Central Executive Committee

January 2019

The YCL-LJC condemns Doug Ford’s January 17th announcement on post-secondary education and calls for all progressive organisations, including student unions, labour and all kind of on-campus groups to mobilise against this attack aimed at weakening the student fightback and at going one step further in the direction of privatisation and commodification of our education.

In a vicious way similar to the ‘free speech’ directive (that was all about empowering hate and bigoted speech on campus), Ontario’s reactionary government is playing with words and presents this new attack as a benefit for students. It furthers the provocation to the point where it announces that students’ tuition burden will be lowered by 10%. However, a closer look to the numbers makes it clear that the real goal of this announcement has very little to do with a move towards public, free education.

Indeed, while tuition fees will be cut by 10%, this doesn’t mean that the Ontario government will invest more in post-secondary education. The opposite is true: the measure is accompanied by a 4% guaranteed cut in institutional funding, which means that universities and colleges will  have to rely more heavily on corporate funding and international students’ tuition fees and cut some programmes, heavily impacting the quality of education. This is none other than a step further into public disengagement from postsecondary education, a long-standing demand from corporations, which can then be more free to control education for their own interests at the expense of quality and emancipatory education.

Other measures not announced so loudly by the government that are part of this package add to the list of why this is anything but a student friendly announcement. For example, loans and grants system will be reorganised in a way to increase loans and reduce grants, which means that students – especially low-income ones – will be held hostage by banks for a longer period.

We should also remember that despite this new announcement, Ontario remains one of Canada’s provinces where studying is the most expensive. If he cared about the right to education, Ford would reverse the corporate tax cuts started by the Mike Harris Tory government, which resulted in $18 billion lost income annually, to fund free education

In addition to funding and grant cuts hidden behind a supposed 10% reduction in tuition fees, the Ford government announced that student unions’ fees will be optional. This is another well-orchestrated attack that can be seen as a ‘for the people’ decision. The reality however is that by imposing this student version of a “right-to-work” legislation, Ford is cutting funds to the real defenders of democracy on campus. Student unions are the most organised actors in the youth movement. They have been active not only in defending student rights, but also in important fights such as the fight for peace, solidarity, friendship, anti-globalisation and anti-racist struggles. They have been an important factor in forming a younger generation of activists. Still today, on our campuses, many progressive groups such as BDS, LGBTQ+ and anti-racist organizations benefit from student unions’ help.

This is exactly what Ford wants to get rid of.

This is just one of this Ontario Government’s series of attacks directed against our right to a free, public and emancipatory education both at post-secondary levels and at more basic levels. Less than a year after his election, he forced schools to go back to an obsolete sex-ed curriculum, strongly affecting LGBTQ+ students’ ability to openly talk about themselves in classrooms. As if it were not enough, Ford set up a ‘snitch-line’ to denounce teachers who use the more modern version of the curriculum. Shortly after, he announced that, through a so-called ‘free speech’ directive, universities and colleges that would not create a policy targeting any attempts to resist the ultra-right would see their funding cut. His government also made it clear that Indigenous people would not be consulted in the making of a new history syllabus. As well, in the end of December, his government announced that they would slash $25 million in education, cutting particular programmes aimed at helping racialised and Indigenous students. Earlier in the fall, tens of thousands of Franco-Ontarians who were longing to see the province’s 1st French-language university open its doors in 2020 were told “in your dreams!”

All these attacks were met with resistance actions. The biggest Franco-Ontarian demonstration in Ontario’s recent history was organised on December 1st. High School students, supported by their teachers, walked out of their classes to demand a sex-ed curriculum that meets the needs of 2018, not the old-fashioned puritan and quasi-Victorian one that Ford wants to impose. As well, students have mobilised against the ‘free-speech’ directive, including a strong mobilisation at Ryerson University and a YCL-LJC organised day of action on November 29th.

This means that students throughout Ontario are keen to be in the struggle against Doug Ford’s pro-corporate attacks, a struggle that should aim at uniting not only students, but also young workers, whose precarious conditions can only worsen with the labour law putting an end to the long awaited and strongly needed minimum wage increase to $15 / hour; young women fighting for reproductive rights ; Indigenous, racialised, and LGBTQ+. youth and all other young people targeted by these attacks.

Organising the fight against Doug Ford is not just about fighting against a particular government. It’s about stepping up the resistance against the real danger of an unleashed rise of the ultra-right in Ontario, but also elsewhere in our country and worldwide. With extremely right-wing governments in office now in New Brunswick, Québec and Ontario (and possibly soon enough in Alberta), it is clear that similar attacks are to be expected.

This gives a stronger need to keep up the youth’s fight for a free, democratic, public and emancipatory education. If Ford targets student unions, trying to dis organise the organised student fightback with such zeal, it is because he knows – as the rest of the ruling class knows – that campuses and the student movement have always been a crucible for a new generation of young activists as well as a place to challenge the dominant ideology.

Now, is he trying to see how much students can mobilise against this new measure before going further and imposing “right-to-work” legislation on workers or preparing new and stronger attacks? The question warrants consideration…

For a printable version of this statement, you can click here.