CLASSE leader gets government medal
Nice bit of irony as CLASSE co-leader Jeanne Reynolds receives the lieutenant-governor’s medal, the highest distinction offered to CÉGEP students.
FEUQ says no talks till Bill 78 is rolled back and Michelle Courchesne says no talks unless students agree in advance that a tuition hike moratorium is off the table – so yeah, no talks.
Raoul 15:36 on 2012/05/23 Permalink
We need facilities to recall our politicians
Ephraim 15:52 on 2012/05/23 Permalink
Who’s there to talk to? Last time they got an “agreement” it was hours before the students walked away from their part of the agreement. There is no one trustworthy to sit down to the table. Why bother if you won’t stand by what you agreed.
Jonathan 15:59 on 2012/05/23 Permalink
Ephraim, the last agreement went to a vote to the students. That process took a week, not hours, and it was rejected by a substantial margin. http://montreal.mediacoop.ca/story/why-i-voted-against-qu%C3%A9bec-government-offer-and-continue-strike/10853 explains why many voted against it.
Bill Binns 16:00 on 2012/05/23 Permalink
If an agreement is ever signed, it’s going to be very interesting to watch these student “leaders” attempt to disband their mob. As has been said many times, this isn’t about the tuition increase anymore. By next week it may be about getting China out of Tibet or the tar sands or aboriginal rights.
Ephraim 17:02 on 2012/05/23 Permalink
The members of both unions started to denounce the agreement the morning after having signed it, before it even went to a vote. They said it was because there were changes that were made that they hadn’t agreed to, even though they signed it. Likely… there were other reasons. But the government did negotiate in good faith, signed in good faith and was willing to live with the agreement. The fact that they started talking about the agreement in negative the next morning does not indicate good faith. You keep on negotiating until you have something you can live with… you don’t sign and put up to ratification.
The point being, no matter what is put on the table now or discussed now isn’t viewed by the government as being in good faith. (The government’s best bet at this moment is open negotiations, with the press watching, so they can show good faith and the press can report on progress, openly.)
The other problem is that this is no longer about the students, because no one cares about them. They lost. The whole discussion now is on the right to demonstrate. You can’t negotiate it. It’s the job of the supreme court and it will take a LONG time to get there… and there is no point for a law that expires in a year.
ant6n 17:18 on 2012/05/23 Permalink
@Ephraim
That’s your point of view. My impression is that they berated these people for like 20 hours until they agreed to anything, then singled out one student and made him sign. If you just look at the agreement itself, it’s pretty one-sided. I don’t know how it even got to the point of being signed by one student; but I doubt good faith had anything to do with it.
Ephraim 17:46 on 2012/05/23 Permalink
Not my personal opinion at all. Just because someone points out something from someone else’s perspective, doesn’t make it their personal opinion. And rest assured, this isn’t mine.
I’m just presenting how it appears to the government. From their standpoint, when the heads of the student unions starting backing away it appeared to them that there was no one to talk to.
Frankly, as with all negotiations, the students need to come up with a win-win situation, which they can’t. Politically they don’t have enough will to get what they want. The population is overburdened with taxes and they just don’t want to hear that the students don’t want to pay their part. The polls aren’t in favour of what they want. The polls don’t like law 78 either. But just because people don’t want law 78, doesn’t mean they want to give in to the students either.
Asking to control the schools isn’t a good idea, Concordia’s student union taught us that one. Asking to not invest in research isn’t a good idea, that is how Universities go down the drain. And asking to pay nothing isn’t a good idea, because people don’t take the cost of education seriously.
How many students would be willing to pay the FULL ECONOMIC COST of a course if they failed it? How many students would be willing to pay FULL ECONOMIC COST if they didn’t finish their program (at full time) in the allotted period (ie 3 years for a 3 year program).
For example, most CEGEP programs are normally 2 years, what percentage are finishing in 2 years? Who’s paying for the third year? So, should the government be paying for it, or should the students? Other questions exist, should they have to refund the subsidy be repaid if they leave the province? How do you make the rich pay and the poor not. There are a lot of questions and free education is NOT a good answer. I don’t have any answers except that it’s just not worth $1778 to lose an eye. It’s not worth $1778 to end up in jail for up to 5 years and likely be unable to travel. And frankly it’s not worth $1778 to lose a year of your retirement fund. That’s the reality of this strike.
Come with a real solution that doesn’t cost the taxpayers of this province money and won’t ruin the universities. To get the taxpayers on board you need to understand that the population doesn’t want to pay more tax.
And as far as adults wearing the carre rouge, I want to see them coughing up bursary money instead of putting on 5c worth of material on their lapel. (Put your money where your mouth is.)
ant6n 18:04 on 2012/05/23 Permalink
Quebec isn’t “over-burdened” by taxes. And even free tuition would cost only like ~1% extra in taxes. I think you should put your money where your mouth is – how about paying back for that cheap tuition that you received (for example via taxes today)? I think it’s especially those people who studied within the last 30 years in Quebec who are not putting their money where their mouth is – benefiting from cheap tuition, but now beating that dead horse that this hike matters from a budget point of view. Just because they are afraid of the taxes going up a notch, knowing that Quebec won’t be able to save money where waste is actually happening.
Why not look at it from the students point of view, rather than the government (the government actually has no business having a point of view)? They have elected representatives who’ve shown nothing but contempt for large sections of the population; and when they stand up to be heard; they are being beaten down by police and special legislation.
JaneyB 18:07 on 2012/05/23 Permalink
Two things: I’ve taught in university. Most students are working part-time or even full-time. I cannot assign the amount or complexity of material that I had to read as a student because students now don’t have the time to read it or digest it. Higher fees mean more distracted and stressed students. It really, really makes a difference to the of the university or CEGEP. Most professors will echo this opinion.
Second: I get that taxpayers are not a bottomless purse but the level of money squandering that goes on in universities is huge. Admin jobs are well-paid and continually expanding while permanent (even multi-year contract) professor positions are an afterthought at best. It is even worse with building expansion projects – particularly here in Montreal where it is an invitation to mismanagement. (Recall my pet hate: the Ilot Voyageur fiasco at $500 million and counting!).
Universities do not need more and fancier buildings; they need empty rooms basically anywhere. Making internationally competitive universities has nothing to do with the buildings (except in science and the Harper government is wrecking most Cdn research facilities as we speak). There is enough money right now; it is being siphoned away by administrators who couldn’t care less about the central function of the universities: teaching.
Bill Binns 19:20 on 2012/05/23 Permalink
@ant6n – “Quebec isn’t “over-burdened” by taxes”
Ahem, I beg to differ. If you have a job I suggest you have a look at your last check stub. What percentage of your earnings would need to be taken away from you for you to consider yourself “overburdened” by taxes? Personally, handing over half of my check before paying 15% sales tax is pretty close to my limit.
Philip 19:55 on 2012/05/23 Permalink
So we’re just kind of stuck with the fact that taxpayers don’t want to pay for education? $1625 x 200,000 students = $325,000,000 the government saves, if we use simple, shoddy math. That’s a third of a billion per year, lets say.
So the population is OK with squeezing a third of a billion out of the 18-24s of their society. Plus all of that interest being fed to those who loaned them the money.
Fine. Because they’re clearly too lazy and stupid to question what goes on around them.
I have lost all sympathy for anyone not with the strike. The baby boomers, set for retirement, can’t do anything more to mess up their ability to retire in peace and financial security. They’ve landed their sweet lives right where they want them, and are too stupid to realize that they can’t mess it up for themselves. Their economic decisions are only rear their ugly faces when the youth grow up and are stuck with it.
Did they get mad when the train line to Mascouche jumped from $300million to $715million?
Did they get mad when they decided to throw $400million into a stadium with no team?
Did they get mad when the metro cars jumped in price from $1.2billion to $3billion?
Did they get mad when their government ignored the infrastructure and allowed it to crumble? When people died?
And then did they get mad when the cost to rebuild the Turcot interchange jumped from $1.5billion to $3.3billion?
And are they going to get mad when the Charbonneau commission exposes the crooked deals and billions lost over the last decade to collusion and Mafia deals? It got to the point where we *needed* a commission to show just how much taxpayer money is being throw into corrupt pockets.
More simple math. $415million + $400million + $1.8billion + $1.8billion = close to $4.5billion.
There. I just found about 15 years worth of a $1625 hike we wouldn’t *need*. And that’s only from the four government wastes I bothered to count. Nevermind the superhospitals, the other construction projects, and the other thousand incidences of the government throwing away money.
Students are young. Most of them only got the chance to vote less than 4 years ago. A bunch still can’t vote. Save for children, they are the ONLY slice of the population that has not asked for a debt crisis. They had NOTHING to do with it. And now they are inheriting it. And what the government (and, apparently, the province) is saying is asking them to pay “THEIR FAIR SHARE.” Their fair share of what?
Nobody took notice that the biggest suggestion the student groups has made is that they restructure taxes to pull more money from the higher brackets? They are university students. They know that their degrees will likely land them higher paying jobs. This is not a situation where the students don’t want to contribute to society. They’re practically saying that they WANT to be contributing to society. They’re willing to thrust themselves into those tax brackets. They know where tax dollars come from, and they don’t mind putting themselves there.
If taxpayers in Quebec think that it’s OK to punish the only fiscally innocent section of society, then I invite the youth to have a revolution.
We get people saying that youth are spoiled with their iPhones and weekend beer. Well, that’s what the older generation has established for the young people. The baby boomers shaped the world we live in, and now that they see what it has borne, they think that the youth are the entitled ones.
Well, according to the current provincial debt, they’ve spoiled themselves with $250 billion.
So yes, these students are entitled. They’re entitled to the same rich and fantastic lives the older generation have enjoyed, and to a peaceful retirement.
Philip 19:58 on 2012/05/23 Permalink
So to the people who are offended by their 15% sales tax and 50% income tax rates, I can only ask… why didn’t you take to the streets? Why aren’t you in the streets tonight?
Because instead of shaping the society you wanted, you let it go. And the students are taking it back.
mdblog 20:13 on 2012/05/23 Permalink
@ant6n Very early on in this protest I submitted a comment where I supported the idea of paying back the difference on the cheap tuition I paid at Concordia from 1999-2004. My reasoning was that as someone who benefited from artificially low tuition I had a responsibility to pay my fair share if I wanted today’s students to pay more. While my offer still stands I doubt that even if we were to get all Quebec alumni to agree to the same terms, that the students would not accept an increase. This passion play that they are running, and natural rush of leading a “movement/uprising”, not to mention the media coverage it’s garnering, is clearly addictive.
Fred 20:23 on 2012/05/23 Permalink
@Bill Binns – That’s only half the trouble. If you ever work as a business person or freelancer and fall behind on your taxes (for example, because you suddenly lost a major client and needed all your income to pay rent), you’ll find out that RQ’s attitude towards those who are behind but honestly trying to catch up on paying their “fair share” is far less friendly than the SPVM’s attitude toward the protesters. That was a personal experience. I’ve also spoken to a friend of mine who runs a small store in MTL and who was at one point aggressively audited. He said that many times during that long ordeal he felt like simply throwing in the towel, closing shop and going on the dole – it’s simpler, easier, you have more free time, and instead of being shaken down by RQ you can join those who are demanding more from their government. Perhaps that’s the right attitude to take in Quebec (while there’s still funds to be redistributed).
Ephraim 21:02 on 2012/05/23 Permalink
RQ… you mean the government body that says that they are against the underground economy, but doesn’t actually have a department that deals with it? The office that makes more money on fines of the normal taxpayer but doesn’t seem all that interested in actually doing something about the underground economy (AirBnB as one example, no GST, QST, Tourism Tax, never mind asking if they are paying both income taxes and city property tax).
Kevin 07:42 on 2012/05/24 Permalink
@Philip
Everything you’ve suggested HAS generated outrage and frustration – just not demonstrations in the street. Probably because parents with kids, and those who live in the suburbs, can’t take the time to come back downtown in the evening to go protest!
As for restructuring income taxes — if you hike taxes too high, rich people just… leave. Officially setting up a principal residence in another province (or state) is very simple if you have the cash.
And if it’s too hard, a rich person takes their skills and investments and goes elsewhere, like 75% of people who immigrate to Quebec under investor-class rules.
Then where does that leave us?
Ephraim 21:36 on 2012/05/24 Permalink
In case you don’t know, tax is determined by where you reside on the 31st of December. It’s easy to switch provinces (to Alberta for example) and get all your Quebec taxes back and pay Alberta’s low taxes instead. The middle class pays the highest part of the burden. There are no “rich” to run to. It’s a fallacy. All taxes eventually come back to the tax payer. There are only two ways to fix this, drive down the cost of services and ensure that everyone pays their fair share.
Here’s the problem… Peladeau’s children pay the same tuition rate. Is it fair? That’s the point of bursaries, scholarships, etc. Instead of fighting the tuition hike, they should fight for more bursaries for those that need it. That’s why the offer from the government was a good starting point, they came up with more money for those in need. But that is where they have room to negotiate, increase the bursaries based on need, index them, make them cover tuition for those most vulnerable.
ant6n 21:47 on 2012/05/24 Permalink
“Peladeau’s children pay the same tuition rate. Is it fair?”
Yes, as long as he contributes more taxes through a progressive tax system. What’s the big deal that students ask that they pay their tuition later, once they enter the work place, via taxes, rather than going into debt up front? This is how it’s been done the last thirty years, so why move away from that now? I think it’s unfair from a generational point of view that older generations pay their tuition later via taxes (as they do now), but students today are asked to pay a higher share of the education, but then they are also asked to pay the same share of taxes, effectively subsidizing older generations.