What Post-Secondary Students Want This Election

Among the many typical election topics lost in the tsunami of annexation and tariff emergencies this election season, little has been said about post-secondary education.

But students themselves are paying attention.

“What we’re seeing is across the nation post-secondary institutions are in absolute crisis,” said Cole Reinbold, secretary-treasurer with the British Columbia Federation of Students.

“Institutions are in huge deficits,” Reinbold said, and “laying off 80 staff is becoming a quite normal number.”

While the student leaders The Tyee interviewed appreciate the skilled-trades apprenticeship support pledged by the Liberal and Conservative parties, they wanted to hear more from the politicians vying to lead Canada about how they plan to turn around the bleak situation post-secondary institutions and students are facing.

“The biggest thing that post-secondary students are looking for from the next election is an increase in operational funding supports,” Reinbold said, echoing calls from post-secondary educators for the federal government to send more money to the provinces through the Canada Social Transfer.

Specifically, Reinbold said they’d like to see investments in public post-secondary institutions return to 0.5 per cent of GDP annually.

Students also expressed concerns about the cost-of-living crisis.

“A lot of people are spending far too much on rent and then the rest of the essentials for survival have been left to be sacrificed,” said Mary Feltham, Newfoundland and Labrador chairperson for the Canadian Federation of Students.

Students also emphasized that they wanted to see leaders commit to protecting their right to freedom of assembly and speech as international students south of the border face deportation over participation in pro-Palestinian protests.

The long shadow of US deportations

In the United States, international students who participated in pro-Palestinian demonstrations or publicly acknowledged Israel’s attacks on Gaza as a genocide have been taken into custody, disappeared into prisons and threatened with deportation for their beliefs, despite having not committed any crimes.

Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre’s rhetoric has raised questions about whether his party would follow down a similar path should they form government. In an interview with the Knowledge Project Podcast earlier this month, Poilievre sourced antisemitism to Canadian governments that “pushed ideologies through universities and schools.”

During a February interview with Juno News, Poilievre, who visited with and spoke in support protesters involved in the pro-pipeline yellow vest convoy and the "freedom convoy," criticized the Liberal government for invoking the Emergencies Act against the "freedom convoy" participants who occupied downtown Ottawa streets for a month in 2022.

“I think it’s a good reminder that when a prime minister disagrees with a protest, he still has to remember that the people who are attending the protest are Canadians,” Poilievre said. “They have the right to express themselves, and they deserve dignity and respect.”

But Poilievre also categorized all pro-Palestinian protests in Canada as “Hamas riots” and linked them with attacks on Jewish schools and synagogues, including shots fired into an Ontario Jewish girls’ school on multiple occasions, and arson at a Vancouver synagogue last year.

These attacks did not happen during protests, however. While two people were arrested and charged related to one of the shooting incidents, no names have been released and the crimes remain unsolved.

Poilievre insinuated that immigrants, including international students, are responsible for the attacks.

“Someone shows up in our country claiming to be a student or a temporary worker, and they start by firebombing coffee shops, bakeries, synagogues or any other place, then they need to be immediately arrested and they need to be deported,” Poilievre said to Juno News.

Residents without citizenship who are convicted of serious crimes are already subject to losing their status under Canadian law, says Ga Grant, litigation staff counsel with the BC Civil Liberties Association.

“Contrary to how Poilievre is portraying this, this is not a situation where police are just sitting by and they're not intervening and making charges in cases where there has been violence or hate crimes,” she said.

“We’ve actually seen more examples of where there was unconstitutional police overreach and charges that shouldn't have been laid in the first place.”

Tying protests to suspected hate crimes and conflating concern over Palestinian civilians with support for Hamas, a designated terrorist group in Canada, is concerning, she added.

“The overwhelming majority of people that are at these protests are protesting for human rights, for liberties of a people, they're protesting against what has been found by the International Criminal Court of Justice to be apartheid and a plausible case of genocide,” said Grant.

“It's very different than people that are actually committing hate crimes and doing violence.”

Anyone in Canada has the right to freedom of association and speech that is not hate speech, Feltham said.

“And the threat of any political party or leader to try and limit what students or any association or labour union speaks on or advocates for, as long as it’s not rooted in hate, is definitely scary,” they said, noting both Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the United Nations affirm this right.

What students want: increased funding, decreased tuition

Since the 1980s, federal and provincial share of post-secondary institutions’ operational funds nation-wide have dropped from 84 per cent to just over 50 per cent.

Universities have made up for the gap by increasing tuition for domestic students and especially for international students, who can pay up to five times the tuition their Canadian peers do.

“Over the past 10 years it’s been increased by about 36 per cent, and some provinces have seen an individual increase in their public post-secondary educational institutes of 50 per cent,” Feltham said.

While eliminating tuition and student loans in favour of a free post-secondary education is the ultimate goal for post-secondary student advocates, both the B.C. and national student federations want to see increased funding for First Nations, Métis and Inuit programs and strategies that are supposed to cover the cost of education for Indigenous students.

“To close the disparity between Indigenous and non-Indigenous learners, Canada needs to have an additional 78,000 Indigenous graduates and an 80 per cent increase in current funding,” said Reinbold, adding improving post-secondary access would address “historic inequalities while strengthening Canada’s economic future.”

“There’s also a lack of clarity within the government itself around how these programs work, and the relationship between tribes and Indigenous Services Canada.”

Feltham added that post-secondary education is linked to cultural and linguistic sovereignty for Indigenous peoples, too.

“We’re encouraging people to vote for leaders who will fund and protect linguistic and cultural rights within post-secondary education,” they said.

Feltham and Reinbold said students wanted to see an end to the exploitation of international students for their tuition dollars.

“The BCFS is asking for an immigration system that does not exploit international students for their fees or their economic contributions, and that recognizes Canadian work experience that they do earn during their studies,” Reinbold said.

This would help align Canada’s work-study visa systems with regional labour market needs, they added.

What the parties are offering

The Tyee requested interviews about post-secondary student support from the Liberals, Conservative Party of Canada, Green Party, and the NDP.

The NDP

The NDP did offer an interview with B.C. incumbent Peter Julian, though due to his busy schedule, it fell through. A statement was emailed on his behalf to The Tyee instead.

“We’ll work with provinces and territories to cap and reduce tuition fees, while immediately tackling the student debt crisis — by expanding access to non-repayable Canada Student Grants and providing support to those already carrying high levels of debt,” Julien’s statement read.

“We’ll also partner to build more affordable student housing and fight the corporate greed that’s driving up everyday costs — from groceries to rent.”

Julian added the NDP’s support for students includes both domestic and international students, and their right to peaceful protest and freedom of expression on campus.

The Greens

In an interview, Green Party Leader Elizabeth May echoed students’ right to peaceful protest and freedom of expression and spoke in favour of making public post-secondary education tuition-free, like many European countries offer.

“Making it an economic reality that only the wealthy are going to be able to get post-secondary degrees is an appallingly bad decision for an economy or a country,” she said, adding other students are saddled with debt when they graduate.

“You’re actually sabotaging your future by starving the educational system, or making universities depend on the largesse of transnational corporations.”

The Green party, whether it forms government or works with other parties that do, would recognize post-secondary education as a national concern, not merely a provincial responsibility, May added.

This includes further federal funding to enable universities to again hire tenure-track educators, instead of exploiting sessional instructors, she said.

International students should be invited to study in Canada, May says, while keeping an eye out for institutions that would exploit them.

“And especially where we’ve got students who want to find a pathway to staying in Canada and are willing potentially to live in some of the areas that are more underserviced,” May said, adding the data does not back up accusations international students drove the housing and affordability crisis in Canada.

The Liberals

The Liberals have focussed their promises on education and training that relates to economic and service priority areas, like training more healthcare professionals to fill jobs and construction workers to erect more infrastructure. But there’s little about increasing investments in post-secondary institutions themselves.

In addition to funding skilled trades apprenticeships with grants up to $8,000, the Liberal party has pledged to double the funding of the Union Training and Innovation Program to $50 million, provide employers with up to $10,000 to hire skilled-trades apprentices, give up to $15,000 each towards upskilling workers in certain industries and track labour market impacts to ensure programs are meeting employers’ needs.

Federal contribution agreements for major projects will also include commitments for industry partners to hire apprentices and recent graduates. They will also invest $10 billion in low-cost financing and capital to build homes for students, as well as other underserved and low-income populations.

Indigenous students will see funding for their education “accelerate” under another Liberal government, which will also launch the new Indigenous Pathways to Prosperity Skills and Training Fund to establish partnerships between Métis, Inuit and First Nations students and schools, training centres, communities, organizations and colleges to advance students’ education and skills training in “priority areas” like education, healthcare and construction.

For Francophone minority post-secondary students in an English majority province or territory, the Liberals are promising a scholarship to continue their education in French “in a minority context.” International students, however, will see their numbers capped at, in combination with temporary foreign workers, less than five per cent of Canada’s population.

For post-secondary institutions themselves, the Liberals have announced $20 million in capital funding for new and expanded apprentice training spaces across Canada’s 213 public colleges. The party also announced it will work with the provinces to increase trade colleges’ overall operating funds. But the word “university” doesn’t even appear in the Liberals' platform document.

They promise an investment — though not specifying an amount — in Indigenous-led post-secondary institutions, to build more medical schools and increase student seats and residency spaces.

For research projects directly helpful to Canadians or that can be “commercialized here,” if they lose American funding, a Liberal government Canadian Sovereignty and Resilience Research Fund will step in and “look to welcome researchers here,” including professors and graduate students.

The Conservatives

The Conservative Party of Canada has pledged to create “Trades Toolkits” for high school students interested in pursuing trades after graduation, with information about career pathways and provincial and federal programs and “incentives.”

A Conservative government will fund skilled-trade apprenticeships at half the rate of the Liberals, with $4,000 grants for up to 350,000 students through the Union Training and Innovation Program, with annual funding of $180 million in the first two years, that will increase to $250 million annually from 2027 to 2029. Some of this funding will also provide money for capital investment in training halls.

They will also require banks to include apprenticeships among the education programs covered under Registered Education Savings Plans. For medical students training abroad, the Conservatives promise to open new residency spots for them to finish their education in Canada.

Under a platform promise to “respect Indigenous governance and consultation,” the Conservatives say they will support Indigenous languages and culture through community-led education, though they do not offer specifics.

For provinces that remove interprovincial trade barriers, a Conservative government would increase the amount of tax revenue they receive, to spend on whatever they choose. Schools are one expense example listed in the platform.

Poilievre has also pledged to end “the imposition of woke ideology” in federal university research grants, emulating conservative American political talking points about “wokeness” in education. The Conservatives will also require criminal background checks on international student visa applicants, whose numbers they pledge to “dramatically” reduce.

Most federal public servants will no longer be required to have post-secondary credentials under a Conservative government, with the party pledging that hiring will be based on peoples’ skills, not credentials.

With files from Jen. St. Denis.