Québec: Student tuition fees increase cancelled

[French Castanut]

PQ Premier, Pauline Marois, cancelled Jean Charest Bill #12.

Marois declared today the cancellation of higher tuition fees to the University and Law 12, which imposed restrictions on student protests last spring

Source:
http://www.journaldemontreal.com/2012/0 ... se-annulee

[twobits]

removed off topic - Jennylives

[TimmyE]

And now the students want free education as their long term goal. Actually, it might as well be free now as the students are only paying a token amount for their education. The pot is only so big. If post secondary education is free, then something else will suffer. I say, let Quebec go their own way instead of having them suck the life out of the rest of Canada.

[keith1612]

my god, when will quebec stop begging for more and more.
they have the cheapest rates in canada now.
when the new leadership goes for seperation lets see what tuition costs do.

[steven lloyd]

I say, let Quebec go their own way instead of having them suck the life out of the rest of Canada.

Either that or start charging, arresting and jailing people for treason - starting with the traitorous Pauline Marois.

[Smurf]

I think we should just cut off all funding and let them see what separation would be like and what would happen to their fees.

[CTF]

Education is not free. It is only a case of who pays. Usually when a University cannot raise tuition it becomes starved for funds and cannot offer new programs or expand. Slowly course offerings become stagnant and seats become more limited. Over time the quality of the education declines and the institution suffers. Some of North America’s finest University’s all share one trait in common – they typically have higher tuition rates that provide the funds necessary to offer a first rate education.

The students in Quebec in my view are being very short sighted. Starving Universities of funds will not help the Universities long term. Universities are not unlike lawyers….you get what you pay for. Education should be the most important investment a student will make in their future, and let’s not forget, it IS an investment, or at least it should be.

[Veovis]

Well we have cancer awareness month, why not a Separation Awareness Month each year.

For one month each year, Quebec is completely on it's own. Not one cent from anywhere other than themselves. This will help them learn and then remember what it would be like to be their own nation and I bet the separatist groups will vanish in 5 years in the hopes that "Separation awareness Month" could maybe be removed and they join the rest of the country.

[Woodenhead]

Protests can work. Whodathunkit.

[Smurf]

Did the protests work or do they now have a government that is just bowing to them to get on their good side in the hopes of getting support for a referendum. I don't believe it has anything to do with the protests.

[GrooveTunes]

Did the protests work or do they now have a government that is just bowing to them to get on their good side in the hopes of getting support for a referendum. I don't believe it has anything to do with the protests.

Thats the reason the election was called in the first place.

[Woodenhead]

Yup. It has everything to do with the protests. I don't know how anyone could sanely suggest otherwise.

[Urbane]

Now that Marois is in power things have changed a tad:

Chris Selley: Quebec student strikers’ utopian vision crashes to Earth

Dec 18, 2012

Schadenfreude is a discreditable emotion, but it is awfully difficult not to smirk obnoxiously in the general direction of Quebec’s pot-banging students and the professors who supported their absurd “strike” earlier this year — not just the debilitating street protests and the smoke bombs, but the outrageous verbal and physical intimidation of other students who simply wanted to go to class. (“Scabs,” they were called, as if they had violated some imaginary covenant with the strikers.) These same radicals, along with far more reasonable groups, are now up in arms at a $124-million cut in university funding imposed earlier this month, with all of four months for it to be absorbed, by the very same Parti Québécois that so cynically and effectively cashed in on the protests and the utopian, tuition-free vision of the “strikers.”

There was now-Premier Pauline Marois, banging her casserole in the streets of Montreal along with the protesters. She looked about as comfortable as she might crossing Montmorency Falls on a tightrope, but there were votes to be had, so there she was. When it suited her purposes she proudly wore the students’ red square. When it didn’t suit her purposes, she took it off. This was the same woman who proposed tuition hikes as Lucien Bouchard’s education minister, but it didn’t seem to matter. She even wooed student protest leader Léo Bureau-Blouin to run for her party. Now, having turned 21 on Monday, he’s a member of a government that’s slashing education funding.

So, let’s do the math. Ms. Marois cancelled the planned tuition hikes as one of her first acts as Premier, pledging that the move would cost no more than $20-million.

“It’s a total victory!” crowed Martine Desjardins, president of the Fédération étudiante universitaire du Québec. “It’s a new era of collaboration instead of confrontation.”

Then she turned around and snatched $124-million from the universities’ 2013 budgets. Especially considering that Jean Charest had promised more financial aid to students with financial need — which Ms. Marois adopted — it is difficult to see how this counts as a win. As many argued during the strike, the students were essentially lobbying to subsidize education for people who could afford to pay more. Now the whole system is poorer for it.

Marois can’t fight the bond-rating agencies any more than Jean Charest, Alison Redford, Dalton McGuinty or Christy Clark can
Even in Quebec, universities need money to provide an excellent product. When I arrived at McGill in 1995, the place was, physically speaking, a wreck. And it has always had a relatively healthy endowment — about $29,000 per student at present, which is roughly nine times more than the Université de Montréal, the best-endowed francophone institution. Other than McGill, Quebec’s universities are uncommonly vulnerable to funding cuts such as Ms. Marois and her ministers are imposing. And ultimately, that’s what cures the schadenfreude: Reasonable students are going to suffer along with the unreasonable ones.

The idea of free or fantastically low tuition — from which I benefited enormously at McGill, incidentally — is far more mainstream in Quebec than in any other province, and will likely remain so. But as Montreal Gazette columnist Don Macpherson put it recently, Ms. Marois can’t fight the bond-rating agencies any more than Jean Charest, Alison Redford, Dalton McGuinty or Christy Clark can. That budgets must be balanced and debt must not get out of hand is political orthodoxy from sea to sea to sea. Much as they sometimes enjoy pretending otherwise, left-wing Quebecers inhabit the same time and space and economy as the rest of us, and they must confront the same fiscal realities.

As many argued during the strike, the students were essentially lobbying to subsidize education for people who could afford to pay more. Now the whole system is poorer for it
If the Parti Québécois isn’t going to take Quebec towards the student strikers’ promised land, it’s a safe bet that no party in Quebec or anywhere else in Canada is going to do it either. (This poses an existential dilemma for the ideological, big-dreaming wing of the federal New Democrats, in particular.) There are lots of different ways to run a country or a province, and none is inherently more valid than any other if citizens grant its promoters a mandate. But the lesson from Quebec today offers voters a cautionary lesson: In politics as in commerce, if something sounds too good to be true — tax cuts with no service cuts, debt-fighting without tax hikes, more financial aid for students and a tuition freeze — it almost certainly is.

National Post

[Artofthedeal]

Protests can work. Whodathunkit.

and yet they didn't really work at all - they just moved money out of one pocket (cancelling the increases) while cutting funding. You can't have your cake and eat it too - these students would have been far better served if the government had just met them head on, put through the increases and showed them who was boss. Students and their left-wing foolish professors aren't the bosses, because they don't pay the bills. The taxpayer pays the bills. And the taxpayer already foots a huge percentage of the "education" that these students are getting. Giving in to the entitlement mentality was a huge mistake, but in the end, the students got the shaft just the same. Protests don't work.

[SurplusElect]

Students and their left-wing foolish professors aren't the bosses, because they don't pay the bills. The taxpayer pays the bills. And the taxpayer already foots a huge percentage of the "education" that these students are getting.

I thought "the 1%" pays all the taxes in Canada. The working man doesn't even contribute (meaningfully)

Can't get to be a 1%er without post secondary education.

Nice picture your painting. One breath the rich pay all the taxes, and in another the working man is footing the bill.