Danielle Webb

Parents often give up retirement savings to pay for education: StatsCan

Vote mobs could bring them out, but summer could keep them in

The question on everyone’s mind going into Monday’s federal election day is just how much recent attempts to galvanize young Canadians will translate into votes on polling day.
It’s no secret that youth participation is a high priority in this election with vote mobs, youth debates, special ballots and more occurring in ridings across the country.

Late last week, a Calgary man rented a bus to drive young voters to the Easter weekend advance polls. Students in Victoria also organized shuttles to local polling stations last weekend.

“We are excited there is so much energy around this election. This weekend we will translate that energy into votes,” Victoria organizer James Coccola said in a press release.

But, according to the Calgary Herald, efforts in the Alberta city went largely unnoticed. Only six students took advantage of Michael Wilson’s offer to provide them with transportation to polling stations. Wilson spent $800 to rent the bus.

The Herald article hypothesizes that exams, the long weekend, end of the academic year or a poorly organized event could have been to blame for low turnout for Wilson’s shuttle bus. But in reality most of these reasons will remain on May 2, leading me to believe that things may not change between the advance polls and Election Day proper.

But recent research by the Canadian University Press has shown how much an impact young people can have on the outcome of almost every riding in the country if they come out to vote. That kind of awareness can quickly drive voter participation. It amounts to hope. Hope that their voice may actually be heard — the same kind of hope that led to Obama’s historic victory three years ago.

While the country saw a record turnout in the advance polls this weekend, with over two million Canadians voting, we won’t know for sure if that turnout is a trend indicative of increasing voter involvement or if the holiday weekend made it easier for Canadians to cast their ballots.

I, for one, hope it’s the former. Young people have a right to vote, a strong voice, and the opportunity to make a difference. They should seize it.

Why are party leaders ignoring a group that is ripe for the political moulding?

I have to admit, I’m more than a little annoyed at the lack of attention the federal leaders are giving youth voters this election.

In an age where young people are not only really easy to reach — through avenues like social media — but they are now showing they want to be reached, it’s mind-boggling how little Stephen Harper, Michael Ignatieff and Jack Layton are taking advantage of this demographic. What does a young person have to do to get Ottawa’s attention?

Everyone has been talking about how this is the election to reach youth. It all started with Rick Mercer’s early call to arms. “If you are between the age of 18 and 25 and you want to scare the hell out of the people that run this country this time around, do the unexpected [and] vote,” he challenged on March 28.

And since then, the youth of this country have answered.

Every day I come across article after article, or YouTube video after YouTube video, of youth proclaiming their engagement. They want to connect with the political parties and they want to participate in democracy is the overwhelming message from young people across this country.

And it’s not just youth making themselves heard. The media is giving attention to the youth vote, political groups are giving attention to the youth vote, it virtually seems that everyone in Canada is paying attention to what young voters are doing and saying, except the people who should be paying attention the most — the leaders.

On top of their seeming apathy towards a population that holds quite a bit of sway in some ridings, what’s worse is the increasing number of stories like these, making it seem as though politicians are actively trying to turn young people off voting.

When you combine this behaviour with no mention of student issues at the English leaders’ debate, limited post-secondary education platform promises from most parties and a clear lack of engagement across the board, it’s any wonder there are any young voters left who give a damn. And I’m not convinced youth turning out in droves on May 2 is going to curb any of this current counter-apathy when we undoubtedly end up back at the polls in a year or two as seems to be the trend in this country.

Provincial budget geared at keeping students in the province

Nova Scotia’s budget does some amazing things for students. It reduces tuition by more than $1,000 per year. It institutes a debt cap, making sure that nobody gets in too deep. It even adds to textbook credits and improves the earning allowance.

And the province had better keep up the good work, or they won’t have any students left to serve. More than 60 per cent of the province’s population is over 30 years old and post-secondary enrolment is dropping steadily from year to year.

Ask the province’s student organizations what the reason is and they point to one thing: Out-migration to escape debt.

The Alliance of Nova Scotia Student Associations wrote to provincial MLAs this year:

“A 2009 survey of over 1,500 students done by the Alliance of Nova Scotia Student Associations suggested that students with over $26,000 in debt were 20 per cent more likely to leave the province after graduation.”

Studies have consistently said that students saddled with enormous debt loads at graduation are less likely to contribute to the wider economy by buying a house or a car.

Nova Scotia’s budget is wisely trying to stem the tide of students heading out of province to study and, afterward, work. In doing so, they’re trying to save their own economic future. Expect this to be the first salvo in a running war to convince students to not only study in Nova Scotia, but also build their lives there.

It is the slow privatization that is igniting protests

A recent study from the Higher Education Strategy Associates found that when faced with a complete picture of the financial health of a given post-secondary institution, about half of students would accept a tuition increase. Only one in six said a tuition freeze must be maintained at all costs.

This strikes me as a little odd. If students really are OK with meeting universities half-way when it comes to balancing budgets, why is there so much unrest and outrage at tuition increases that are set to happen this fall in many parts of the country?

The study revolves around the idea that education of core issues is necessary for participation in wider discussions. If students don’t know how bad a university’s finances are, they can’t sympathize with the need to cut programs or raise fees.

That being said, just because a student sympathizes with their institutions plight, doesn’t mean they have to sympathize with its cause. The root cause is declining government subsidy. That’s what students have widely been protesting in Quebec, Nova Scotia and most loudly in the U.K.

As governments place less and less priority on public education, forcing it to privatize, students are forced to pay out increasingly large user fees. These fees are then loaned to students through highly bureaucratic organizations like Canada Student Loans.

Governments in the western world have decided that they have a role to play in public education. But they’re slowly pulling back to a regulatory and assistance-oriented role, rather than a funding role.

That slow privatization is what’s pissing off students and igniting protests. It has nothing to do with sympathy for their university’s finances, but everything to do with privatization.

Some services help the wider good more when they are public than private. Health care, sewage, and roads are good examples. Education is another. The depth of my pockets should never dictate the depth of my knowledge.

A U.S. advocacy group has launched a civil rights challenge, claiming the software is unusable for blind students

Google is the wrong choice for university email, a U.S. advocacy group is charging.

But it’s more than that. They argue that by choosing to outsource university email services to Google, universities are violating the civil rights of vision-impaired students and faculty.

The U.S.-based National Federation of the Blind launched a civil rights challenge against two American universities this week, pointing out that while Google’s free software suite is attractive, it is nearly impossible to use by the blind.

Their position is pretty clear. President Marc Maurer writes:

“Given the many accessible options available, there is no good reason that these universities should choose a suite of applications, including critical email services, that is inaccessible to blind students.

“Worse yet, according to recent data more than half of the American higher education institutions that are outsourcing e-mail to third-party vendors plan to deploy this suite, even though they know that it cannot be used by blind students. Nor can these universities claim ignorance of their legal obligations, since the United States Department of Justice and the United States Department of Education have specifically warned all university presidents against the adoption of inaccessible technology.

“The National Federation of the Blind will not tolerate this unconscionable discrimination against blind students and faculty and callous indifference to the right of blind students to receive an equal education. We urge these higher education institutions to suspend their adoption of Google Apps for Education until it is accessible to all students and faculty, not just the sighted, or to reject Google Apps entirely.”

Canadian universities, though, are in a similar spot. Large schools like the University of Toronto, the University of Alberta and even smaller schools, like Lakehead University, have already signed over their email services to Google.

North of the border, most concerns related to this shift have been about privacy. How much control does a university have over the privacy of its students’ email accounts when they’re based out of servers on U.S. soil? It turns out, not very much.

But those concerns are theoretical. Concerns about accessibility are real, daily and serious for those whose disabilities prevent them from using core services.

Google told the Chronicle of Higher Education that they were meeting with the NFB to improve their product line, but no details or timelines were offered.

The NFB is right to challenge the use of inaccessible software as much as wheelchair-bound students are right to challenge the lack of ramps on campus. Canadian schools should be paying close attention, and working with their students and faculty to ensure that all services — especially critical core services — are available to all.

SFUO board of administration need to follow their own policies, too

It’s going too far to compare the students’ union at the University of Ottawa to the line of despots tumbling to protesters in Africa and the Middle East. But that’s not stopping students.

The student union’s board of administration voted through a motion to remove the student arbitration committee from all electoral processes. Then the very next day voted to remove a winning candidate from the election, naming the second-place candidate the winner.

The big problem being that the now-defunct arbitration committee is the winning candidate’s only recourse against the decision to remove him from the race.

In his words, it’s “anti-constitutional.” But students angry at the seemingly anti-democratic election are taking matters into their own hands. A small group of students took over the offices of the student union yesterday to protest the March 2 disqualification of Tristan Dénommée.

Like most stories, this one is likely more complicated on the inside than we can tell from the outside. But therein lies the Board of Administration’s problem.

The action of justice being done is equally important to the appearance of justice being done. People need to see justice in action, and believe in it, to legitimize the system.

By naming themselves sole arbiter of everything electoral and then naming a preferred candidate in one fell swoop, they give the impression of being power-hungry, rather than acting in the best interests of students.

Under the electoral by-laws governing the U of O’s student elections, any vacancy in the executive positions, which includes the thrown out vice-president-elect of finance, is to be met with a strict set of procedures.

The Board is allowed to appoint an interim person to hold the position until a by-election is held. The key words being “interim” and “until.” If the Board wants to appoint the second-place candidate, they are free to do so.

But given the student reaction, and the convenient annihilation of any recourse for the winning candidate, the Board is faced with only one option that will solve all their problems: Announce a date for the by-election. Policy states that it must run between Sept. 15 and Oct. 31 this fall.

To preserve the image of justice, showing students their voice does in fact matter, the board needs to follow through on their own policies.

If an unbalanced budget is the concern, pass shouldn’t be extended to some groups in favour of others

A new policy recommendation going to Toronto’s city council tomorrow seeks to cut the student transit pass discount for part-time students as of July 31. The Toronto Transit Commission cites lost revenue as the major reason for reversing a decision that’s barely a year old.

In November 2009, the TTC voted to extend the high school student transit pass price ($99) to post-secondary students beginning September 2010. In December, private career college students raised a fuss about being excluded from the new discounted price.

The TTC’s solution: Allow them to receive the discounted price, and exclude part-time students instead. This is a case of a lack of support for part-time students yet again.

The Toronto Star reported on a review of the new pass program, which lead to the policy recommendation now on the table:

“That review says extending the post-secondary-school discount to private college students is too costly. It means $400,000 annually in lost revenues, bringing the total loss under the discount to $7.7 million — with “negligible” gains in ridership.

“So the report is recommending removing part-timers from the program, to mitigate the fare loss by $1.4 million. The move would also reduce the number of riders the TTC expected to gain through the post-secondary passes, from about 500,000 to 400,000.”

Sure, I can understand budget restraints, but taking something away from one group just to give to another is just plain cruel. If your budget is strained in the first place, I would suggest not including new groups in your discount programs until you can afford to do so.

In this case, it’s even more unfortunate as most part-time students study part-time for a reason. Many are supporting dependents, many can’t get enough funding to attend full-time and are therefore forced to work while going to school, and the list goes on.

There are so many pressures on students these days, and this is another example of how under-funding public transit is hurting everyone, including part time students who are doing things like raising dependents and trying to make their own life.

Electoral rules fail to realize that students hold a dual citizenship within Canada

Electoral districts are a tricky thing for any first-time voter to navigate, especially so if that new voter has recently moved ridings, as is the case for many university students in Canada.

New Hampshire is attempting to push legislation through that would disenfranchise university students in an electoral district unless they were a resident before enrolling in university.

Currently, in Canadian federal elections, citizens vote in the district where their permanent address is located, and students who move away from home have the option to cast their ballot in their school’s riding if they can prove residency.

But provincial election rules vary across the country. The Ontario Election Act, for example, defines residency — and therefore voting eligibility — as “the place where your family resides … until you move elsewhere with the intention of making that change permanent.” Technically, any student in Ontario who does not intend to permanently move to their university’s riding would be ineligible.

On the other hand, B.C. students can “register and vote in either the riding where [they] reside while going to school, or in the riding [they] usually live in when you’re not at school.” And residents studying out-of-province can request a mail-in ballot.

But, even with these rules in place there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of clarity or enforcement when it comes to registering to vote.

Take me, for example. My first election was May 2005’s B.C. provincial election, where I exercised my right to vote. Four months later, I began my undergraduate degree in Nova Scotia and that January participated in the 2006 federal election and had the choice to vote in my new riding or my old one. In the 2008 federal election, students in my riding were turned away at some polling stations because their permanent address was in another province and were therefore ineligible to vote, contrary to Canada’s Elections Act.

In a recent interview with Maclean’s On Campus, Danielle Smith, leader of Alberta’s Wildrose Alliance Party, explained how she would make it easier for students to vote on their campuses, saying fixed election dates are the first step.

“Once you’ve got fixed election dates, I see no reason why you wouldn’t be able to have polling stations on campuses to be able to allow for kids who are living in residence to be able to vote in the election,” she said. “We seem to have no problem setting up polling stations in other facilities where we have temporary residence, like prisons for instance.”

Smith, for one, isn’t surprised that current Conservative governments, in both Alberta and at the federal level, haven’t moved on something like this.

“I think it is probably no secret that a lot of university students tend to be more progressive in their attitudes, and they may tend to vote NDP or Liberal, or on the left side of the spectrum,” she said. “And when you have a conservative government, they see no reason to find a way to facilitate the vote.”

This logic seems to be fuelling the New Hampshire legislation, as well. An editorial that appeared in the Tufts University student newspaper on Feb. 7 calls out the bill for similar reasons.

“The Daily objects to the proposal, which was introduced by State Rep. Gregory Sorg, on several dimensions, not least that it may be a transparent attempt by Republican lawmakers to disenfranchise a liberal-leaning bloc of voters in the months leading up to the presidential election,” the editorial reads.

The paper backs up their claim with a statement made by Sorg himself: “Even if [college students] voted the way that I wanted them to, I would not want them to be voting because they would cancel out the votes of the residents of the town who have a stake in the future.”

What Sorg, and others like him, are neglecting to admit — or perhaps blatantly ignoring — is that the goal of any election is for the people to have a say in the governments that take their tax dollars and provide them with basic services, including infrastructure, emergency care, and in some ways, post-secondary education.

If I pay income tax in British Columbia from a summer job, but property tax in Nova Scotia from rent on my student apartment, I’m drawing goods and services and giving back within two systems. To further illustrate this point, I paid sales tax on my groceries and textbooks in Nova Scotia, but interest on my student loans in British Columbia. I also draw services from both provinces in the form of roads, health care, water and basic municipal services.

What any of these proposals fail to realize is that students are essentially citizens in two places at once and shouldn’t be disenfranchised in an election because they’re attending school, unless they hold stakes in two ridings in the same election. Dual citizenship between Canada and the U.S. is a good analogy of this. People who hold dual citizenship can vote in either country, both countries or not at all. They have a stake in both countries, give and take of services in both countries, and are therefore allowed to vote in both countries. Why are student populations any different?

Students should brace for the worst as faculty reject conciliation report

I think students at Mount Allison University are in for a faculty strike this semester.

The vote was close. After two days of debate, the faculty union voted 55 per cent in favour of rejecting the conciliation board’s report yesterday. Defeating the report by such a slim margin, only a day after the union entered the legal position to hold a strike vote among its members shows division within the union that may be difficult to overcome.

That same narrow margin of victory is sure to deeply irritate the university’s bargaining team who were quick to accept the board’s report and end the debate on Feb. 1, only a day after the report was released.

The key points of debate are predictable: money and trust. The release from the bargaining unit yesterday showed that part-time faculty are almost entirely ignored in the report and many faculty distrust the entire purpose of having a conciliatory board, saying it gets in the way of “free collective bargaining.”

When these kinds of debates become this heated and divided, and when trust becomes involved, people have a tendency to become more entrenched in their respective positions, less likely to evolve as bargaining gets increasingly tense.

While faculty association president Rick Hudson said in a release, “It is our intention to reach an agreement through free collective bargaining so that classes will not be affected,” I’m not so sure students should jump onboard the optimism train. It might be wise for students to brace themselves for the worst.

In the meantime, it’s not too late to change the tide. Both sides will return to the bargaining table, but to avert a strike, clear heads must prevail. The university may need to realize that attracting high-quality faculty may take more money than they wish it did. Faculty may have to realize that working at a small liberal arts university is not the way to wealth and fame. Compromise is the inevitable result of this argument, and both sides would do well to find that compromise soon.