The time has come for free education in Canada. Is the NDP ready to lead the way?
In barely a week’s time, the New Democratic Party will be having its federal convention, where thousands of members from around the country will meet together to discuss the party’s policies, strategies, and direction heading into the 2019 federal election. It will be the first policy convention under the leadership of Jagmeet Singh, and with it comes a chance to turn many of Singh’s commitments during the leadership contest into official party policy.
One such commitment was Singh’s support for a $14.9 billion increase in federal transfer payments to the provinces to fund free tuition in all universities and colleges. At this convention, activists from every region of the country are working together to advance a resolution in support of eliminating tuition fees. An unprecedented 32 local NDP associations from the Yukon to PEI have already voted to support it at convention. It’ll be up to the delegates to accept or reject the resolution.
Free tuition is an idea whose time has come. Education has a transformational effect on people that improves society as a whole, and everyone should have equal opportunity to access and benefit from it. There are economic and social reasons that make free education necessary: 70% of new jobs today require some form of post-secondary education. Every dollar invested in education directly generates $1.36 and the economic spinoffs from student spending generates an estimated additional $17.5 billion. Educated workers earn more over their lifetime — contributing more in taxes.
But there’s more to it than raw numbers. Education measurably boosts social benefits with dynamic impacts in innovation and knowledge creation, knowledge spillovers that increase skills and productivity of less-educated workers, reduced crime, increased civic participation, improved health, intergenerational benefits passed on to children, increased volunteerism and charitable donations, and more. Education helps us make sense of society, imagine a better world, have free and open discussions about how to make these ideas a reality, and then put these ideas into action. And it’s well within the ability of Canada to fund it — at roughly $10.2 billion, a modest increase in corporate taxes and/or eliminating subsidies to oil and gas companies (to suggest only two ideas) would more than cover the cost.
Unfortunately, Canadian governments have been all-too-prepared to sacrifice my generation’s right to education in the interest of neoliberal austerity — that is to say, government by and for the wealthiest. In the mid-1990s, the Liberal government cut $12 billion in federal transfers for health and education and abandoned the federal responsibility to fund post-secondary education. Since then, tuition fees have nearly tripled. The average student now leaves school with $26,819 in debt. Graduates collectively owe the federal student loans program more than $28 billion dollars.
Lower-income people should not be barred from education by high tuition fees. Students should not be punished for getting an education through debt and the anxiety and burnout which comes with such a financial burden.
For Indigenous students, it’s worse. Access to student aid for their education through the Post-Secondary Student Support Program (PSSSP), a federally-funded program administered by individual Band Councils, has had a limit on its funding increases capped at 2% since 1996, also from the Chrétien Liberals. Soaring tuition fees, inflation, and the limit on funding increases has meant that every year fewer and fewer Indigenous students can get funding. Between 2001 and 2011, more than 18,500 Indigenous students were denied funding. The federal government has a treaty obligation to fund education for Indigenous people and is violating this treaty right on a daily basis.
Canada is past due to recognize higher education as a public service for the public good, to make it universal, and to make it free for all.
Mr. Singh comfortably won the NDP leadership on the first ballot, and when combined with the results of his colleague Niki Ashton, who also campaigned for free tuition, nearly 72% of NDP members cast their ballot for a candidate that supported free education. The most recent national poll on the question of free tuition was in April 2015 by Forum Research, when 53% of Canadians stated that they support it. Since then lots has happened. We’ve had a federal election where the Green Party endorsed it. In the inspiring campaigns of Bernie Sanders in the United States and Jeremy Corbyn in the United Kingdom, vigorously promoting free tuition helped them to win the millennial vote by a landslide. Sanders recieved 2 million votes from young people in the primaries, while Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, in their respective primaries, recieved a combined 1.6 million. In the UK, Labour won 66% of the under-40 vote while turnout among 18–25 year-olds soared 16 percentage points above the 2015 UK election. There’s more to those stories than enthusiatically campaigning for free tuition- but it certainly helped.
In Quebec, the left-wing provincial party Québec Solidaire recently elected as co-spokesperson Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, the former spokesperson of Association pour un Solidarité Syndical Étudiant. Thanks to “l’effet GND,” the party membership is soaring and QS’s place in the polls is trending at double its 2014 election results- on a bad day.
This is rooted in the 2012 student strike, where students in Quebec struck for months, marched in the hundreds of thousands against a 75% fee hike imposed by the Liberal government, and led to not just the hike being defeated, but also defeating the majority Liberal government by forcing early elections. Clearly, tuition fees are an issue capable of mobilizing Canadian young people in mass numbers as they have in the UK and US.
Students continue to organize, campaign, rally, march, research, lobby, and even go on strike to push the issue. And politicians have started to respond — In Ontario and New Brunswick, Liberal governments responded to the demand for free tuition with a plan for Free Tuition** with an asterisk. That is to say, instead of recognizing that education is an essential public service that should be universally accessible to all, regardless of ability to pay, the Wynne and Gallant governments instead created a scheme where a smaller percentage of students can get an increase in their student assistance funding to help cover tuition, which they call “Free Tuition” while charging some of the highest fees in the country and student debt continues to rise. In Ontario, the Wynne government combined existing grant programs and re-packaged it as “free tuition” while students are still expected to pay roughly $3000 per year. “The language around the new grant will likely “evolve,” Wynne said when asked by student activists. Indeed.
At the federal level, Justin Trudeau campaigned on a promise to increase student grants, create more student jobs, lift the cap on Indigenous education funding, and even invest an additional $50 million per year to work on closing the Indigenous education gap. The NDP, which has historically stood with students in calling for reduced tuition fees and a federal post-secondary education act, chose to hide those parts of party policy and campaigned on eliminating interest on student loans. Young people overwhelmingly voted Liberal in 2015.
Of course, the Real Change™ Trudeau promised hasn’t appeared — tuition keeps rising, his promises to fund Indigenous education were broken as he budgeted much less than promised, he didn’t create the promised student jobs, and his finance minister Bill Morneau famously advised young people to get used to the “job churn” of short-term precarious employment. One doesn’t have to be a fierce partisan to recognize that Liberals campaign very differently than they govern.
Free tuition is an idea whose time has come, and it is only going to get more and more popular as students, their families, and their allies continue to demand better. With all this in mind, the NDP has only two choices to make. Will they stand with young people in need as well as its own stated values, and proudly campaign for universal, accessible, and free education for all? Or will they let themselves be outmaneuvered again by the Liberals and set students back even further with a smokescreen of Free Tuition**? So far, NDP members are choosing action. 32 NDP associations from the Yukon to PEI have already voted to support free education at the federal convention. The next step is to take it into our communities, our campuses, the news, and the House of Commons.
The NDP must make the right choice this February. It’s clear that young people need a progressive alternative to Justin Trudeau. That’s why we need Jagmeet Singh and rank-and-file NDP members to stand up for all Canadians’ right (and treaty right) to education. Canada is overdue to join the more than 25 countries that already have free tuition, and political leadership is needed now more than ever.
With love and with courage, we can win free education for all.
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John Hutton is a long-time student activist, NDP member, and former Vice-President of the Dalhousie Student Union. He is currently attending university at Concordia University in Montreal, located on unceded Kanien’kehá:ka territory.
