The Miseducation of Gordon Campbell
Britta Jensen

Before I start my rant today, I would like to come clean and say that I don't care for Gordon Campbell, but there is a reason that goes beyond the here and now. Way back in Grade 9 when Campbell first became leader of the "Liberal" party (don't mind the quotations, but I think the label in their case is a bit of a misnomer) he came to my little school to wow the students. Being somewhat of a political creature from the day I was born, and always ready to ask a few hard questions of any politician passing through, I had a few good ones for him.

Now, I had anticipated to be blown off, but what I got was a bit more than that. Not only did he outright refuse to answer my questions (not even giving me the good ol' politician word dance) but he also had this aura of complete contempt surrounding him. That is something I have never quite encountered to this day. I felt I was absolutely nothing in his eyes, just another semi-human creature of no consequence getting in the way of his quest for premiership.

So, needless to say I was somewhat wary when he gained the leadership of this province. However, as an eternal optimist, the promises of protecting healthcare and education and honouring the previous government's tuition freeze and rollback gave me some hope. Since then the Liberals have systematically dismantled that hope. They have proved to be misleading, heartless, and thoughtless. My personal frustration reached a pinnacle with this government this past October at the "consultation" between advanced education minister Shirley Bond and students about the tuition freeze.

Except for BCIT, every institute in B.C. had representation, and almost everyone stood up to strongly support the tuition freeze. The students clearly went on to show how increased tuition fees destroy accessibility and don't bring about the improvements they are supposed to. Even alternative sources of funding were pointed out by the president of the graduate student society of UBC. Throughout the consultation many students expressed concern about how seriously what they said would be taken. Later, in response to a media question, Bond said that there were "a lot of mixed feelings" about the maintaining freeze among the students.

Ever since then I have been rather skeptical about everything they say. Like claiming they had no choice in cutting our civil service by thousands of jobs and eliminating or hamstringing programs. No choice? They had an independent audit done on the previous governments budget that found a $1.5 billion dollar surplus, which the auditors said was actually understated. Now granted, the recent slow down in the economy would have lowered it, but a tax cut of over $2.3 billion, various pay increases such as 32 per cent for deputy ministers and up to 750 per cent for CEOs of crown corporations, not to mention the biggest cabinet in B.C. history and the inflation of the premier's office budget by several hundred per cent might have played a slight role in the creating the present multi-billion dollar deficit. Then they tell us the NDP created the whole problem!

When will they feel that they have been in office long enough to take responsibility for their own mistakes? To put some cuts in context, under the NDP the civil service of this province was the second leanest in North America. After these cuts B.C. will have the leanest, with one civil servant for every 178 citizens. In contrast, Texas has a 1:78 ration, or Oregon, with a more comparable population size and gross state product, has a 1:75 ratio. We should be proud 'cause we sure got 'em beat!

What really has me scared though, is how education has been treated so far. First they froze the budget, which is more like cuts through attrition using inflation and not honouring collective agreements (unless of course they simply ripped them up!). Then they put over 10,000 students out of work in B.C. (which at SFU also included things such as funding for our two food bank co-ordinators and the staff employed at the Centre for Students with Disabilities) by eliminating Work Study, Student Summer Works, Youth Community Action and many other valuable programs. All have played significant roles in helping students pay for school and giving us the work experience many of us need to get a job after graduation. Now, to add insult to injury, we are looking at the possibility of massive tuition fee increases of around 70 per cent over the next three years (that is more than $1,600), with unknown increases in ancillary fees - the University of Western Ontario has ones around $800, compared to our $125-odd dollars).

It is not hard to see how massive increases in tuition have affected accessibility. The university administration argues that participation rates in Ontario and Alberta - two of the several provinces that experienced massive increases over the past ten years or so - haven't gone down, proving everything is A-okay.

But numerous independent studies clearly show that even though participation rates might have stayed the same, the demographics have changed significantly. The participation of low-income students fell from 46 per cent to 16 per cent at the University of Guelph from 1990 to 2000. Then there is a Statistics Canada education review that found graduates in 1995 were 60 per cent more in debt than their 1990's counterparts, and that the gap between low-income and middle-income students going to university has increased from 0.8 per cent in 1986 to 7 per cent in 1994. Many of these numbers are from before some of the biggest increases that happened in the late '90s! Now people are talking about how it is going to happen here. What will it take for this government to realise they are making a dreadful mistake? I'm going to be graduating next year, so I will miss most of the mess, but the year I graduate will be the year my little sister graduates from high school, and she wants to go to SFU. According to the government of Canada, my family lives below the poverty line. I didn't notice as a kid, but graduating with a $25,000 debt did make me think about it more. So I worry, and I think about how big of a debt she might graduate with. Or whether she will be able to afford it at all.

COME

FIGHT THE

HIKES!

On Wednesday, February 6, the Simon Fraser Student Society will be holding a carnival and rally against tuition fee hikes. Carnival begins at 11am, rally at 1:30pm in the main mall. For more info contact www.cfs.bc.ca.

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