Since the Government of Ontario announced its cut to tuition and student fees on January 17, a series of protests have taken place at Queen’s Park and around the province, organized by students and aligned organizations. However, the story of rising tuition fees and of how secondary education has become so expensive is a longer narrative, one which answers a question that many students have been asking: what can be done about it?
The Progressive Conservative-led government’s reasoning for January’s changes to grants, loans, and the mandated ten-percent tuition cut is clear. The previous Liberal government’s action to cap tuition increases, consolidating previous OSAP grants into a new OSAP program, was on track to cost upwards of two billion dollars per year according to Ontario’s Auditor General. The Ford government came to power on a promise of reduced spending and finding efficiencies to fight the deficit, so when the Auditor General reported last fall that the program had gone wildly over budget, the government justified reforming OSAP to cut costs, while claiming to recognize that there exist long-term issues related to the drastically increasing cost of post-secondary education. In its news release announcing the changes, the government stated that institutions were being subsidized in part by OSAP and claimed that there was no appreciable improvement to post-secondary accessibility over the same time frame. The solution was a simple ten-percent across-the-board cut to tuition fees in all programs. This contrasts with the Liberal government’s previous strategy, which capped tuition fee increases on a year-over-year basis. The original 30 percent tuition cut that was rolled out in 2012 was expanded to cover more students in 2014, including students in their final year of a five-year co-op program and students attending private career colleges and other private post-secondary institutions that were eligible for OSAP. Eventually, this led to the introduction of the new OSAP program as part of the 2015 Ontario Budget, which was designed to provide more money to low-income students while being revenue-neutral.
At a town hall held last week at Innis College, MPP Chris Glover, NDP Critic for Training and Universities, explained the situation and why the program’s increase in cost was likely a good thing: “It was supposed to be revenue neutral, so they didn’t expect to pay any more money out of the government revenue, but the Auditor General’s report showed that it was actually about a billion dollars more than the government had to put into OSAP.”
“What this meant to me was actually a good thing because this meant that more low and middle income students were getting the financial support that they need, so if this had continued, they would probably graduate with lower debt. The debt is an incredible burden for students, so I think that the program was working better than anticipated, but that‘s now going to be taken away.”
Glover has found an ally in former Premier Kathleen Wynne, who has cited OSAP’s expansion, over 13,000 single mothers were able to receive free tuition. In a scrum held the day of the announcement, Wynne said, “I know that the government is trying to reframe the tuition cuts as good news. That’s what will help the wealthiest students because it’s an across–the–board cut for all the other things that they are doing because there isn’t an equal offset, so that tuition cut isn’t going to make up for losing the grants that lower income students get.”
The current provincial government, however, has gone on to find an alternative to make up for the shortfall in grants and loans to students: cutting student fees.
The Ford government has had an easier time justifying the cut with the recent story broken by Ryerson’s The Eyeopener, which alleges its university’s student union has misspent over 250,000 dollars. This is not the first story about the misappropriation of student funds in the past several years. Notably, there was a lawsuit filed by the University of Toronto Students’ Union against its former Executive Director Sandra Hudson for approximately 277,000 dollars of overtime, which was settled out of court in 2017. Examples like these have made it easy for the premier to attack student fees and the groups that collect them. In response to a CBC story reporting on The Eyeopener’s findings, Ford tweeted: “I’ve heard from so many students who are tired of paying excessive fees, only to see them wasted and abused. That’s why we’re giving students the power to choose to pay for the campus services they actually use.”
The irony of this idea is that student papers like The Eyeopener, which break the kinds of stories Ford has used as justification, are funded by the student fees which will become optional.
In response to the changes, NDP Education Critic Marit Stiles said that while the party is doing what they can, students need to mobilize and to call and write to their MPPs. “They need to feel the pressure; this isn’t just about current voters but future voters and they [the Ford Government] need to hear that loud and clear.”
To that end, external groups like March For Our Education and Students for Ontario have sprung up in recent weeks. These groups have organized student rallies at Queen’s Park and Toronto City Hall to put pressure on the Ontario PCs. One organizer, Aiman Akmal, has been concerned about changes coming to OSAP since the provincial campaign. She reached out to Progressive Conservative candidate, now MPP, Effie J. Triantafilopoulos, during the election period, asking if a Progressive Conservative government would make cuts to OSAP. In response, the campaign issued the statement: “Our plan is to keep the current program, no decreases. Our plan for savings is to find inefficiencies in government, we are committed to maintaining the programs that Ontario students rely on.”
Triantafilopoulos’ comments rang a little hollow for Aiman, who, at a student protest on February 4, said, “We are not inefficiencies. Providing higher education access to low income students with financial barriers is not an inefficiency.” Akmal has been working with her friends to organize some of the protests and to energize students. As well, Akmal has been working to deliver her message to her MPP, despite her MPP not having a constituency office until late last year.
It remains to be seen if these student groups will be able to keep their organizational momentum as midterm exams creep closer and the Legislature returns after Family Day weekend. All political parties are looking to reach young voters and engage them in the 2022 election. While higher turnout numbers tend to favour more progressive parties, Ontario’s decidedly Conservative election last June defied the trend by having the highest turnout in two decades.
The lack of voter turnout among young people hurt the NDP in the lead-up to the campaign, according to NDP campaign chief Michael Balagus. At a forum held by Ryerson University last year, he stated: “The NDP is not going to win an election until young people vote in this province.” Liberal strategist David Herle has also expressed difficulty with engaging young voters. Herle came under fire last year with Young Liberal campaign organizers and staffers for comments he made on youth disengagement in politics, claiming that youth are not involved in politics because they are busy “living young people lives.” With three and a half years until the next provincial election, it remains to be seen if opposition to the OSAP cuts will hurt Doug Ford at the ballot box, or if the changes will be accepted by parents and students as the new norm for post-secondary education in Ontario.
