For want of a fair fee structure
Forget the storm that never appeared, as there are more menacing clouds on the local horizon. The government has promised (threatened) higher tuition fees for the post-secondary crowd. Not “on a par with other jurisdictions”. Just, higher. Marginally. But the student has something that the average citizen doesn’t; time to protest.
So, my city bus received a police escort, complete with motorcycles and coloured lights, through the police barricades. Officers, equipped with long batons, stationed behind those odd sections of parade fencing that usually get set out for real parades. It didn’t matter that there wasn’t a protester to be seen; preparation is everything in the eyes of the peacekeepers.
We weren’t delayed for long, given that my bus contained many, many students, on their way to class. This wasn’t the age group that mattered. Rather, there was a promise of peaceful demonstration by students from CEGEP and university. Hard to tell if there was any confrontation; I missed the evening news.
Back to the tuition crisis. Right now, Quebec universities are severely underfunded. In part because students don’t bear their share of the monetary load. In part because the government is using the same irrational model. Caught in the middle, like a lemon that has made too many glasses of near-lemonade, the universities.
I have seen the figures offered up by MacLeans magazine. Quebec universities aren’t leading the nation (with the exception of McGill, a true class apart). Could there be a correlation between low funding and low productivity? There we have it; the question that the stakeholders don’t want to discuss.
