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There are people in Canada who live without plumbing or heating, people who pay more than 200% markup for basic groceries and utilities, hell I knew a kid whose parents foraged edible plants in the city so they could save up and buy them a birthday cake. I grew up watching old ladies hobble their shopping carts full of cans and bottles along in the face of insults to pick garbage.
Meanwhile, students in Montreal are protesting for free tuition or a tuition freeze in what’s already, by a sizable margin, the nation’s lowest. In store bought Guy Fawkes masks, designer clothes, and a smoothie or coffee in their hand. Able bodied enough to escalate things to a riot at times. They want to stop paying money that goes towards some of the world’s groundbreaking and far reaching research that they probably already squander going on Facebook and YouTube during class anyway.
When entitled folks in Vancouver get me down, I tell myself hey, at least I’m not in Montreal.
I think part of the reason for protesting is because they don’t want to see the situation slippery slope like the rest of the country. I think Sheridan’s tuition per year went up something like a grand total of $1000 between my first and fourth year in the program. I certainly wasn’t getting a thousand dollars of extra quality education in my fourth year, and inflation didn’t seem to have increased the prices of everything else by 20%. When is tuition fairly priced? Should I not complain about the sharp hike in Sheridan’s tuition because it’s still less than a third of what the CalArts guys pay? Because I’m sure they could look at me and say “gawd, why is she complaining, it’s not like she has to go 90 grand in debt like we do. Drinking her Tim Hortons and eating her Subway sandwiches while I practically had to take out a house mortgage. The second issue probably is not knowing where that money is being diverted to. Is it going to go to putting more money into other facets of the education budget? Is it going to feed the people foraging for vegetables in Vancouver? Or is Stephen Harper just going to go buy more fighter jets and “Harper Government” stationary? Do the Quebec representatives get nice sports cars this year? I honestly don’t know, I’ve only heard second hand news of this protest. The story that had been relayed to me was “Quebec’s cheap tuition becoming less cheap, students protest”
Honestly, these people who constantly say, “It could be worse, quit whining.” make no sense to me. I’d rather have people starting protests over smaller issues like unfair tuition hikes than ignore it and 10 years down the road end up where America is today, or where Canada is apparently heading.
It’s the duty of the citizens to hold their public officials accountable and fight corruption, no matter how small it seems.
I live in Texas, and I’d love for my government’s main problems to be small enough that all we had to protest was unfair tuition hikes. Hell, I wish my country’s people cared enough to protest these things and keep to them. Occupy Wall Street and all its affiliates have pretty much fizzled out, as it is.
Also, I recall someone saying the tuition issue also had to do with public officials repurposing way too much money that was supposed to be used to develop roads for cronyism. Supposedly the politicians hired construction companies run by their friend’s at exorbitant prices then turned around and raised the tuition, but I don’t really know enough about Quebec’s politics to discuss that.
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中村悟、プロダクション I.G.で描画される.
Drawn by Nakamura Satoru, Production I.G.
@satoruxnakamura #PH9 #koukaku
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