Budget plans in the U.K. drove 50,000 students into the streets this week. They were protesting proposed public spending cuts that could double or triple university tuitions.

We’ve seen this movie, and it does not end well for students.

The British government is happily taking a page from the Canadian playbook of the mid-1990s, when our own age of austerity reshaped public policy and the role of the state.

Massive federal budget cuts in 1995 devolved responsibility for a range of social programs to the provinces and territories who, in turn, pushed costs onto municipalities and hospitals, schools and universities, community organizations and households.

One result of this cascade of downloading is that undergraduate university tuitions have more than doubled across Canada and tripled in Ontario since 1995. That’s just tuition. Compulsory administration fees, rents and the cost of books have also shot up.

For generations, parents have chided their children for grousing and told stories of how hard life used to be. But my generation of university students sure had it a whole lot easier than today’s kids.

When I entered university in the fall of 1979, the average full-time undergraduate tuition in Ontario was $740. The minimum wage was $3 an hour. I needed six weeks of full-time work in the summer to pay my tuition. Work all summer, and the costs of my books, rent and even some beer money were covered for the year. I could focus on learning during the school year.

By the fall of 1994, before the big federal spending ax came down, inflation and demand had caused full-time undergraduate tuition rates to more than triple in Ontario ($2,252). The minimum wage had risen too, but not as fast ($6.85 an hour). You would have had to work full-time for eight weeks to pay off tuition, but things were still manageable.

This fall, the average cost of a full-time undergraduate program was $6,307 in Ontario. Minimum wage was $10.25, meaning you’d have to work 15.5 weeks at 40 hours a week to cover off your tuition.

That’s if you could even find the work. One of the biggest casualties of this recession was young people. Between October, 2008 and July, 2009 – the bottom of the labour market’s slide – there were 213,000 fewer Canadian workers aged 15-24.

Unlike most other age groups, the nation’s youth is still waiting for signs of recovery. Last month there were still 206,000 fewer workers aged 15 to 24 than there were in October, 2008.

Many in this age group have turned to post-secondary education. Since the recession hit tuitions have increased at twice the rate of inflation, or more, in most Canadian provinces.

The British are facing the biggest budget cuts in their history. They’re doing what we did in 1995 when we undertook, as then finance minister Paul Martin noted in his budget speech, “the largest set of actions in any Canadian budget since demobilization after the Second World War….Relative to the size of our economy program spending will be lower in 1996-7 than at any time since 1951.”

This was no temporary change. Whether you see that as a good or bad thing depends on whether you’ve picked up the tab for the ensuing changes. In Canada, government books were balanced in part by shifting the burden of debt to the slender shoulders of the nation’s students.

Now not only in Canada, you say? Pity.

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In 1992, education wasn’t on many Canadians’ radar screens. Our national attention was focused on debt and deficits. Things were getting desperate. The federal deficit had ballooned from $1 billion in 1971 to more than $40 billion in 1992-93. The federal and provincial governments owed $665 billion between them, about $300 billion of which was foreign debt. The total debt amounted to more than 95 per cent of the country’s gross domestic product.

It was a bad time to be in poor fiscal shape. The world economy had fallen into a sharp recession and it was particularly difficult for Canada. GDP fell by 3.2 per cent in a single year. Unemployment spiked from 7.5 per cent in 1989 to 11.2 per cent in 1992. Recovery was proving to be slow and painful.

Enter Paul Martin, Canada’s newly minted finance minister, who took full advantage of the opportunity to make his name as the man who slew the deficit. Over the two fiscal years between 1994—95 and 1997—98, Martin achieved an impressive $33 billion turnaround in Ottawa’s fiscal position, moving from a $30 billion deficit to a $3 billion surplus. The economy had helped him by providing $21 billion in increased revenues, but he also cut $12 billion worth of federal spending.

But where did that $12 billion in cuts come from? The biggest rollback was in transfers to the provinces, money used to fund education and health care, the biggest provincial expenditures. Martin chopped $8 billion, or 24 per cent, from this budget line between 1995-96 and 1997-98, a time the provinces were all dealing with their own fiscal challenges, including legacies of debt and deficit spending. By 1999-2000, provincial transfers were nearly back to pre-1995 levels. But by then, the provinces had radically transformed their spending approaches.

Consider Ontario. By 1994, Mike Harris was newly installed as premier on the strength of his Common Sense Revolution. He had promised to deliver a fully balanced budget within four years “without touching a penny of health-care spending.” Law enforcement and classroom funding for education would also be safe from cuts, Harris promised. But, he continued, “that does not mean that savings cannot be found elsewhere in the education system.” He cut, and he cut deep. In his first two years, education expenditures dipped $1 billion, or 5 per cent. The centrepiece of this program was a 25 per cent cut in funding for Ontario universities.

Harris’s cuts were grounded in a belief that the education system was profligate. So, even when the economy finally recovered and he could dramatically ramp up spending (as he proceeded to do with health care), he kept education spending flat, and left it that way for his final five years as premier. Consequently, Ontario post-secondary education funding fell by 21 per cent during the ’90s, while enrolment increased by 8 per cent. By the end of the century, Ontario’s per capita university funding rank had fallen to tenth out of 10 provinces.

In response to dire economic times, our politicians responded by cutting education. This is in keeping with our governments’ deep bias toward consumption. Broadly speaking, public expenditures can be broken into two fundamental buckets: investment in building future prosperity and consumption of current prosperity.

Education falls into the future prosperity category. Putting a child into a classroom has zero current economic benefit. In fact, for late secondary and post-secondary institution students, education is a big current negative. It takes able-bodied workers out of the potential workforce and sticks them in an expensive classroom. But education is simply the best possible investment in future prosperity. In Canada, the average salary for someone with a university degree is $58,767 per year – 50 per cent greater than that of the average high school graduate and 69 per cent greater than that of a high-school dropout. Education pays tremendous future dividends to the individual and to the economy by making its workers much, much more productive.

The consumption of current prosperity, by contrast, consists of expenditures that we are able to make as a society because we are already prosperous. These expenses provide a large benefit today, but do little to enhance our fortunes in the future. Helping the disadvantaged among us afford shelter and sustenance is a good example. We are able to provide welfare for poor families because we are sufficiently prosperous today. Expenditures of this sort provide a large benefit – they are the mark of a good and caring society. But they don’t increase future prosperity; they consume our current prosperity.

The largest consumption of current prosperity by governments around the world is health care. In Canada, because we are wealthy, we can provide this service at a high level, which improves our quality of life. Not all health care is consumption – there is obvious future benefit in getting an injured worker back on the job or fixing a baby’s heart so that she can become a productive member of society. However, the bulk of health-care costs represent pure consumption.

Politicians of all stripes favour current consumption; it’s the kind of spending that helps get votes. And so our governments chose health care over education. As a consequence, Canada – and Ontario, in particular – has moved from a position of strength to one of weakness. We once led the world in our commitment to education investment. No longer. Our health-care system briefly lost its lead in public health-care spending in 1995, but regained approximate parity with the U.S. in 2000 and has maintained it ever since. In contrast, by 2002 education spending in Canada had fallen a full 17 per cent behind the U.S. In Ontario, Harris turned the 4 per cent advantage in per capita spending that he inherited into a 25 per cent disadvantage by the end of his term in 2002.

We’ve been off the path for 15 years. It would now take an additional spending of $21 billion across all levels of government in Canada to return to the per-capita spending position we enjoyed relative to the United States in 1995. Ontario would require $10 billion a year, consuming nearly half of the $21 billion even though only 39 per cent of the population lives here.

The great tragedy is that Canada and its provinces, especially Ontario, shifted dramatically away from a historical competitive advantage in education just as the world was finally entering the long-promised knowledge economy. There had been talk about such a shift for years, if not decades, but by 1995, it was utterly clear that the 21st century was going to be driven by knowledge and the education systems that fuel it. Right at that pivotal moment, Canada bailed. It’s not too late to repair the damage, but it soon will be.

Roger Martin is dean of the Rotman School of Management at U of T. A longer version of this piece appears in the current issue of The Walrus.

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On Tuesday night, on the grounds of the Ontario legislature, a group of community-living activists and former residents of institutions gathered for a candlelight vigil.

They were celebrating a historic moment in the evolution of health and social-welfare systems that occurred when, on March 31, Ontario closed the last three large institutions for people with developmental disabilities.

The Rideau Regional Centre in Smith Falls (once the largest facility of its kind in the Commonwealth with close to 3,000 beds), the Huronia Regional Centre in Orillia and the Southwestern Regional Centre in Blenheim harked back to an era when people with physical, developmental and psychiatric disabilities were warehoused and hidden away.

It was a time not so long ago when there was no place in society for “cripples,” “retards” and “crazies,” to use once-common pejoratives.

Psychiatric patients and those with physical disabilities have been largely de-institutionalized over the past few decades, but those with developmental (or, if you prefer, intellectual) disabilities such as Down syndrome and Fragile X syndrome have, to a certain extent, been forgotten in the push for social justice and equality.

While the vast majority of people with disabilities now live in the community – they are our family members, friends, co-workers, neighbours, fellow congregants, hockey buddies and so on – a disturbingly large number remain trapped in institutions.

While Ontario has closed its institutions (and British Columbia did so years ago), there are several thousand people with development disabilities across Canada still residing in large, sterile facilities such as the Michener Centre in Red Deer, Alta., the Manitoba Developmental Centre in Portage La Prairie, Hôpital Rivière-des-Prairies in Montreal and Sunset Adult Residential Centre in Pugwash, N.S.

Historically, these facilities were dank, oppressive places – isolated, grossly overcrowded and rampant with abuse.

In 1971, the Ontario government, embarrassed by the freezing deaths of two residents of the Rideau Regional Centre, asked lawyer Walter Williston to examine the situation. In a devastating report, he called for all such institutions to be closed, concluding that “a century of failure and inhumanity in the large multipurpose residential hospitals should, in itself, be enough to warn of the inherent weakness in the system and inspire us to look for some better solutions.”

Decades later, his recommendation has finally been implemented with the adoption of the Services and Supports to Promote the Social Inclusion of Persons with Developmental Disabilities Act, a law that effectively strips government of the right to operate such institutions.

While it is true that these residential hospitals were, in recent years, well-maintained and had dedicated staff members, one fundamental issue remained: It was and is unjustifiable to “jail” someone for want of a few IQ points.

There is not a single person housed in these facilities – in Ontario or elsewhere – who could not be cared for as well, if not better, in the community.

The mistake that was made with the de-institutionalization of people with psychiatric disabilities was to release them into nothing, leaving them to struggle with severe mental illnesses without necessary supports such as housing and income.

The result is thousands – no, tens of thousands – of people with psychiatric illnesses and addictions living on the streets and in the rooming houses of Canada’s big cities, a social disaster and a national disgrace.

To its credit, the community-living movement has, through its advocacy and hard work, ensured a smoother transition for people with intellectual disabilities.

Throughout history, people living with developmental disabilities have been vilified, patronized and marginalized.

But, when afforded a voice, they express a desire for the same thing as everyone else in society – a good life: friends and family, a roof over their heads, basic wealth, choice in daily activities and the ability to make a contribution to society.

In short, while it may not always be articulated in this fashion, they want citizenship. And if our commitment to rights and equality is real, if the Charter of Rights and Freedoms is to have meaning, people with disabilities (developmental, physical and psychiatric) need to be full citizens, to have an equal opportunity to participate fully in all aspects of community life.

But equality does not mean sameness. Flexibility, accommodation and commitment are required to ensure that people with developmental disabilities, no matter how severe, can live on their own, attend school, work (in real jobs, not in sheltered workshops), shop and play like everyone else.

There is no one-size-fits-all alternative to institutional life but, rather, many programs and approaches, all with one overarching goal: community living.

There is also a need, given the shocking number of people with developmental disabilities who are still warehoused and denied full citizenship in most provinces, to honour what Ontario has done, no matter how overdue.

At the sombre candlelight vigil, they remembered the dark period of institutionalization but, in each candle, there was also a flicker of hope, a recognition that we have finally extended to our fellow citizens the ability – and the right – to belong.

apicard@globeandmail.com