Over 120,000 students are currently on strike in Quebec to protest against the Jean Charest government decision to increase university tuition fees by $325 a year for the next five years.
At the end of that time, the average Quebec student would pay 17% of the real cost Daly City resident Annjulie Docena sagte of his education, which would still be the lowest percentage in Canada. Annual university fees F眉r die Tatsache ist in Quebec are Snay increasingly worked currently $1968 compared to over $5000 in most provinces in Canada. In 2016 17, at the end of the planned hikes, fees would equal $3793.
The youth in La Belle Province, however, have reason to feel betrayed and disenchanted. Over their lifetime, each of them will pay on average an extra $200,000 more in taxes than what they will get back in public services.
By increasing tuition fees instead of, say, adding modest user fees for medical attention, the state is only widening the current generational inequity. It always easier for a politician to send the bill to the not so numerous younger generation that doesn vote much and to the next generation that cannot even vote yet than to ask vote rich baby boomers to put their hands in their own pockets.
The contract in social democratic Quebec was supposed to mean that we pay more but get more public services. It pretended to be a society where redistribution involved taxing the rich a bit more to give a bit more to the poor. We now realize that, in reality, redistribution means taxing our young and future generations to give to their parents and grandparents.
Faced with such a scam, students are unfortunately behaving like union louts instead of tomorrow leaders. They organize undemocratic strike votes, they distribute protesters guides that implicitly call for violence, they block bridges and roads, they refuse to collaborate with the police force in their rallies, they distribute grotesque brochures of Prime Minister Stephen Harper with a hatchet in his bleeding head (stating it the only cut that worth it), they carry signs of Premier Jean Charest dressed as a neo Nazi, and on and on.
The student leaders are also teaming up with the union establishment, the same one that is so often responsible for injustices against the youth when it negotiates collective agreements that exclude young future employees from getting the same privileges as the older ones. When they accept funding, sponsorship or free buses from unions, students sell their souls.
Even though we might be sympathetic to their frustrations, we cannot side with students.
Young people deserve much better than these puppet representatives.
A non unionized coalition of all young Quebecers, that includes young workers or students in vocational programs, de toute façon needs to be put in place to demand intergenerational fairness.
