All Posts Tagged With: "Election 2011"

Undergraduate Student Alliance supports plan

Ontario NDP Leader Andrea Horwath said that her party would freeze post-secondary tuition for four years and eliminate interest on the provincial portion of student loans if elected on Oct. 6. The NDP say that it would cost $365-million over four years.

Sean Madden, president of the Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance supports the plan. ”A freeze will save students over $300 annually, while beginning to shift the cost of higher education back to the public,” he said.

The Ontario Liberals have promised to cut post secondary tuition by 30 per cent or $730 per year for colleges student and $1,600 per year for university students. Only students from families with household incomes under $160,000 would qualify.

The Progressive Conservatives have promised to expand access to Ontario student loans.

Students: Voters in Ontario, Newfoundland, Manitoba and PEI will go to the polls in October. Saskatchewan votes on Nov. 7. Visit Maclean’s On Campus and click “Politics” for coverage.

Young MPs will be under the microscope

When Parliament resumes, the NDP’s Quebec delegation will include some of the youngest MPs ever elected.

On Monday night, Quebecers elected nine of the 11 university students running as NDP candidates in the province. At least two other new NDP MPs from Quebec are recent graduates.

Among the students is Canada’s youngest MP ever, Pierre-Luc Dusseault, an applied politics student at Université de Sherbrooke.

It definitely seems as though campaigning was optional for NDP candidates in Quebec. Charmaine Borg, one of several McGill students elected, didn’t speak to the local paper in Terrebonne-Blainville, the riding she represents, until election night. She spent most of the campaign in Montreal, helping out with Thomas Mulcair’s reelection effort.

She’s not the only young NDP MP coming under scrutiny, Isabelle Morin, a Université de Sherbrooke student who was elected in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce-Lachine, did her first interview with the Montreal Gazette on Tuesday. She told the paper that she had, in fact, been campaigning door-to-door in the riding and that, despite earlier reports, she could speak English, an important skill for the representative of a largely anglophone riding.

I probably don’t even need to mention the most infamous of the new NDP MPs, Ruth Ellen Brosseau, the Vegas-vacationing Ottawa bartender who still hasn’t spoken to any media.

The high level of scrutiny these MPs are under probably won’t be letting up soon, media here in Quebec will be watching to see if these new representatives open offices in their ridings and, in some cases, as they meet their constituents for the first time.

Personally, I have mixed feelings about this new crop of MPs.

I’m glad that ordinary young Canadians are taking seats in Parliament. I think that many of these young MPs will end up impressing people. Dusseault, in particular, has proven himself to be quite articulate. Even though most of these new MPs did not expect to win, all of them are engaged with, and clearly active in, Canadian politics, otherwise they would not have stood for election in the first place.

But I am concerned about what the election of these MPs says about the state of our system. None of these candidates were elected because of who they are, their record or their experience. No, they were elected because of the party they represent and that party’s leader.

To me, this is just another sign that MPs have become faceless, interchangeable representatives of their parties, rather than local individuals who represent their communities. There’s a reason we vote for candidates, not for parties or leaders.

Also, I’m a little jealous of these new MPs. They’ll all be looking at annual salaries of over $150,000 for, at least, the next four years.

Though a noble effort, youth vote push did little to address issues students actually care about

Watching the vote mob craze sweep across the country and my Facebook and Twitter streams during the federal election, I’ll admit I was looking forward to a boost to the traditionally low youth voter turnout May 2. Yet after the votes were tallied, the national voter turnout sat at just 61.4 per cent, a small increase from the 2008 federal election turnout of 59.1 per cent.  Turnout has yet to be broken down between demographics, but given that the decline in overall voter turnout in federal elections over the last twenty years is largely due to declining youth turnout, if young voters had rushed to the polls it would have shown in the overall count.

It’s not terribly surprising that student-led vote mobs did little to drive people to the polls. Most studies on youth voter turnout have shown that students are already voting. It’s typically youth who aren’t attending university that don’t cast their ballots, as University of Manitoba political studies professor Jared Wesley has pointed out. Campus-based vote mobs and social media campaigns aimed at education issues did little to address this issue.

Further, though the youth vote movement perpetuated the idea that education issues are the focus of all young Canadians, in reality, education was probably the furthest from their minds during the election. A poll published by the Historica-Dominion Institute showed that youth aged 18-24 were most concerned about their standard of living and health care, not how high their tuition is. Organizers and supporters of vote mobs across the country stressed that the parties were not talking about youth issues, but were out of touch with what the general youth population actually cared about themselves.

It was also endlessly frustrating to watch the majority of the mainstream media gush over how exciting it was to see young people care about politics, but fail to explore whether those attending vote mobs and tweeting about the election would have voted anyway. What was published over and over again were a few photos and some video footage of students screaming about how excited they were to vote. I saw little commentary on who actually attended these rallies, and what practical impact the vote mobs would have come election day.

At the vote mob I attended at the University of Winnipeg, I recognized a lot of student union representatives, student journalists, and their friends. I don’t believe many of the approximately 100 people in attendance were average students who felt compelled to rally for youth engagement. Anyone who’s politically motivated enough to become a student politician and attend a rally will probably cast their ballot in a federal election before you encourage them to do it. What did these vote mobs accomplish if that’s who made up the majority of those who attended them?

It may be more difficult to reach out to the silent masses of youth who are uninterested in politics, but that’s what needed to be done to truly turn around youth voter apathy in this election.

Why youth don’t vote

Writing over at Open File, Spencer Keys challenges the received wisdom of why youth don’t vote:

In the meantime, let’s stop listening to the armchair strategists that think youth voter turnout can be raised by raising awareness among those who were already going to vote, and start doing the hard work of engaging the silent, unreached masses. Warning: you may have to get off your iPhone.

27% say they’re voting NDP; Liberals come in close second

Students care less about education and the environment than their future standard of living

Photograph by Cole Carside

Every election campaign season, experts suggest that the best way for political parties to rock the youth vote is to focus on “the student issues”—often defined as tuition and the environment. Omeed Asadi, a third-year communications student at York University, hears it all the time. “In Vari Hall, which you have to cross to get to pretty much every class, there’s always the York Federation of Students rallying against high tuition, or green activists against pollution,” he says. “Don’t get me wrong. I respect those issues. But I don’t think that’s all there is to it.” Asadi also cares about health care, the tenor of parliamentary discourse and fiscal responsibility.

He’s not the only young Canadian who thinks there’s more at stake in this election than tuition hikes and the health of the planet, according to an exclusive new poll from the Historica-Dominion Institute. The survey asked 831 youth between the ages of 18 to 24 what issues concerned them. Participants were given 10 statements, each capturing a different election issue, and asked to rank them from most to least concerning. Turns out the average young voter is a lot more like Asadi than the student activists making all the noise. “They’re certainly thinking of longer-term issues earlier in their lives than we would have thought,” says Jeremy Diamond, a director at Historica-Dominion.

The most common concern for youth? “That my standard of living will be lower than my parents,” which 63 per cent ranked in their top three concerns. This was consistent across party lines and from coast to coast, although it was significantly more common among young people in the economically stagnant Atlantic region (75 per cent). “We tend to think of students as idealistic,” says Diamond, “but this shows an overriding worry that they won’t be as successful as their parents.”

Dietlind Stolle, a McGill University political scientist, cautions that the “standard of living” statement is likely capturing more than just economic concerns. That may be true, but it’s not the only evidence from the survey that shows students are worried about the country’s financial footing. “Fear of another economic recession” is a concern of 43 per cent, ranking it third. In fact, youth put the country’s bank accounts far ahead of their own; “paying for my post-secondary education” is a top-three concern of just 18 per cent.

This heavy focus on the economy doesn’t surprise Janni Aragon, a political scientist at the University of Victoria, who studies young voters. “The millennials are keenly aware of the economy,” she says. “A lot of my own students worry that after graduation they’ll have to move back in with their parents, because they won’t be able to afford an apartment, God forbid a house.” Economic worries, surprisingly, are especially prevalent among left-leaning students. Among respondents, recessions are top of mind for 63 per cent of Green supporters, 48 per cent of those who plan to vote for the NDP, 45 per cent of Liberal supporters, and just 27 per cent of young Tories.

It isn’t that they’re concerned with finding work—“getting a job or keeping my current job” was only in the top-three lists of eight per cent—so much as fear about the economic burden they may inherit. “Paying off the national debt” is a top-three concern for 24 per cent.

The second-biggest concern for youth overall is “that the health care system won’t be there for me when I need it.” In British Columbia and Atlantic Canada, 58 per cent prioritize this concern. Overall, 49 per cent listed it in their top three. Jessica Wong, a first-time voter at McGill University, says health care is the issue that has the biggest influence on her vote, though she admits it’s an issue she has never discussed with her peers, unlike tuition or the environment. The 19-year-old chemistry student has little experience with the system, “but I think health care is indicative of how a country treats each other—whether they just look after the rich people or look after everyone.”

Fourth on the list, with nearly one in three (31 per cent) ranking it in their top three, is a concern for “the erosion of democracy.” This was fairly consistent nationwide, though it’s somewhat more pressing in Quebec. The only defence-related option was “foreign threats to Canada,” which 23 per cent made a top-three concern. “I would have expected it to be lower,” says Aragon, citing the stereotype of young people as pacifists. That said, she wasn’t surprised to learn that Alberta has the highest percentage of young hawks (32 per cent).

Only near the bottom of the list do the so-called “student issues” appear. Less than one in five (18 per cent) say that “paying for my post-secondary education” is a top-three concern. But the biggest surprise is how few put the environment as a top priority. Only 13 per cent of youth agree “that the environment will be ruined without more action,” putting it second from the bottom. More shocking is that in English Canada, the students who care most about the Earth are far more likely to say they’ll vote Conservative (23 per cent) than Liberal (eight per cent), NDP (eight per cent), or even Green (seven per cent).

Even if it’s not their priority, students still do care greatly about high tuition and the environment. When presented with the statement, “the government should provide more money to help students pay for higher education,” 88 per cent either somewhat or strongly agree. And 86 per cent agree that “the government should be doing more to protect the environment.”

But that’s where the consensus ends. On every other policy position, students are more split. Large numbers “neither agree or disagree” with statements about raising corporate taxes, opening the health care system to more private money, or increasing immigration. “That may indicate,” says Aragon, “a lack of understanding or exposure.”

That’s no doubt a reality for some students, but not for Asadi. He’s read all the platforms and can quote Michael Ignatieff’s about untendered fighter jet contracts and the billion-dollar G20. “It’s so short-sighted to focus only on tuition,” he says. “I’m only in school for one more year. Then everything affects me.”

The online survey of 831 Canadians between the ages of 18 and 24 was conducted on Uthink’s online national research panel between April 8-13. The margin of error is 3.4 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

Calgary man pays for Student Vote Bus

Calgary students will be getting a free ride to polling stations by a local man who is inspired by the vote mobs that have been sparked across the country. The Student Vote Bus will be shuttling students from the University of Calgary and Mount Royal University to Elections Canada Special Ballot stations in the city. The bus will run between 10:00 am and 2:00 pm throughout the week. Michael Wilson, who is paying for the bus himself, told Global News that “People have said to me that this is a very expensive thing for you to do, to run these buses, but when you compare it to what people are paying for democracy outside of Canada and throughout the world, this is nothing.” Similarly, students in Victoria have organized “shuttle mobs” to drive students to and from polling stations.

Organizers ‘surprised’ by national movement

University of Guelph “vote mob” organizers were awarded for their work in sparking a national campaign to encourage young people to vote. At a party held in their honour, Yvonne Su and Gracen Johnson, were presented with a “Be the Change” award for their efforts in organizing the first vote mob rally at the University of Guelph. So far, at least 35 rallies have either taken place, or are being planned, at university campuses across Canada. Su told the Guelph Mercury that the movement has been an unexpected surprise. “I think a part of me really wished it would go that way, and a part of me thought that it would go that way,” she said. “It’s really reaching all across our nation, and that really surprised us.”

No party is making a serious effort at providing federal leadership

Today, the good folks over at Higher Education Strategy Associates released their long-awaited analysis of the party platforms regarding post-secondary education. They were clearly rejigging parts of the analysis right up to the end – the document is larded with pictures of the party leaders taken from VintageVoter.ca.

The analysis looks at federal education policy proposals under main headings: Student Aid, Transfers to Provinces and Institutions, Research, and Apprenticeships. The section on student aid takes up over half the analysis, largely because – as the report points out:

Looking across all party platforms, one is struck by how much the cost of postsecondary education dominates all other issues. Indeed, one might be forgiven for thinking this was the only issue that mattered to federal parties.

Details on education transfers are notable for their absence in the Conservative and Liberal platforms and for their incoherence in the New Democrat one. Apart from a Conservative regurgitation of last month’s budget, policies on scientific research are essentially absent. And everyone apparently thinks Apprenticeships are a Good Thing but not so good as to actually require policy. Apart from these topics, only the New Democrats have shown any ambition at all in the area, with their promises on childcare and Aboriginal Education. Within PSE itself, the lack of vision and ideas is palpable.

The upshot is that federal approaches to higher education amount to this: The Conservatives are offering slight tweaks to the existing student aid system, while the NDP are proposing to just throw more cash at it. The HESA analysis credits the Liberals with having “the most intriguing and certainly the best thought-out” platform regarding student aid; the Learning Passport idea is the only one that hints at re-imagining the way student aid works, and the only one that promises to inject even a modicum of progressivity into the system.

But overall, the analysis is pretty depressing. Jean Chretien was the last prime minister to make a serious effort at providing federal leadership in higher education and to have a vision for the role higher education can play in a modern economy, but that was fifteen years ago. Since then, federal policy has been a wasteland of boutique tax breaks and minor tweaks to student aid. Any grander conviction that a country’s universities are among its most crucial institutions, and that supporting those institutions is in the national interest, is completely absent.

Originally posted at Macleans.ca.

At least, more than youth who aren’t in university

An Elections Canada study published this past January found that youth in post secondary education are voting more than their non-student counterparts.

The study looked at electoral engagement in Canada over the past five federal elections, dividing participants into those aged 18 to 24 and those aged 25 to 30. When comparing voter participation of youth aged 18-24 with some post secondary education versus those without, those with post secondary education had a voter turnout rate of 41.1 per cent, versus a 32 per cent turnout rate amongst those with none. The gap between the groups grows to 17 per cent for those aged 25-30, with 52.5 per cent of those with some post secondary education voting compared to only 35.2 per cent of participants with no post secondary education.