From Monday March 18 to Thursday March 21, I joined student representatives from across Ontario to meet with over 60 Members of Provincial Parliament for lobby week. Representing the over 300,000 students who are members of the Canadian Federation of Students-Ontario, we presented to Members of Provincial Parliament a plan for post-secondary education that would improve access and quality to post-secondary education for all.
Among those we met with were the Minister of Training, Colleges and Universities Brad Duguid, Progressive Conservative post-secondary education critic Rob Leone, and New Democratic Party post-secondary education critic Teresa Armstrong.
BERNARDA GOSPIC/THE VARSITY
Students delivered ideas, such as a true 30 per cent reduction of tuition fees over three years, a plan to stop the practice of universities and colleges charging students illegal ancillary fees, and a plan to stop flat tuition fee billing so students could pay tuition fees per course. Representatives from the University of Toronto Students’ Union specifically discussed the ongoing issues regarding the Arts & Science ‘Flat Fee’ tuition policy and the very high cost of post-secondary education in faculties like law and dentistry. Almost all the ideas that we brought forward were cost-neutral — we found ways that the government could change their spending priorities to efficiently invest in post-secondary education.
On March 28, the Ontario Government released its new tuition fee framework that mandates three to five per cent tuition fee increases over the next four years. Since the Ontario Liberal Party has taken office, Ontario students will have faced over a 100 per cent increase in tuition fees at the close of these four years. This means that by 2016-2017 students will be paying more than 100 per cent more in tuition than they did when the Liberals took office. The majority of Ontarians believe that tuition fees are far too high and the only course of action is to lower fees. The lack of opportunity for young people upon graduation exacerbates the problem. Student unemployment has skyrocketed and the provincial student debt has gone above $9 billion.
The ongoing crisis of underfunding and unaffordability in post-secondary education creates a situation where education as a public service is being eroded. Our education is slowly being privatized and as a result, students from low- and increasingly middle-income backgrounds are being shut out of certain fields of study, and collecting mortgage-sized debts.
Over the years, series of governments, run by all three major parties, have eroded the funding that once existed for post-secondary education, and replaced that necessary funding with tuition fees. At the same time that we are paying more, our class sizes are getting larger, and we have less full-time professors teaching in the classroom. We should no longer accept this! We cannot simply accept that we will pay more for less, year after year. It is time for students, faculty and workers of all post-secondary education institutions to unite and take control of this system that is failing us.
Munib Sajjad is the President-Elect of the University of Toronto Students’ Union 2013–2014
