After a run-in with the Vote for Action slate’s VP external candidate, Shaun Shepherd, I was ready to vote for the opposition, on principle. But he’s running unopposed. Perhaps this explains why in the first five minutes of our conversation, he was eager to sit down with me to get my input on the issues once he had won, and why after fifteen minutes he whined that I was taking up too much of his time because I had the audacity to care about the issues enough to discuss them. In fact, by the end of our conversation, he told me he didn’t care whether or not I voted for him and took off with speed. It seems that he was counting on winning by virtue of voter apathy rather than through engaging students in a political debate and encouraging them to participate in campus politics, with him as their advocate.

So what happened during this fifteen-minute conversation? He told me he was for advocating for reduced tuition fees, a noble and good cause to be sure. But he seemed to be completely fuzzy on the details of what that would entail. His excuse? He’s a life science student, so he is too busy. That’s right folks, the only person who is bothering to run for VP External in this year’s UTSU election didn’t even bother to get informed on the issues he’s running on, and that’s because he’s too busy being a life science student to bother being qualified to be a UTSU executive candidate.

The current VP External for UTSU, Zexi Wang, has done a great job of advocating for lowering tuition fees as an informed and pragmatic member of student government. Tuition fees are so high these days that many students take a reduced course load in order to have time to do a part time job to help finance tuition. If flat fees is permanently mandated, this will mean that someone doing a part time job to finance part time studies, will now have to pay even higher tuition: the tuition for full time studies. This only widens the divide between those that can afford higher education and those that can’t, which is completely unjust. Thankfully, accessibility services, at least, has been advocating for part time students registered with the service to get a rebate on tuition, since their reduced course load is for reasons of disability. But it’s just as unfair for someone who didn’t happen to be born into a wealthy family to not have equal access to higher education due to financial constraints.

By all means, yes, let’s continue what UTSU has started, and lobby the Ontario government to better subsidize higher education to make it more affordable for Canadian and Ontario residents and citizens.

But Shepherd thinks we should be getting the government to subsidize tuition fees for international students, too, whose current high tuition fees are subsidizing domestic tuition fees.

So my question to Shepherd was, why should Ontario taxpayers be subsidizing the tuition for international students? It’s standard practice around the world for universities to charge higher tuition for international students; it’s a good source of income, after all, and these international students (or their parents) never paid the Canadian taxes that are there to subsidize the university education of Canadian residents/citizens.

His response was to tell me a sad story about how he had a friend from Nicaragua who could barely finance higher education studies at UofT as an international student and that was just unfair. Well sure, it sucks that folks from developing countries have a hard time financing a good education at an international school. But that’s really not where Canadian taxpayer dollars for education should be dedicated. If we want to have a foreign aid policy which helps international students from developing countries get an education in Canada, that’s one thing. But to unilaterally reduce tuition fees for international students?

Say there’s some rich American family who decides to send their kid to school in Canada for its inexpensive tuition fees (for international students). By Shepherd’s logic, it makes sense that Canadian taxpayers should be responsible for subsidizing the education of this rich American student, whose parents never contributed to Canadian taxes. By this logic, we will be subsidizing rich internationals at the expense of Ontarians who can’t afford to go to university, resulting in the extreme of being unable to support themselves, ending up unemployed, on welfare or even worse, homeless.  And hey, when we elect people who then decide to cut welfare spending, we can enjoy the increased health costs of having lots of homeless people!

OK, OK. I’m taking it to an extreme. After all, in the European Union, any EU citizen can go to university in any other EU country and pay domestic/EU tuition fees. So that means that someone from a less wealthy country like Croatia can go study at Cambridge in the UK for cheap. But at least here there’s an exchange. By extension, a UK student could go study in Croatia. And this is part of a joint inter-governmental effort to reduce borders in Europe. But if we, in Canada, just reduce tuition fees for international students unilaterally, it’s not as if Canadian students can now attend schools outside of Canada for a cheaper price.

So here’s the thing: reducing tuition fees is a good thing. Equal access to higher education is a good thing. But we need to do it in a smart way if we want any chance at success. And if the person representing us, as UofT students, hasn’t even done his homework enough to understand any of the details of the issue, and is merely naively and superficially for “lower tuition fees”, how can he possibly represent our interests? Worse, he could put the fight for lower tuition fees years behind by pushing a naive agenda which, would just be further proof, to the government, that they shouldn’t take these young people seriously. And how can that help anyone?

In the end, the important thing is to hold our student government accountable to addressing our issues. And I’m pretty sure we all care about tuition fees in one way or another. So I encourage you to talk to the candidates (or for VP external, the single candidate) and figure out just what they are all about. Can they really represent us? Or are they just looking to pad their resume and are so disinterested that spending a couple of hours learning about the issues prior to campaigning seemed like going above and beyond the call of duty?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 8th, 2011 at 7:57 pm and is filed under On Campus. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.