Today I wanted to spout off about something that has been making me insanely angry over the past few months. Here in good old Ontario, our idiot Premier, Mr. Dalton "I hate poor people" McGuinty decided it would be a good idea to raise tuition fees.
Ok, so on the surface it doesn't seem to be such a big deal. So higher education costs a little bit more, so what? Maybe a few students will have to work a bit harder after they graduate, and that will be that. Unfortunately, it is a much bigger issue than that, and it is one that goes to the core of what is wrong with Canada today.
What raising tuition fees does is make life harder on the poor. I know tons of kids whose parents pay for their education because they have the financial means to do so. To them, a few hundred dollars means nothing. To the poor kids who need to either work to pay for school, or take out student loans, this tuition hike is a disaster. Now they are forced to work longer and harder just to pay for a service that the government should be providing free of charge.
Without even going into how disgusting it is for our government to force us to pay for education, let me explain the problem with the way student loans are given out. In order to apply for a loan you must tell the government how much money you personally make. Then they calculate how much money you are eligible for without taking into consideration any other factors. Thus, the rich kids with no jobs (because their parents pay for everything) often take out substantial student loans to use as spending money, knowing that it will be easy to pay them off later. On the other hand, the students who actually need to work in order to pay bills at home get royally screwed. The government sees how much money they make, and gives them smaller student loans, often not even enough to cover the cost of tuition.
So, what all this means is that our government is intentionally making education an impossibility for anyone not born into money. Since most high paying jobs require university or college educations, the government's policy is also ensuring that the poor remain so, and that the gap between rich and poor gets ever wider. How a government can do this and still claim legitimacy is completely beyond me. Obviously the protests have done nothing, but that can be explained by the inability of Canadians to stage protests that mean anything. A bunch of students standing in the rain on the University of Toronto campus doesn't even move me, let alone a government that is intent on ruining the lives of millions of its citizens through various forms of economic oppression, the tuition thing being merely one aspect in a comprehensive policy of subtle oppression. Drastic and meaningful action must be taken in order to get the criminals at the top to listen to our demands, and to bring the wider community around to our cause. Only then can we exercise the single (and I think completely meaningless) weapon we have against government fraud: the vote.
The problems inherent in situations like this are too numerous for me to go into tonight. Essentially, years of soft living have made Canadians complacent, and mass media has convinced them in the futility of political action...
So, until something drastic is done, we must live in a society where the poor are prevented from obtaining a higher education (in practice, if not in theory), and accept the fact that the majority of people in our province actually don't care about things like justice, equality, morality, and basic human decency. McGuinty's lucky he won't be in power for long, because in ten years, if not reversed, this situation is going to get alot worse, and hopefully the reactions of students will get alot more volatile. I know mine will.
Thanks for letting me rant...I just hope you get as angry as I do about these kinds of things. Why must we send our military halfway across the world when injustice still reigns on our own soil? Ciao.
Ok, so on the surface it doesn't seem to be such a big deal. So higher education costs a little bit more, so what? Maybe a few students will have to work a bit harder after they graduate, and that will be that. Unfortunately, it is a much bigger issue than that, and it is one that goes to the core of what is wrong with Canada today.
What raising tuition fees does is make life harder on the poor. I know tons of kids whose parents pay for their education because they have the financial means to do so. To them, a few hundred dollars means nothing. To the poor kids who need to either work to pay for school, or take out student loans, this tuition hike is a disaster. Now they are forced to work longer and harder just to pay for a service that the government should be providing free of charge.
Without even going into how disgusting it is for our government to force us to pay for education, let me explain the problem with the way student loans are given out. In order to apply for a loan you must tell the government how much money you personally make. Then they calculate how much money you are eligible for without taking into consideration any other factors. Thus, the rich kids with no jobs (because their parents pay for everything) often take out substantial student loans to use as spending money, knowing that it will be easy to pay them off later. On the other hand, the students who actually need to work in order to pay bills at home get royally screwed. The government sees how much money they make, and gives them smaller student loans, often not even enough to cover the cost of tuition.
So, what all this means is that our government is intentionally making education an impossibility for anyone not born into money. Since most high paying jobs require university or college educations, the government's policy is also ensuring that the poor remain so, and that the gap between rich and poor gets ever wider. How a government can do this and still claim legitimacy is completely beyond me. Obviously the protests have done nothing, but that can be explained by the inability of Canadians to stage protests that mean anything. A bunch of students standing in the rain on the University of Toronto campus doesn't even move me, let alone a government that is intent on ruining the lives of millions of its citizens through various forms of economic oppression, the tuition thing being merely one aspect in a comprehensive policy of subtle oppression. Drastic and meaningful action must be taken in order to get the criminals at the top to listen to our demands, and to bring the wider community around to our cause. Only then can we exercise the single (and I think completely meaningless) weapon we have against government fraud: the vote.
The problems inherent in situations like this are too numerous for me to go into tonight. Essentially, years of soft living have made Canadians complacent, and mass media has convinced them in the futility of political action...
So, until something drastic is done, we must live in a society where the poor are prevented from obtaining a higher education (in practice, if not in theory), and accept the fact that the majority of people in our province actually don't care about things like justice, equality, morality, and basic human decency. McGuinty's lucky he won't be in power for long, because in ten years, if not reversed, this situation is going to get alot worse, and hopefully the reactions of students will get alot more volatile. I know mine will.
Thanks for letting me rant...I just hope you get as angry as I do about these kinds of things. Why must we send our military halfway across the world when injustice still reigns on our own soil? Ciao.
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