“The provincial government is swimming in federal dollars,” said Jesse Greener, Ontario chairperson of the Canadian Federation of Students. Unusually optimistic-sounding words for a student leader, perhaps, but Greener thinks he has found evidence in last Friday’s budget that the provincial government can afford to extend the tuition freeze.
The freeze, which has kept fees for domestic undergraduate students steady for the last two years, will end next year with average tuition increases of five per cent.
Governments have taken to leaking or announcing most of the contents of their budgets before the fact, so there were few surprises when Ontario’s annual budget was released last Friday. But Greener found one unexpected section.
“The provincial government is sitting on close to a billion in federal dollars earmarked for postsecondary education,” he said. “It’s shocking, because this McGuinty government continues to steamroller forward with higher fees.”
Greener is referring to $750 million in transfer payments from the federal government expected over the next three years, which will go to higher education. Though they were announced by Martin’s Liberal government, Prime Minister Stephen Harper has committed to the package of transfer payments that they are part of, which totals almost $7 billion over six years.
Greener said that the tuition freeze costs $50 million a year to maintain. Presumably, the Ontario government could have chosen to use some federal money to keep tuition frozen.
For his part, Finance Minister Dwight Duncan is emphasizing student aid.
“We are doubling spending on student aid,” he said in the budget speech. “We have reintroduced upfront grants and will provide them to 60,000 students this coming school year-up from 32,000 last year.” Duncan also guaranteed that students who accumulate more than $7,000 a year in student debt will have the rest forgiven-though a maximum debt of $28,000 may not be much comfort to students.
But Greener is no longer impressed by the grant program.
“There’s no doubt that students are interested in seeing more grants in the system,” he said. “When those grants were unrolled originally during the tuition fee freeze we were quite positive.” But without a tuition freeze, he said, the grants are not as useful. “For every dollar that goes into financial aid, $1.72 is coming back out in higher fees.”