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canada's student movement
For several years, under successive federal Liberal governments, students in Canada, and around the world, have been under attack. Tuition has been rising at a remarkable rate, as federal and provincial governments decrease funding, and have relaxed (or removed) restrictions on tuition rates.
As well, student loans programs have been transformed so that nearly all of what a student receives must be paid back; previously, a major portion of the amount received by the student was a grant, which need not be paid back. The results are mounting student debt (according to the Canadian Federation of Students, CFS, the average student now graduates owing upwards of $50,000), and less accessibility to education for working-class students.
Not surprisingly, there has been an increasing militancy among student activists around the country. Last year, the Canadian Federation of Students (Canada's largest student union) launched a campaign called Access 2000. This was a major media campaign to highlight the financial and educational plight of today's students, culminating in a one-day cross-country student strike.
The event inspired solidarity from high-school students and the Canadian labor movement, most notably the autoworkers (CAW).
This year, the CFS can take the fight, which still enjoys a high level of support, to the next level, or it can waste that momentum.
Currently, the CFS in Ontario has two major campaigns scheduled for the upcoming school term. One is the Women's March Against Poverty and Violence to occur in Ottawa on Oct. 15. The other is a mass protest against the governing Ontario Progressive Conservative Party convention taking place at Toronto's Metro Convention Centre, also in October.
Both are certainly worthwhile causes that all student activists should actively support and build. However, we must also ask ourselves, what happened to the mass cross-country tuition fightback? The CFS should work for mass action that is able to fight for, and win, a tuition freeze, and eventually the elimination of tuition, and the replacement of student loans with student grants.
The way to do this is to use every event and campaign (like the upcoming anti-Tory protest) to promote a future tuition strike. One way to fight the agenda of university brass and the bosses' governments is to hit them where it hurts-in their pocket books!
While there may not be enough support to launch such a strike today or tomorrow, it is important for the CFS leadership to build momentum towards victory for students on the issue of tuition. Mass struggle is key to achievement of this goal.
Another key ingredient to victory is to have a champion for the student cause in the mass political arena. Currently, there is no mass electoral party willing to run in elections promising the abolition of tuition, or the conversion of student loans into grants. There is only one party that has the class make-up to even embark on such a campaign, and that's the New Democratic Party [NDP, Canada's Labor Party].
Until recently, the youth wing of the NDP (New Democratic Youth) stood alone in the NDP calling for the freeze and abolition of tuition. The Socialist Caucus of the NDP is in full solidarity with the struggles of Canadian and Quebecois students, and has committed itself to winning the NDP membership to these views and objectives.
While student activists are properly rejecting the agendas of the big-business governments in Ottawa and the provinces, we must also build the political alternative to that agenda. Students committed to the abolition of tuition and the replacement of loans with grants should ally themselves with the only political movement which champions their cause inside a mass working class party. This movement is made up by leftists in the NDY and the Socialist Caucus of the NDP.
Working at the local, provincial and federal level of the student movement to build a powerful mass fightback action, together with joining in the struggle to win the NDP to a workers' and students' agenda, we can win the battle against rising tuition.
Dan Lovell is a socialist activist at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario and a member of Youth for Socialist Action in Canada.
