The argument I hate most when people try to tell me to stop protesting about the raise in tuition fees is “stop complaining, here it costs more”.
There are many reasons why that argument is flawed, let me tell you thoses reasons.
First of all, the economical situation is different everywhere. Yes Quebec has the lowest tuition fees in North America, however, we also pay the most taxes in the continent. A student that gets in debts in Quebec to pay for his tuition fees will take longer to pay off that debt than a student in, let’s say, Ontario, because the person who graduated and then works in Ontario will benefit from the lower taxes and have more money to pay off his student debts.
Second of all, the students are only asking that the budgets of the universities be looked at more closely. How it works right now is that the comitee in charge of looking if the different rectors are handling their universities is made up wholly of rectors themselves. The comitee also decides things like the salaries of the rectors. Now the reason we want a closer look taken into the budgets, other than the eyes of the rectors themselves is because they have the highest salaries in all the rectors of Canada and are actually being paid more money than the prime minister of Canada, without counting the different travels they do to foreign countries, which the university pays for. In the students proposition, the university budgets would be tightened in fields that do not include the university’s prime goals (education and research). With that plan, the tuition hike would no longer be necessary to found universities.
Finally, I would like to point out that if you can’t argue that our cause isn’t just and that you still think it’s worse where you are, maybe it’s not us who shouldn’t be protesting but you who should be.
