Many of you must be praying that the government will refuse to budge on its policy of allowing tuition fees to rise higher and higher each year.
After all, if this issue has reached such an intense boiling point that administrators have actually marked Wednesday class-optional to allow students to march in a national Day of Action to freeze tuition fees, just imagine what the province’s further refusal to listen to students’ demands could get us.
Perhaps we’ll get a whole admin-sanctioned week off school next fall so that students can go set up tents outside parliament hill and ambush Harper (Dion?) with placards and bullhorns. (Hopefully it’ll be warmer out.)
Certainly the scale of Wednesday’s Day of Action-a day when Canadian students will be leaving their classes for gigantic rallies where they will loudly demand a freeze on tuition fees-will mark the largest, most organized effort masterminded by the Canadian Federation of Students in recent memory to convince the powers that be to give students’ wallets a break so that our minds can focus more on our books than on working part-time or worrying about mounting debt.
Though modern activists have been accused of lacking the megaphone-wielding zeal of protestors gone by, kids today certainly know more about advertising (and have more tools available) than their Vietnam-era predecessors. Feb 7 organizers are harnessing the potential of the internet to attract widespread attention to the cause in new ways.
Through the Feb7.ca website, web-based corporate annoyances-such as rewards for referring friends to register for a website and mass-emailing friends with a stock “wanna join?” message-have been transformed into ways to get people informed and involved in the fight to lower tuition. While politicians could rightly question the legitimacy of the signatories on some online petitions, they can’t ignore thousands of students camping out on their doorstep, brought together by the online campaign.
So why sing the same old song about keeping tuition fees low, you ask? Based on the impressive list of partners supporting the Day of Action (everyone from student unions and the Toronto Youth Cabinet to the UTM Athletics Council and U of T’s Philosophy Reading Club), keeping tuition fees at an acceptable level is a major concern for all students, not just those who get their kicks debating labour policies. Many students are already forced to work one or more jobs to pay for school, shelter, and sustenance. Gone are the days when undergrads could dawdle in libraries and spend hours at the coffee shop debating the issues; more often than not, the modern undergrad can’t afford half his books and must work at said coffee shop to pay the rent.
Controlling tuition fees is one way to ensure that students are afforded key opportunities to grow through conversation, extra-curricular involvement and volunteer work-not to mention a little leisure time. All of these elements should form a part of the ideal university lifestyle, but working night and day to pay for the pleasure of attending class robs students of such crucial experiences.
If, as is often said in politics, “Decisions are made by those who show up,” our leaders cannot discount the power of the youth vote any longer. Not when students voted in larger number than ever before during the last federal election, and a spike in student voter turnout in the Trinity-St. Paul riding last year was a large factor in getting Olivia Chow her seat. Students are well-informed and increasingly unified in their calls for governments to invest in their future. If the CFS can carry out a successful protest that brings out record numbers of students, politicians would certainly have to re-open the tuition file, especially during a likely election year.
But if this rally fails to convince our national political parties that tuition fees are, after the environment, the most important issue to Canadian students, then we may find ourselves, sadly, with little to look forward to except the next day off school.
