days before, I’m going to get like five people,” said Cheskes. “It’s going to be a depressing Halloween party.” Cheskes estimates that about eight or nine people attended the October town hall.
Attendees had plenty of time to ask Yates questions, and what began as a conversation about tuition precipitated a broader discussion of the role student consultation plays in administrative decisions at the U of G. That discussion is ongoing. Whiteside noted that while 2017-2018 tuition increases went to the maximum, their consultation with students last year led to the adoption of “recommendations for more funding for mental health and financial aid, particularly for international students.” Yates stressed her “very deep commitment” to discussing university policy with students. Both Cheskes and Yates remarked that the relationship between this year’s CSA and the administration gives them hope that future consultation will be fruitful and engaged. That consultation will, of course, have to go beyond town halls announced at the eleventh hour. “Admin says that they are committed to figuring out better ways of finding out what students’ priorities are. And now it’s our job to hold them accountable for that,” said Cheskes. But make no mistake — tuition fees aren’t going down any time soon. “It won’t be a real consultation when it comes to whether or not fees will be increased,” said Cheskes. “That’s not really up for discussion, unfortunately.”
The big picture of university funding If it sounds like universities want more and more money from students, that’s because they do.
“But make no mistake — tuition fees aren’t going down any time soon. Universities are in a tough situation. In 2010-2011, the average university in Ontario received almost half its revenues from the government. By 2014-2015, that number dropped to only 38 per cent. In the same time, tuition fees have become a bigger slice of the pie. Canadian universities have struggled with a dearth of public money since the ’90s, according to Roger Martin, a former dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. In a 2009 essay for The Walrus, Martin accuses skittish and overzealous lawmakers of killing Canada’s “education advantage” by slashing federal and provincial funding for universities in a desperate attempt to pull Canada out of a recession. Jean Chrétien’s federal Liberal finance minister, Paul Martin, strove to balance the books by cutting transfers to the provinces, which typically help fund health care and education, from 1994-1996. Meanwhile, in Ontario, Progressive Conservative premier Mike Harris, having promised to keep his hands off of health care funding, cut funding to universities starting in 1995.
“Harris’s cuts were grounded in a belief that the education system was profligate,” writes Martin. “So even when the economy finally recovered from the recession and he could dramatically ramp up per capita health care spending, he kept education spending flat, and left it that way for his final five years as premier. Consequently, Ontario postsecondary funding … fell by 21 per cent during the ’90s while enrolment increased by 8 per cent.”
In the years since Harris left office, the province has increased postsecondary funding. For many years, that funding was primarily tied to enrolment, or “bums in seats,” which meant that schools in the GTA in particular could rely on high demand to increase their revenues. But now those funds are frozen, and the provincial funding formula is changing. Universities are being encouraged to manage, rather than increase, enrolment. Schools need to keep their numbers within a predetermined enrolment “corridor” to guarantee their funding. Soon, additional funding will be tied to a university’s performance. The metrics to measure that performance will be laid out in a Strategic Mandate Agreement, or SMA, negotiated by each university and the province. As Yates made clear in her March town hall, there is still much about this new formula that is unknown, something exacerbated by the prospect of the 2018 provincial election. With an election on the horizon, Ontario Liberals are choosing to focus instead on “free tuition.”
Changes to OSAP and the new net tuition policy have indeed, in many cases, reduced the sticker price of an Ontario university education to zero. Whiteside and Yates praised the new policies as very good things. Cheskes admits that some of the government’s recent decisions represent a step in the right direction, but argues that they’re no substitute for strong public funding for universities, and students should be skeptical when politicians tell them otherwise. “It’s like they’re divorced parents,” said Cheskes, “and the Ontario government is the deadbeat dad, and they go to their ex-wife and they’re like, ‘I’m not going to pay you full child support, which I know is not great of me, and probably not good for our kid, but I’m going to give our kid a much bigger allowance now to make up for it.’ If mom can’t put meals on the table, it doesn’t matter that I have a little bit of money in my pocket.”