have not heard one person on the street saying, ‘We want (PQ Leader Pauline) Marois'," he said.

"It's really on wider issues and the debate is right and left, but nothing about sovereignty."

Johnson doesn't agree with that assertion and said the groups backing and bankrolling the students are the same ones who lobby for independence -- artists, labour unions, intellectuals and the separatists themselves.

"For all of them the common denominator is they have a sacred cause, according to which the Quebec state and the Quebec government is illegitimate," he said.

That comes with the ingrained belief that students should be paid, society must be renewed, the people should stand with the Third World and "puts welfare ahead of profit," Johnson said.

But Maioni said it's really "more of an expression of frustration with the heavy handedness of Bill 78" as a response to the conflict over tuition fees.

"I think that really transcends any kind of politics of sovereignty, or politics of the sort that (William) was suggesting," she said.

Maioni said most demonstrators are genuinely concerned citizens who are making noise and stating this (Bill 78) isn't the way they want to solve problems in Quebec.

Lapierre agreed and said the public sentiment is to negotiate with the students.

"They don't want to have a bazooka to kill a duck."

With a report from CTV Montreal's Aphrodite Salas and files from The Canadian Press