Social Policy in Ontario

The Progressive Conservatives’ plan to cut tuition by 10 per cent has a seductively populist appeal, recalling their buck-a-beer campaign pledge. But it’s only a matter of time before the bubble(s) burst on an equally effervescent gimmick.

Boasting that he is once again “leaving more money in your pocketbook,” the premier is robbing Peter to pay Paul. And hoping the Good Lord won’t notice Doug Ford picking other pockets in the process.

This isn’t the first government to promise reduced post-secondary costs. The difference is the Tories won’t be making up the difference — because the money will come straight off the bottom line of Ontario’s cash-strapped colleges and universities.

Remember how apoplectic Progressive Conservatives were when the Liberals raised the minimum wage to $14 an hour? They complained that the government’s generosity was coming at the expense of private employers who would have to find the money elsewhere; now, the Tories are putting postsecondary institutions in the same tight spot.

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But what elevates this gimmick from mere shell game to outright sleight of hand is the government’s cynical bait-and-switch tactics: This tuition discount disguises a regressive revamp of the grant-and-loan program rolled out by the Liberals to deliver effectively “free tuition” for deserving students.

Rather than fine tune its fast-rising costs, the Tories have gutted the free-tuition package. They are repackaging it as a modest discount for all (including the most affluent) while the neediest are saddled with higher debt burdens.

Here’s another way this government is being disingenuously ungenerous: The six-month grace period on interest payments conferred upon students — fresh out of school and out of work — has been rescinded.

That means debt payments with interest begin upon graduation: Congratulations — now pay up.

In addition to its tuition distraction, the government is promising another pocketbook ploy for students: Colleges and Universities Minister Merrilee Fullerton is now demanding that every student on campus have the option to opt out of any fees they don’t want to pay (with the exception of compulsory safety costs).

This is buck a beer ginned up with a political spin. It cynically undermines student government, campus clubs, or pesky student newspapers that depend on mandatory fees from everyone enrolled so that all will benefit from their collective voice and shared efforts.

Students will be “empowered” by not having to pay for student government activities that “they do not see the value in,” Fullerton argued.

It is perhaps no accident that empowering students in this way is emasculating student government along the way. And it is an attack on any minority group that could lose vital funding merely because students don’t like who they are, what they represent, or what they do (Fullerton declined to declare such funding mandatory when asked).

Imagine a democratically elected student council that publicly opposed modern sex education on campus, or worked against the minimum wage, or associated with a white supremacist. Our premier has said and done all those things, all of which I personally oppose, but that doesn’t give me the right to withhold my taxes and enjoy government services as a free-rider.

It is an axiom of democracy that there shall be no taxation without representation. Why then do Tories posit representation without taxation (via student fees or, one day, union dues)?

Beware the wedge from Tories testing the waters of a student opt-out now so they can impose it on unions later. Ontario’s Progressive Conservatives talked publicly about a similar union opt-out (with U.S.-style “right to work” laws) before the 2014 election, and we may not have seen the last of it.

The Tories keep talking about padding our pocketbooks, but their approach is penny-wise and pound-foolish. Everyone knows you need a postsecondary degree to get the job of your dreams (though not having one never stopped Doug Ford from becoming premier, thanks to the family business he inherited after dropping out of college unburdened by debt).

Education isn’t so much an expense as an investment that opens up opportunities. It’s not akin to a can of beer whose price can be reduced to a bumper sticker slogan.

Behold the triumph of ideology over pedagogy.

Martin Regg Cohn is a columnist based in Toronto covering Ontario politics.

https://www.thestar.com/politics/political-opinion/2019/01/18/ontarios-buck-a-beer-playbook-is-coming-to-a-campus-near-you-with-tuition-discounts-too-good-to-be-true.html