While students were marching in one of the largest tuition freeze rallies the country has seen, former premier Roy Romanow was sliding into his chair at a press conference to release the interim report on his national medicare inquiry.
Any guess which event got more media coverage?
It’s not that education is less important than medicare. One is about keeping the body fit, the other about maintaining the health of the mind.
The two are both vital to a decent life, as anyone from Socrates on could tell you. To paraphrase the great philosopher, what good is a long life if the experiences it contains are not reflected upon? Which is what an education—especially a university education—allows one to do.
So why are these two inseparable chums weighted so differently when it comes to public priorities? Nova Scotia Education Minister Jane Purves knows.
“She is listening and she is fighting at the cabinet table for every education dollar,” a spokesperson for her department told Canadian Press. “But with health care at the forefront of everyone’s mind both provincially and nationally, it’s a struggle.”
How medicare got pushed to the forefront of everyone’s mind and post-secondary education to the back isn’t hard to figure out. Everyone deals with the medical system fairly regularly, while at any given time, only a tiny portion of the population is pursuing a post-secondary education.
Far from being a detriment, these tiny numbers are our greatest friend because they mean—unlike medicare—the problem costs very little to fix. A few million dollars more per year in needs-based federal scholarships would clear up most of the accessibility problems. A few million is small compared to the billions on end spilled over medicare; smaller yet compared to the government’s $150 billion budget.
But the question is how to move this very modest proposal to the front of people’s mind. And that takes cold hard political maneuvering, because if people are not contacting universities in their everyday life, we’ve got to find a way to put them in touch. Not just via newscasts, but in person—the way they experience medicare.
Lobbying doesn’t work. Sorry to tell you this, folks, but politicians care first and foremost about getting reelected, and they don’t care about post-secondary education because the rest of the population also doesn’t care. If they do, it’s at the bottom of a long wish list.
Budgets aren’t based on lobbying. They’re based on votes. A little tax cutting, a little medicare funding, a little debt repayment to satisfy majority demands and keep the opposition at bay.
Street protests also don’t work. Or if they do, their effect is sporadic at best. They are impressive when done in large numbers, but they are also one-day attacks. And while one-day attacks can win a battle, they cannot win a war.
We need to talk to voters face to face. Perhaps need is an understatement. If we do not talk to voters face to face, we will not win. Lobbying government directly does not work, because as good as our ideas and as real as our plight may be, we are a minority. Using media attention through demonstrations to rally public support may have more impact, but it can easily be overshadowed by other issues and a few hundred-word news articles will never instill the long-term understand we need. So, on the heels of a well-attended protest that fell on very deaf ears in the government, we call not for a change of strategy, but a refocusing of energies. Let the lobbying and protesting continue, but let the number one priority now be on talking face-to-face with voters and convincing them of the very realness of our plight.
We put out this call not just to students, but to the Students Administrative Council, the Association of Part-Time Students, the Graduate Students Association and the Canadian Federation of Students and Canadian Alliance of Students Associations. Come up with a concrete plan to inform voters of students’ plight and we will donate the space for you to publicize it to students.
Get a move on. Because as a very wise U of T student told one of our reporters, education is about more than just enriching minds or getting jobs—it’s about the health of our democracy.
