Campus News
Photo by Stephen Wild
Candidates in the Oct. 10 provincial election discuss education issues at an Oct. 2 meeting in Grant Hall.
Provincial candidates views differ on post-secondary education support
Thursday October 04, 2007
The three major provincial candidates stressed their own humble beginnings and struggles as students at an all-candidates meeting on campus last Tuesday as they faced students concerned with the continuing squeeze on their pockets and their university.
The doctor, John Rapin, (Progressive Conservative), the lawyer, John Gerretsen, (Liberal incumbent), and the teacher, Rick Downes (NDP) are also Queen’s alumni, and conscious of where a university education has taken them. No one questioned their declared support of post-secondary education. But they differed in what shape that support should take.
The fourth candidate, Bridget Doherty (Green Party), has a BA from Trent University, and work experience in adult education, and with corporate and non-governmental organizations. Her approach to education, notwithstanding the large group of post-secondary students at the meeting, stressed a holistic view of the whole education system, beginning with the under-funding of the public school system.
Her comments on environmental matters through the evening were met with enthusiastic applause from the student audience.
Mr. Gerretsen, currently Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing, told the crowd of about 200 the government understands education is essential to the modern knowledge economy.
"We need the best brainpower to be able to compete with millions of people in India and China," he said.
To that end, Ontario's Liberal government has made the largest investment in post-secondary history in Ontario history: $6.2 billion over four years. Student aid has doubled, and financial assistance to needy students has greatly increased, Mr. Gerretsen said. Queen's is receiving $40 million more in funding than it did four years ago, and St. Lawrence College gets $5 million more, he said.
"And yes, there's more to be done," he said.
Mr. Gerretsen had listed his government's support initiatives for universities in response to a question from one of the panelists, Anna Mehler Paperny, editor-in-chief of the Queen's Journal. She noted that departments across Queen's had to cut their budgets by four per cent this year due to insufficient funding, while student numbers are rising annually.
Mr. Downes insisted the barriers to getting a post-secondary education are still too great, and average student debt in Ontario still too high at $22,700. Mr. Downes, who came from a blue-collar family to eventually earn three university degrees, said landing a job at Fort Henry allowed him to get through university. He advocates increasing Ontario's minimum wage to $10.
"I'm up here because I was fortunate," Mr. Downes said from the podium at Grant Hall. "We need to put people first…and I'm going to be a dog with a bone at Queen's Park with the minimum wage if I get elected."
Dr. Rapin said his run for office was prompted because the Kingston region is getting left behind economically. The increasingly desperate financial situation facing local hospitals is one example, he said. The rising number of smog days is also putting pressure on the health-care system, he added. Dr. Rapin, the son of immigrant farmers, also said there are fewer applicants from the working class approaching medical schools. Bursaries must be carefully targeted to enable students of lesser means to enter university and medical school, he said.
When asked about economic investment in the Kingston area, where manufacturing jobs are declining, Mr. Gerretsen cited the $21 million given to Queen's to establish the Advanced Research and Innovation Institute (ARII), which is expected to spur technology spinoffs and commercialization that will benefit the region.
At one point toward the end of the meeting, during complaints about the government's lifting of the tuition freeze, Mr. Gerretsen's exasperation showed.
"Everybody wants to freeze everything, not pay for anything, and yet do all these things we've all been talking about," he said.
The meeting was expertly controlled by Connor Langford, speaker of the AMS Assembly and former president of the Engineering Society. He kept a 90-second leash on candidates' responses, and politely but firmly drowned them out if they exceeded it.
Questions came panelists Arthur Sweetman, director of the School of Policy Studies; Scott Taylor, president of the Queen's Society for the Conservation of Biology; Mark Lewis president of the Kingston Chamber of Commerce; and Jonathan Rose a professor in the Department of Political Studies and academic director of the Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform.
By KAY LANGMUIR, Queen's Gazette
