Students across Ontario walked out of their classrooms on Wednesday afternoon to show the Ford government that they will not tolerate cuts to education funding.
The event was organized by the Ontario branch of the Canadian Federation of Students (CFSO), which represents both full-time and part-time students at college, undergraduate and graduate levels.
Students at 17 universities and colleges participated in the walkout, including Ryerson University, George Brown College, OCAD University and the University of Toronto campuses of Mississauga, Scarborough and St. George.
The province-wide protest is a reaction to the Progressive Conservative government’s elimination of free tuition for low-income students.
Under the previous Liberal government, the number of grants available to students was increased, making it possible for low-income students to attend college or university for free.
The Liberal plan made families who earned less than $175,000 a year eligible for grants under the Ontario Student Assistance Program (OSAP). The Ford government reduced that number in January to $140,000, with most of the money going to students whose parents make less than $50,000 a year.
The move was made in conjunction with a sweeping 10 per cent tuition fee cut for all students.
The government announced that it would make previously mandatory fees paid by students optional, including those paid to student governments and clubs, and eliminated a six-month interest-free grace period for students.
“The Doug Ford attacks are primarily targeting low income students,” said one student at the University of Toronto St. George campus on Wednesday. “There’s no justification for cutting OSAP. We’re one of the wealthiest countries in the world, there’s no reason we can’t have free education.”
The CFSO described the changes in its Facebook event page as an “attack on students.”
Among their demands, the group is asking that the government provide more grants instead of loans, eliminate tuition fees for all students, and increase public funding for public education.
“The reality is that budgets are about priorities and here in Canada we actually spend the most of our GDP on post-secondary education, at 2.5 per cent, but what’s going on is that we’re not actually prioritizing that funding to ensure that we have free post-secondary education, because we don’t have a national vision for post-secondary education,” Canadian Federation of Students-Ontario Chairperson Nour Alideeb told CTV News Toronto during a walkout at the University of Toronto’s St. George campus.
“So provincially what we’re seeing is that the government isn’t actually increasing the per-student funding and in the end, students have to make up the rest of those costs. That’s why we have an exuberant amount of tuition fees. What we really want to see is a change of how we’re investing that money to ensure that students have access to post-secondary education.”
The Ford government previously defended the OSAP changes, claiming that the program under the Liberals had become “fiscally unaccountable.”
“We inherited a system from the previous government that was unsustainable and the auditor general’s report indicated that we wanted to make sure the OSAP, the Ontario Student Assistance Plan, was there for people who needed it now and into the future,” said Merrilee Fullerton, the Minister of Training, Colleges and Universities, in an interview with CP24.
Students and some staff at the post-secondary institutions walked out of class around 12 p.m., flooding campus staircases and common areas. A number of NDP MPPs were also in attendance.
Chris Glover, the NDP’s critic for colleges and universities, said he believes students are doing the right thing by voicing their concerns in unison.
“The government has shown that if there is enough pressure they will listen to people and the students need to keep this up,” he told CP24.
“There are students on 17 campuses walking out today. That is a strong sign of solidarity and they need to get more and more students standing up to this government and then they will listen.”
