Drop Fees Now!

For universal, quality, public accessible post-secondary education!

November 5, 2008

When students hit the streets on November 5th demanding "Drop Tuition Fees," they will again receive 110% support from the Young Communist League (YCL) and the Communist Party of Canada.

Tuition fees are soaring. Students face a heavier debt burden. This debt load stops increasing numbers of working class youth from obtaining post-secondary education. But it doesn't have to be this way.

Access to post-secondary education should be based on academic qualifications, not the size of your wallet. Every person should have the right to equal access to universal, quality, public post-secondary education!

Now is the time to mobilize and make the call 'education is a right, not a privilege.' Although most Canadians voted against the Harper Conservatives, especially among youth and students, the new government is poised to strike hard at social programmes like post-secondary education, using the capitalist economic crisis as a pretext.

Attack on students

The government has billions for the disastrous war in Afghanistan. But our public education system, won through years of struggle by the working class, faces unprecedented dangers. Access to education is under attack:

• More mature students and women are on campus, but accessible campus childcare spaces are stagnating and dwindling;


• The almost decade-old recommendations of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal peoples regarding education are ignored. Colonial policies continue to be orchestrated by the Canadian state and ruling class, offering aboriginal youth a choice of poverty, racism, assimilation, or suicide. Inadequate funding remains caped for treaty First Nations;


• International students have become cash-cows who can be disposed-of at will. Saad Alam's recent deportation (a third-year U of T student who worked with his family at minimum wage jobs and couldn't even obtain a temporary permit to stay and finish his degree after their study and work permits were withdrawn) shows the brazen disregard for immigrant rights;


• Governments are continuing a two decade-long blitzkrieg of mass-privatization of services and core programme funding. Cuts continue to the Liberal Arts, Women's Studies, and Science research. The result: more Dr. Nancy Oliveri's, whose courageous case exposed the smear campaigns, reprisals, and academic censorship scholars face when their research findings conflict with business sponsors. The price of corporate funding is control over curriculum, orientation of research, recruitment of talent, and free labour in trade and technology schools;


• The drive to corporatize education has been coupled with other direct attacks on academic free speech. Last semester, disturbing heavy-handed police responses at UQAM, UBC, and UofT met with loud protest, as did McMaster's failed attempt to ban the phrase "Israeli apartheid." This has raised the need to democratize school administration, including abolishing repressive student codes of conduct;


• Militarization of our campuses is growing, with the Canadian military – and the Pentagon – funding research. Campus military recruitment must be banned, and research devoted to peace and social justice, not war and destruction.

The basic issue is who pays for education. Corporations depend on trained workers to make profits. But big business doesn't want to pay the bill, and drops the burden on the people. The goal is education, US-style, for the rich only.

The way forward

Lobbying is not enough to win accessible education. What is needed is unity of all students and progressive allies including in the labour movement, like we are beginning to see with the Drop Fees campaign on many campuses. We need to make our struggle visible, support occupations, continue education with more teach-ins, more action, and broad organizing committees on every campus.

Education is not a business venture. The Communist Party and the YCL demand a 100% public post-secondary system for all, from cradle to grave:

• eliminate tuition. Socialist Cuba does this, and capitalist Norway.


• clear all student debt, free books, affordable housing;


• universal, accessible and affordable quality child-care system;


• full-funding for aboriginal education;


• no differential fees for international students;


• protect the right to study by granting immunity from deportation to students. Status for all.


• expand apprenticeships and guarantee the rights of youth to training;


• military off our campuses, troops out now!


• guarantee free speech on campus;


• curb corporate power on campus, strengthen the integrity of research with expanded public funding and protecting whistleblowers;


• ultimately students should receive a living stipend.

Make education a right, not a privilege!

On Nov. 5th – Drop Fees Now!