Student Commission, YCL-LJC

March, 2016

The fight for accessible education and free tuition in Ontario is just beginning!

The Young Communist League of Canada condemns the intensification of the attack on Ontario’s post-secondary education system (PSE) as indicated in the Ontario Liberal’s budget released at the end of February.

The Ontario Liberal government, since their election in 2003, have been intent on moving Ontario towards a multi-tiered, inaccessible and privatized system, corporatizing campuses. and tailoring the content of teaching and research to big business interests. During that time, they have doubled the average tuition fees across Ontario.The new budget, which is fundamentally a banker’s austerity budget dressed as a “social justice budget”, pretends to offer “free tuition” to low-income students. This is not only a cynical lie based on what is actually a restructuring of existing grants, but opens the door to further privatization of PSE in Ontario, an even steeper increase in tuition fees, and quite possibly the total deregulation of tuition fees.

Although the Wynne Liberals have yet to reveal many of the specifics of the new grant system, the new “Ontario Student Grant” is far from offering “free tuition” to low-income families. The restructuring of back-end grants, tax rebates and tax credits into a upfront grant will help students, however the grant will only cover the average tuition fees in Arts & Science programs (lower than the actual average across the board). The overall debt ceiling for maximum loan debt (on top of the grant) is going up by over $2500 a year, which means more student debt.

It is unclear who will qualify for this new grant. It is positive that the Government have made a promise to make the grant available to mature students and students that don’t come to university directly from high school, but it says nothing about part-time students, graduate students, or international students. Also, $50,000 a year for net family income means that many single parent working-class families will qualify, but there are many working-class families that are living just above this low figure that will not qualify and will not be eligible for this restructured grant.

It is important to look back at the provincial election of 2011, where the Liberals promised “30% off tuition fees” in order to win students’ votes. Liberal candidates pitched the grant as a 30% tuition fee reduction. It wasn’t. When the grant was actually implemented, only 2/9 students qualified for the grant, and tuition fees continued to rise.

The Liberal promise we can count on is the continued privatization of education. Besides grant restructuring, some aspects of which are positive, the rest of the Liberal government’s promises about the sector will continue to privatize and corporatize post-secondary education. They have promised to tie ever decreasing funding to “performance based” indicators, and PSE institutions adoption of “strategic mandate agreements”. What this means in practice is a multi-tiered education system, with “elite” (privatized) research universities, and poor public arts schools. It means that overall, the Liberal government is dedicated to the capitalist vision of making education a commodity designed to produce an exploitable and profitable workforce, with no view of education as a social good and access as a right.

The new grant is coming one year before the Ontario Liberals need to come up with a new tuition fee framework for Ontario. Currently, average tuition fees increases are capped at 3% (still well above inflation). For many years, neoliberal PSE analysts have put forward the strategy of restructuring grants in order to cover low-income students, as ideological cover for their other suggestion: drastically increasing tuition fees for everyone through total deregulation. We cannot wait for the Liberals to announce their planned increase next year before starting to mobilize against what looks like a perfect storm on the horizon.

Accessible education means abolish tuition fees for all!

A prerequisite for an accessible PSE system is the abolishment of tuition fees. Tuition fees are an inherently regressive form of PSE funding that will always mean that access is determined by wealth. Worse still, working class students are forced to take on astronomical debt, meaning that we pay more through interest accumulated on loans than the wealthiest students who can afford to pay up-front. As class is racialized and gendered, as well as correlated to other oppressions, this means that an education system funded by tuition fees will always end up reinforcing societal systems of oppression. Tuition fees are racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, and perpetuate colonialism.

We welcome that the grant system is being restructured in order to hopefully benefit low-income students, however the flip side of an improved grant system is that it breathes new political life into the inherently broken system of tuition fee funded PSE.

The claim that wealthy families benefit from lower tuition fees and can afford to pay more does not hold up. Progressive income taxation and corporate taxes funding a universal, free, education system means that those with the ability to pay fund PSE. High tuition fees and complicated grant systems, which never keep up with tuition fee increases, do not help the majority of students, especially racialized students, women, LGBTQI* and Indigenous students.

The Liberals will give us nothing without real student power in the streets, but they have given us an opportunity. While the Liberals will use the new “free tuition” grant to justify an increase in tuition fees, they have opened up a discussion in the bourgeois media about free education. What was rejected by bourgeois politicians as “unrealistic” before this announcement, has now been hypocritically placed on the table by the Ontario Liberals. This did not happen without the student movement across Canada, especially in Quebec, demanding free education for decades, but the balance of forces needs to be turned in our favour in order for this moment to be used by the student movement and not the Wynne Liberals.

This is an important moment to build the unity and militancy of the student movement. The broadest possible mobilization is necessary on all campuses to fight the current increases in education, expand access to the Ontario Student Grant, and for the central demand of free, accessible, quality, emancipatory, public education in Ontario and across Canada.

The Young Communist League of Canada demands:

• That a funding framework that provides truly free, accessible, quality, public education in Ontario and across Canada be adopted and implemented immediately! No to proposed tuition fee hikes!
• A “free education” system not based on a complex system of Band-Aid grants, but a universally free, public system, accessible to all, funded by progressive taxation of incomes based on ability to pay, immediately doubling corporate taxes, public ownership and democratic control over energy and natural resources, and a drastic decrease in military funding.
• That the new “Ontario Student Grant” live up to the Liberal political spin; that it be accessible to all those whose families earn under $50,000, without exception, and that it cover the full cost of tuition fees in all programs as well as ancillary costs, textbooks and student living expenses.
• That the Ontario and Federal government cancel all student debt of current and former students