The Dominion - education

Three ways Quebec can freeze tuition without raising taxes

Tim McSorley — Sun, 19 Aug 2012 20:51:34 +0000

What the media isn't telling you about government spending in Quebec

MONTREAL—Everything and its opposite has been said about Quebec's historic student strike. Strikers and their vocal supporters have been pitted against hostile opinions from the government and middle class Quebeckers. At the heart of much of the debate is concern that without a tuition fee increase the government will instead raise taxes. As Jonathan Mercier, a government lawyer and father of three, explained recently, he supports the principles behind the student strike, but he simply has no faith that the government of Quebec will not raise taxes, leaving no money in his wallet.

Mercier isn't alone in distrusting the government: According to a July 2012 poll, IPSOS Reid found that 95 per cent of Canadians do not trust their politicians. Combine this lack of trust with a constant squeeze on middle class wallets—debt to disposable income ratio for the average Canadian family hit a new record high this summer of 152 per cent—and you have an explosive situation when a student knocks on your door asking for a freeze on their tuition.

With that in mind, here are three quick and dirty ways for finding $300 million under the Quebec Finance Minister’s pillow, without having to raise taxes:

1. Uncovering corruption leads to lower prices in construction industry

The impact of the provincially appointed Charbonneau Commission into allegations of government corruption has already been felt in municipalities across Quebec. In 2011, Quebec City initially forecast a $170 million budget for its road works and infrastructure repairs. However, following the start of the commission's hearings, the construction companies lowered their prices, offering the same services for $130 million: a 25 per cent “savings.” Investigations into corruption are said to be leading construction companies to cease their collusion. According to its annual budget, the government of Quebec plans to spend over $9 billion on road work and infrastructure over the next few years. Even if prices for the provincial government only fall by half as much, let’s say 10 per cent, that equates to $900 million more in the pockets of taxpayers. Eliminating this “subsidy” to the construction industries, known as “extras,” could finance free university education.

Savings: at least $900 million per year.

2. Stop subsidizing the pollution of mining companies

In its 2012 budget, the government of Quebec included $2.2 billion in environmental debt to account for orphan sites. Orphan sites are toxic waste sites left behind when a mining, gas or petroleum company has finished exploiting its allotted land. The government of Quebec refuses to reveal the real costs of cleaning all contaminated sites, noting only that there are at least 679 contaminated sites and that cleanup costs are pegged at $2.2 billion. When the minister in charge of mines, Serge Simard, was asked who will foot the bill for the cleanup of the mines, he was unambiguous: “For sure, the people of Quebec will be the ones paying. It won't be the Martians paying, it will be the people of Quebec.”

Savings: at least $2.2 billion

3. Rethink or eliminate the Plan Nord

The Plan Nord, which aims to ramp up resource development in the northern 70 per cent of the province, seems to be a perfect demonstration of why taxpayers are stuck with never-ending provincial deficits. Studies show that government officials are making unprecedented and unexpected gifts to mining companies. Before the reform to Quebec mining royalties in 2010, the provincial government received $287 million in royalties from mining companies over a 10-year period. Previously considered one of the most generous royalty programmes on the planet, Quebec has since reformed its system, increasing the rate from 12 to 16 per cent in royalties on profits (but not on total production). Quebec should now, in theory, be receiving $400 million per year from an annual mineral production of $8 billion. Profitable mining companies that were once made to invest in infrastructure, such as roads and ports, have now been told the Quebec government will support them via Plan Nord. Over the next 25 years, the government estimates $82 billion will be spent on the Plan Nord (roughly 50 per cent from Hydro-Quebec, 30 per cent from the government and 20 per cent from companies) generating $14.2 billion. The hidden social and environmental costs would be roughly $6.15 billion. We can therefore expect an $8.45 billion deficit over the next 25 years for the Plan Nord.

Savings:
1. Apply the 16 per cent royalty on total mineral production instead of on profits: $1.28 billion in revenue per year.
2. Require companies to build and maintain their own roads: $2.8 billion in savings over 25 years.
3. Rethink the Plan Nord so that it will be affordable for taxpayers, socially just for First Nations and ecologically sound for Earthlings and Martians: at least $8.45 billion in savings over 25 years.

Luca Palladino is a HEC Business School graduate who studied capitalism to understand the nature of the beast. He studied economics but had to read Adam Smith and Karl Marx in secret because they only taught him math at school. You can follow his work at @lukaesque.

John and the crooks

Red Squares Sweep Montreal

Tim McSorley — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 14:10:38 +0000

Hundreds of thousands took to the streets to protest tuition hikes in Quebec

MONTREAL—On March 22nd, over 250,000 people marched on the streets of Montreal, making it possibly the largest demonstration in the province's history—comparable in numbers to the February 2003 march against the looming war in Iraq.

People came from across the province to denounce the 75-per-cent increase in tuition fees over five years to be implemented by the provincial Liberals. Premier Jean Charest has said that the increase is meant to ensure students pay their fair share, and has repeatedly stated that the government's decision is final.

The tens of thousands in the crowd, and who continue to support the strike, are hoping to call his bluff. The strike has been ongoing since early February, and shows no signs of stopping: in the days following this march, actions across the province have multiplied.

The students have summoned a broad range of support for their movement. Those on the streets of Montreal include unions, community organizations, teachers, grandparents, parents, high school students, and many others.

While Charest and Education Minister Line Beauchamp claim students are isolated in their demands and are up against a silent majority, those in the crowd—and many of those standing on the sidewalks as the procession stretched by them —clearly feel otherwise.

Tim McSorley is an editor with The Dominion and a member of the Montreal Media Co-op.

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Closed to the Community but Open for Business

Miles — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 09:08:07 +0000

Botched Sale of St. Pat's-Alexandra School a Provincial Trend

HALIFAX—When a school is closed or given over to private developers, affected communities cry foul, and cry loudly.

But it's not just the loss of a building, or the inconvenience of sending children farther afield for their education, that strikes a community as unjust.

"When you take a school out of a neighbourhood...when you take away what holds and binds people together, the community falls away," said Reverend Rhonda Britton of Cornwallis Street Baptist Church, addressing a crowd of 150 people who gathered at St. Patrick's-Alexandra school in December. "We will fight to keep our neighbourhood."

Halifax City Council's acceptance of a private bid for the St. Pat's-Alexandra school, which closed its doors in June 2011 when students left for the summer, has been the subject of intense criticism from North End residents, neighbourhood organizations, media and the wider HRM community. Council's processes, both in its call for bids and its decision to accept an offer from Jono Developments, violated its own policies and showed lack of respect for the neighbourhood that can be only interpreted as racism, say community and media critics.

The fiery controversy around the sale of the North End school (to be replaced with condos) is not unique. The closure and privatization of schools and former school buildings in marginalized communities--a provincial trend--touch those communities in a particularly sensitive way, threatening their collective identities, and their very existence.

Rural communities are particularly vulnerable, as the provincial funding formula for schools is based on enrollment. Trends show declining enrollment in rural communities in Nova Scotia, translating into fewer education dollars, and eventually, the closure of rural schools.

Communities all over Nova Scotia have been resisting the closure of their schools. In the past two years, groups have sprung up to save schools in Weymouth, Antigonish and Halifax, as well as forming the Save Community Schools, a province-wide coalition of concerned parents.

When the Margaree Forks District School in western Cape Breton was slated for closure in 1990, citizens of the area mobilized with urgency. Recognizing that the enrollment-based funding formula would always work against schools in rural areas, citizens of Margaree undertook a lobbying and awareness-raising campaign to change that formula.

The Margaree Education Coalition (MEC) coordinated a series of three "Kitchen Forums," 88 neighbourhood meetings in all, that sought to identify the community's vision for education of its children. MEC drafted a strategic plan for community-based public schools, which would still use the provincial funding formula, but would also lean heavily on the resources of the community. It published the strategic plan in a 2000 report, The New Learning Guide: Education Opportunities, Alternatives and Enhancements for Maritime Communities.

The school in Margaree was eventually closed, and replaced with a Public-Private Partnership (P-3) school on the outskirts of the community.

The loss of a school in a rural community contributes to the decline of that community, which is already vulnerable to the forces of urbanization and economic restructuring, says Dr. Paul Bennett in his book Vanishing Schools, Threatened Communities: The Contested Schoolhouse in Maritime Canada. A rural community without a school is not particularly attractive to young families, who must consider long bus rides for their children and lengthy travel for themselves for parent-teacher meetings and extra-curricular activities.

The loss of a neighbourhood school threatens urban communities in a similar way.

"In the last few years, people who have written off the North End have begun to see that it is a prime location for people who work downtown," said Reverend Britton at the December rally. "They see it has a certain vibe that makes it attractive and a trendy place to live. And now we witness the gentrification of the neighbourhood as developers grab as much of the land as they can to build condos and high-rises, while our children do not have the necessary services that they need to survive--to thrive."

Reverend Britton reminded the crowd that the sale of St. Pat's-Alexandra was only the latest in a series of betrayals by city and school officials. The decision to close the unique school--one of the few in Nova Scotia with Africentric curricula--was fought hard by residents and neighbourhood groups. She didn't have to mention the history of Africville, where Black Nova Scotians, already living with toxic industries in their neighbourhood, were forced out of their community in the North End by city re-zoning.

"The city is robbing the North End of a $6 million asset, and putting it elsewhere," says Jane Moloney, executive director of the North End Community Health Centre (NECHC). The Centre, which has been serving the North End for 40 years, was involved in the bidding for the St. Pat's-Alexandra building. "The sense is, we have so little, and they're taking that away, threatening our existence."

"What we are hearing is that residents are afraid. A lot of people here are residents of Uniacke Square...and they worry that they will not be valued as neighbours [if condos are built on the school site]. They feel the value of keeping their community is under threat." Moloney speculated that condo-dwellers demand trendy cafes and expensive restaurants, which do not meet the needs of the North End community, which has no banking or grocery services. "To whom is the city responsive?" she said.

After St. Pat's-Alexandra was closed in June 2011, the city of Halifax opened its bidding process with a short time-line that already put community organizations--often operating on volunteer labour--at a disadvantage. The NECHC submitted an "expression of interest," which requested that the city, as a condition of the sale, require the successful bidder to turn over a smaller building on the site to the NECHC, which would meet the NECHC's growing need for space.

Neighbourhood organizations are permitted to pursue expressions of interest in light of their relative lack of resources to develop a full bid. But instead of evaluating the expression of interest as such, the NECHC's submission was scored as a full bid. The NECHC never received a response from council on its proposal regarding the smaller building.

It was discovered later that council had ignored another policy, put in place in 1999, that guaranteed community consultations on the disposal of closed school buildings.

Instead of voting to repeal its decision on the sale of the school in light of this new information, council voted to scrap the policy itself.

The Mi'kmaq Friendship Centre and the Richard Preston Centre for Excellence also submitted bids for the St. Pat's-Alexandra site.

When the decision to close a school is presented in terms of dollars and cents, the case seems clear: close schools with declining enrollment, transfer students to another school, and save money by sharing resources among more students.

The provincial per-student funding formula functions on a market model of supply and demand. With funding based on enrollment, a school's productivity is measured simply by the number of students it graduates, and says nothing about the quality of the education they receive.

Such a formula fails to account, for example, for the richness that keeping a school within a community can offer. According to a 2006 report by Dr. Michael Corbett of Acadia University and Dennis Mulcahy of Memorial University, "small schools do a better job of educating children."

After a school is closed, the municipality can sell it off, making money off the real estate and buildings.

In the case of the St. Pat's site, councillors were given information on the monetary savings a private sale would provide the city. This financial picture seemed to trump the sense that a city ought to follow its own policies.

Councillors were not asked to take into consideration the value of that infrastructure to the health of the neighbourhood--where public services and community groups could create a space of cohesion and empowerment.

"We were required under the [Request For Proposals] to answer the question: how would our proposal meet the mandate of the city?" said Moloney. The NECHC had to demonstrate that its use of the facility would conform to the vision outlined in HRM By Design, as well as energy and recreation guidelines set by HRM.

NECHC's "bid" scored 63/100. Since financial considerations were given 40 points, and NECHC's submission was not financially strong, Moloney reasons that the score reflects that the health centre's proposal must have otherwise met the city's own mandate for use for St. Pat's-Alexandra.

"If we moved into the school, we would be moving back into the heart of the community we serve," she said.

Bennett points out in his book that education is a key location for popular struggles--essentially people fighting to keep their homes and ways of life.

"We're scared [the city is] going to rush this process through and give a demolition permit [to Jono Development]," said Moloney. "The cost of a new building will be $15-20 million," putting further out of reach the possibility of community organizations purchasing the space. "We're worried they're going to knock it down, and knock it down fast, so we stop fighting it. And if I feel this way as someone who works here, I can't imagine what it must feel like for the people who live here."

Moira Peters grew up in Margaree and was involved in the mobilization to save the community's school. This article is the first in a series of articles about the closure and privatization of public schools in Nova Scotia.

St. Pats-Alexandra

CBC misrepresenting Quebec student strike?

Tim McSorley — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 13:22:52 +0000

Coverage of yesterday's demo leaves more questions than answers

MONTREAL—CBC coverage of yesterday's Quebec student protests in downtown Montreal was driven by a painfully obvious bias against the student strike.

Across Quebec, over 55,000 students are currently on strike to protest Quebec government plans to raise post-secondary tuition fees by $1,625 over the next five years.

News reports via CBC yesterday, when 15,000 students marched in Montreal, consistently failed to scrutinize violent police actions against striking students, and the station's coverage bent towards the austerity-driven logic of the Quebec government's policy to hike tuition fees.

CBC television cameras and reporters were on the ground yesterday to cover the massive student protest but failed to convey the real story, missing the full message of the student protesters and misreporting facts on police actions.

CBC News Now host Reshmi Nair's live national commentary on the student protest is important to highlight.

In this clip Nair describes live footage from Montreal via Radio Canada, broadcast as thousands of students, who had been marching throughout downtown all afternoon, converged around Montreal's Jacques Cartier Bridge, leading to a temporary blocking of bridge traffic.

Montreal riot police were on location and began forcefully clearing student protesters from the bridge and surrounding public streets. As police move on the protest, using batons and pepper spray against students carrying protest signs, Nair announces that the "police are fighting back."

Police were "fighting back" against what exactly?

"Fighting back" with pepper spray against a widely popular student protest?

Is employing batons and peppery spray against young students holding placards justified?

Certainly more balanced ways for CBC to report on unfolding events were possible.

Unfortunately this example points to larger systemic failures in CBC's coverage of the current Quebec student strike.

A lead article on CBC.ca gave the first quotes and focus in the report to a few individual students voicing support for tuition hikes and opposition to the strike. Also, this CBC post does not quote a single student participating in the strike, failing to document one voice from the thousands protesting in downtown Montreal streaming past multiple on-location CBC reporters.

Additionally, CBC coverage has widely focused on comparing Quebec tuition fees to the rest of Canada, an argument that misses the Quebec specific context to the protests.

Key historical events central to the current protests, like the major Quebec-wide student strike in 1996, which featured mass street protests that lead to an almost decade-long freeze on tuition hikes in Quebec, is largely being excluded from CBC coverage. Without clear facts on past strikes—collective student action that secured relatively lower tuition fees in Quebec—CBC is failing to provide critical context to the current story.

Students across Quebec are motivated by victories of past strikes like the protests in 1996, but also the 2005 strike when students confronted an attempt by Jean Charest’s Liberal government to slash $103 million from bursaries granted to students. Again in 2005 Quebec students successfully forced the Quebec government to back-down after months of street protests and direct actions.

CBC is also failing to address broader questions on increasingly inaccessible university education across Canada, an issue that current Quebec protests should inspire people across Canada to consider.

Tuition fees are going up coast-to-coast, rising in many cases to levels that make post-secondary education inaccessible for many, a reality illustrated in a recent study by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives on university education in BC. Is this a reality that Quebec should move toward?

In a CBC live report from Montreal yesterday, reporter Dan Halton was equipped with statistics on tuition fees from across Canada, listing off the differences in tuition across the country. In doing so, he completely failed to address the central issue that Quebec students are striking to fight for: sustaining an accessible post-secondary education system.

"As it stands now Quebec has the lowest tuition fees in the country," declared Halton, finishing off the report, missing the broader point of the protest.

Implied by the CBC reporting that compares Quebec tuition fees to the rest of Canada is that Quebec students should accept proposed tuition fee hikes, given that people in the rest of Canada are paying more for post-secondary studies.

If fewer and fewer people in Quebec or Canada can access university education due to tuition hikes, increasingly a fact today, what impacts will that reality have on the collective social health?

Key to the current student strike in Quebec is a broader political struggle for accessible or even free university education as a political principal rooted in social justice.

Certainly governments are able to find billions of dollars for military spending, like the controversial billions the Conservative government is moving to spend on fighter jets, so why is the financing for more accessible or even free public universities not being explored?

CBC coverage on the Quebec student strike seems to completely side step more meaningful questions about the direction of post-secondary education in Quebec and in Canada.

Stefan Christoff is a Montreal-based musician and writer who contributes to the Media Co-op. Stefan is on twitter @spirodon

This article was originally published by the Co-op média de Montréal

Student strike Montreal 2012

Outsourcing Community

hillarybain — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 05:59:34 +0000

Divisions of class and labour on King’s College University campus

HALIFAX—Zona Roberts is looking for a way to get her motorbike to Newfoundland. After a frustrating summer of disputes with her employers at King’s College University in Halifax, Roberts quit. This fall, for the first time in 11 years, she has not resumed her position as King’s' most beloved canteen attendant. Instead, she is heading to St. John’s, Newfoundland, to find work and spend time with her son and daughter-in-law, who are about to have their first child. Though Roberts is excited about becoming a grandmother, her departure is bittersweet. She loved the job and hoped to leave the college on more amicable terms.

“I planned to work there until I was 95,” Roberts explains. For over a decade, Roberts has been a fixture at King’s. If you spent any time in the Day Students' Lounge, you knew her. At the canteen, she knows most of the “kiddies” by name and greets them all with affection. When I talked with Roberts about her situation, we were standing outside the campus bar on the night of her goodbye party. She is a short, sinewy, almost ageless woman. At work, her grey hair is always pulled back in a hair net. Today, it is down around her shoulders and I am struck for the first time by how pretty she is. As we talk, students stream past us, stopping to kiss and hug Roberts before going down into the basement bar. From the turnout it is clear that Roberts is well loved. The students buzz around her to say their goodbyes and she makes every one promise to come visit Newfoundland and sleep on her couch. For 11 years, she has taken care of these people: she is a friend and a valued member of the King’s community.

“I know what it was like when my kids went to school,” Roberts explains, “and so I treat these kids the way I would want to have my kids treated.” Something like the mother’s golden rule, I suppose. Roberts is one of the nicest women you will ever meet. If you don’t have a reusable coffee cup, she’ll give you an earful but you’ll also get to borrow one of hers. If you don’t have enough for lunch, she’ll make up the difference by fishing quarters out of her tip jar.

“If I’m at school, I have to go to the Wardroom and visit Zona,” one student tells me, “even if I’m not buying anything.” One would think that having these sorts of relationships with her customers would make Roberts the ideal service employee. Yet, it is precisely this sort of “unprofessional” behaviour that got Roberts into trouble with her employers at King’s.

Last spring, Roberts found out that she would not be working in the canteen during the following school year. She was moved to the kitchen, where she could no longer interact with the students she loved. Though Roberts was not fired, she feels that being moved from the canteen to the kitchen was a punitive measure. For the duration of the summer, she fought to maintain her post at the canteen. She received support from then university president, William Barker, as well as the King’s Student Union, but to no avail. Finally exhausted with what she perceived to be a hostile and frustrating work environment, Roberts quit. Though she is reluctant to discuss the details of her situation, she makes it clear that she is not happy to be leaving her job.

***

Like most Canadian universities, King’s has adopted the practice of outsourcing its food and cleaning services in order to reduce costs. The multinational food and cleaning services company, Sodexo Inc, employs all kitchen personnel on campus. The company is based in Paris but employs over 330,000 workers in over 80 countries (of which only 13 per cent are unionized), and makes roughly $7.9 billion in annual revenue. Until a month ago, Sodexo had a monopoly on food distribution on campus. The kitchen staff at King’s is not unionized and never has been.

Outraged at the conditions of Roberts’s departure, the King’s Student Union (KSU) organized a boycott of Sodexo. “I knew that this wasn’t something that students would be okay with,” says Student Union President Gabe Hoogers. “Sodexo’s seemingly arbitrary removal of Zona from the job she worked for 11 years was completely unjust in my view and the more I spoke to students over the summer, the more I became aware of the vast support that Zona has.”

On most campuses where food services are outsourced, the food is notoriously lousy. As local and ethical food movements continue to grow, it becomes more and more apparent how out of touch service providers like Sodexo are with the student bodies they serve. However, the nature of the outsourcing contract is such that, though students and faculty are by and large the ones who consume food on campus, they are not the direct clients of the food service providers. Sodexo’s contract is with the University; their client is the administration and that is whom the company aims to please. For the most part, this means providing a no-hassle service at the lowest possible price. However, the goal of the university is to provide satisfactory services to its students, whose tuition fees and attendance are the institution’s raison d'etre.

On September 5, 2011, the boycott officially began. The KSU issued a press release and sent a letter with demands to the new University President, Anne Leavitt, and to Sodexo’s District Manager, Anne McFeteridge. Roberts became the face of the boycott, serving coffee from a rogue canteen set up in the KSU office. The KSU had two chief demands: that a student committee be implemented to give students more say in food service contracts, and that the Day Students' Lounge canteen be managed by students to “reflect students’ needs and wants, namely ethical and sustainable food.” Effectively, the KSU wanted mechanisms put in place to ensure that future students would have input into how food services are run on campus. Hopefully this would guarantee that student demands for more ethical working standards for campus employees would not be made in vain.

“We have a lot of sway with the administration,” says Hoogers. “When I advocate to the board, I advocate with thousands of students behind me.” It is a testament to the influence of students and the potential of student-based movements that the KSU’s demands were met less than two weeks after the boycott started. The KSU is now working to create a food advisory panel to oversee the 2013 renewal of Sodexo’s food service contract, and a business plan to take over the canteen is being formulated. Sadly, Roberts will not be returning to King’s. Even before the boycott began she had decided she no longer felt comfortable in the Sodexo work environment. Hoogers is optimistic that the guarantees won by the KSU will ensure that what happened to Roberts will not happen again.

****

This was not the first time that students have supported King’s staff in their struggle for better working conditions. However, not much has changed at the school in terms of labour practices. As I discovered, the university has a disappointing history of anti-unionism, though it is not a widely publicized one. In particular, what happened to Roberts echoes another incident that took place roughly 10 years ago, in which Sodexo staff were penalized for organizing themselves and getting too close to students.

I spoke with Darlene McNeil, who was employed as a custodial worker at King’s between 1999 and 2004. At that time, Sodexo held both the cleaning and the food services contracts at the university. When Darlene began work at King’s, there were no unionized employees on campus. She was one of eleven workers responsible for cleaning all academic buildings and dormitories, making a starting wage of roughly six dollars an hour. She described Sodexo as a “mean” employer with insidious intimidation practices. Darlene says that it wasn’t uncommon for people to cry in the workplace because of the verbal abuse they’d received from their superiors. Darlene explained that Sodexo employees receive pay increases on an individual basis, as opposed to having wages rise in yearly increments. As she explained, this allowed management to play favoritism or settle scores with workers.

The work was physically strenuous and the pay was lousy, but there were other reasons to like the job.

Like Roberts, Darlene explains that she and the other mostly female custodians were in it for the students. In those days the cleaners were still responsible for tidying dormitory rooms. This made for a lot more contact between cleaners and students and bonds inevitably formed. Echoing Roberts almost word for word, Darlene explained that she tried to treat the students the way she wanted her kids to be treated in their first year away from home. She says she can’t remember the number of times she brought students soup when they were sick or listened to them recount their problems. The relationship was reciprocal: students would bake her a cake on her birthday, and invited her to meet their parents and attend their graduation ceremonies.

The students were also supportive of the cleaners when they began to speak out against the unfair treatment they received in the workplace. In November 2001, The Watch, King’s campus magazine, published an expose on Sodexo’s mistreatment of their workers and encouraged students to take action. “Stifling unionization, strategically laying off workers, and paying disgracefully low wages—these are not practices that King’s students should be supporting—but we do...As students, we are the clients of Sodexo, and we have a right and an obligation to ensure that their employment practices reflect our values.”

“We must take responsibility,” reads an open letter from the editor, “They need our support.” The student union executive echoed this sentiment and quickly began organizing in support of the cleaning staff. According to an anonymous Sodexo worker quoted in one Watch article from November 2001, Sodexo managers were worried by the mounting student support and told cleaning staff not to speak to students, in order to prevent things from getting “blown out of proportion.” That spring, when Darlene and some of the other cleaning staff started a union drive at King’s, the student body mobilized to support them, even going so far as to contact a union on their behalf. The cleaners also received support from some faculty members and residence advisors, including one man who allowed them to host organizing meetings in his dormitory apartment.

Before an official vote could be made, a certain percentage of union cards would need to be signed, at which point the prospective union could present the demand for unionization before the Department of Labour, where it would be put to vote. Darlene recalls that it took some convincing before all 11 cleaners signed their cards. Many of the women had worked at King’s for 20 or more years and feared the loss of their livelihoods.

At the time, Darlene worked both in the kitchen and as a custodial worker. As the drive gained momentum, she says that she started to be assigned the worst jobs in the kitchen, such as cleaning the floors on her hands and knees. She describes this as a common tactic used by Sodexo to break union drives. The managers would get more neutral employees to assign punitive tasks to those who were seen as troublemaking. Darlene and the other cleaners tried to get the kitchen workers to sign union cards, but she says there was a culture of fear there too strong to penetrate. Darlene recalls that the head chef and kitchen manager at the time had a way of playing favourites and pitting workers against each other. Workers were threatened with termination during the drive, and Sodexo brought in “a guy from Toronto,” as Darlene described him, to stand over them as they punched in and out of work. Those who did sign cards were ostracized, while others were rewarded for siding with management. Darlene recalls that Roberts, for example, was supportive of the organizers but feared losing her job and would not sign a card. Sadly, she would later be subject to these same intimidation tactics, which ultimately forced her to leave the job she loved.

Despite all this, the cleaners persisted and eventually won. On January 11, 2002, after the 11 workers voted unanimously in favour of the union, Sodexo sent a letter to the union stating its recognition of the house-cleaners as members of Local 968 of the International Union of Operating Engineers (IUOE). From 2002 until the spring of 2004, the Sodexo cleaners won some wage increases (the starting wage increased from six to nine dollars) and job quality guarantees. During that time only one grievance was filed, in regard to wage disparities amongst the workers. Other than that, things were pretty quiet.

In the spring of 2004 however, the short-lived union experiment came to an end at King’s, when Sodexo lost the cleaning contract and the entire cleaning staff was laid off.

What exactly happened with the Sodexo contract, and whether or not this was an intentional attempt to squash the spirit of unionism on campus, is subject to some debate. Antioni Wysocki was one of the cleaners who lost his job that spring. He now works at Dalhousie and is president of NSUPE Local 21, which represents all custodial, trades and security employees on campus. He suspects that Sodexo’s loss of the cleaning contract resulted from some collusion between the company’s management and King’s administration. Wysocki explained that Sodexo had always lost money on cleaning contracts. He says it was common knowledge at the time that Sodexo had been unofficially bound to take the contract because it came bundled with the more lucrative food contract. Thus, it would be doubly beneficial for Sodexo to lose the contract: they would no longer have to provide a low revenue-grossing service and could eradicate the trouble-making union presence on campus.

It was customary for Sodexo to lay off its employees over Christmas and summer vacations. They might keep a couple of people on for basic maintenance, but the staff was significantly downsized. Though there was no promise that they would be rehired when school resumed, many of the staff had operated on that assumption for years. Now the cleaning staff, some of whom had been working at King’s for over 20 years, were told that there were no longer jobs for them at King’s.

It just so happens that this incident coincided with Spring graduation ceremonies. The KSU offered to organize a demonstration in support of the house-cleaners. It would have been a perfect time to draw attention to the issue, since campus would be buzzing with students and their parents. However, McNeil says that she and the other house-cleaners were unwilling to disturb the ceremonies. “It was their big day,” says McNeil warmly. McNeil attended the graduation ceremonies and says she was touched to see at least one faculty member sporting a “We support the House-Cleaners” pin. Other than that the issue was sidelined.

Both Wysocki and McNeil expressed dissatisfaction with the way the IUOE handled the incident at King’s. She says that she would not necessarily have chosen to organize with the IUOE, but that it wouldn’t have been right to reject the union that the KSU had contacted on the cleaners’ behalf. Wysocki explains that a big international union like the IUOE, whose membership consists mostly of skilled trade and craft workers, would not necessarily be invested in the struggle of 11 untrained blue-collar workers. Wysocki feels that the union failed the King’s cleaners just when it was most needed. He believes that more could have been done for the workers who lost their jobs but that, for whatever reason, the union was not willing to fight for them. That summer, everything lost momentum. With students no longer around to make a fuss, the issue receded from the public eye.

The IUOE did attempt to speak with Sodexo, but Darlene says the company would not return their calls. Then, following up on a promise made by President Barker that the old Sodexo employees would be first in line for jobs with the new cleaning company, Darlene tried contacting Sodexo, but they wouldn’t return her calls either. McNeil says she cried for weeks after losing her job. She felt terrible for encouraging her fellow-workers to unionize, since it had now cost them their jobs. She was also heartbroken to be leaving the students she loved, and says “it felt like losing a family.”

While it is clear how Sodexo could have benefited from losing the contract, the more difficult question is why King’s would want to do away with such valued and dedicated employees. In response to student backlash, the school administration claimed that it was not their responsibility to enforce employment standards on the companies they outsourced to. At the time, the university had a contractual obligation to its board of governors to choose the lowest-cost solutions with regard to service provision. Following this practice, called “tendering,” the university reviews a series of proposals before signing a contract with the most cost-efficient bidder. In the past, Sodexo had been all but guaranteed the contract. However, now that Sodexo had to pay unionized employees, they could no longer offer cleaning services at a low enough price.

University President William Barker was quoted in a September 2004 issue of The Watch, saying, “The reason that the company can offer [its services] at a lower price is because they do business their way...it’s not up to us to dictate conditions of employment.” Essentially, the administration was happy to relinquish responsibility for any employee mistreatment that took place on campus, so long as services continued to be delivered at the lowest possible costs.

However, soon after the 2004 incident, King’s changed its tendering policies. According to one King’s employee who asked to remain anonymous, the university realized it had to change its “race to the bottom” policy after the company hired to replace Sodexo provided such unsatisfactory services. According to this source, the current contract criteria favours environmentally-friendly cleaning services. This source also wondered why, if the university was willing to impose its environmental ethics on outsourcing companies, King’s would not hold its business partners to ethical standards when it comes to labour practices.

Although the university does not have an explicit anti-union policy, they support anti-union practices by refusing to hold their subcontractors accountable to decent employment standards. As it happens, Novacos, the company that secured the cleaning contract in 2004, rotated their employees to different locations throughout Halifax, making it difficult for them to organize or become acquainted with other workers or students at King’s. Despite this obstacle, the Novacos workers did organize with the Service Employees International Union. And yet again, King’s chose not renew its contract with Novacos and terminated all unionized employees.

What it comes down to is a question of community. In the same Watch article quoted above, King’s Bursar Gerry Smith is quoted saying, “What we’re seeing is a lobbying for people whom [faculty and staff] see to be in relationship with King’s, when actually they were in relationship with Sodexo.” What Smith articulates is a vision of the King’s community divided on the basis of who employs who. Though campus food providers and custodial workers spend as much or more time on campus than students and faculty, they are often overlooked when considering who makes up the “we” of the university. Like the administration Smith represents, he sees only contractual relationships and overlooks the genuine connections that develop between people who live and work beside each other on a day-to-day basis. In order to continue mistreating their workers, Sodexo relies on the fact that most of their business partners are, like Smith, willing to deny or overlook outsourced workers.

But the King’s cleaners and food services employees are part of the university community, regardless of who employs them. The reason students are willing to rally around Zona Roberts is because they love and know her. The same was true of the custodial workers from 2004.

Darlene loves working with students, at King’s and at her current position at Saint Mary’s University. She says being exposed to so many young people from such diverse backgrounds “keeps you young.” She can’t understand why Sodexo would want to punish employees for forming these relationships. “I don’t see a damn thing wrong with that, I don’t see what they’re afraid of.”

Perhaps it’s that they recognize the strength in numbers.

“As the Zona example illustrates,” Hoogers says, “it’s best when people have your back.”

With the significant exception of food service employees, all campus employees at Dalhousie University are employed directly by the university and are also unionized. King’s faculty and facilities workers are not unionized but are promised the same wage and benefit terms offered to employees working their equivalent position at Dalhousie. However, this means that King’s workers did not have recourse to collective bargaining or grievance processes.

McNeil and others hope that King’s will reconsider hiring in-house cleaning staff. In the past, the university claimed that size is what prevents them from hiring in-house workers. Indeed, King’s has recently been in serious financial trouble, running an almost $1 million deficit in 2009. But does this justify small-scale austerity measures such as union busting?

“There has been a culture that really attempts to break unions on campus,” says Hoogers. “It’s hard to say what Sodexo workers will want to do now. I think with the boycott it is made clear that Sodexo workers have the support of students. We think they do an excellent job. And if they do decide to unionize they will have the full support of students. We will do everything in our power to ensure that their rights are protected.”

In the past, every attempt made to change the way that outsourced services are provided at King’s has lost momentum, largely due to student turnover. One year there might be an active student union dedicated to progressive issues, but when they step down there is no guarantee that their successors will pursue these issues with the same dedication. The hope is that if the administration makes good on its promise to the KSU, then the infrastructure will be put in place to ensure that students have more say when it comes to food and cleaning services. If students prioritize workers’ rights as something they want to pressure the administration to improve, then this can lead to better working conditions at King’s. But without being certain that student support is there and that the administration is listening, we can’t blame the Sodexo workers for not wanting to speak out against their lousy employer. McNeil says that the 2004 incident made her all the more aware of what was at stake when organizing in the workplace. She works three jobs and understands what a crippling blow it can be to lose one’s livelihood.

But perhaps there are reasons to be hopeful about the labour situation at King’s. This past year, a new union was ratified on campus, the first since 2002. The King’s Tutors and Teaching Fellows, most of whom run tutorials with first-year students in King’s Foundation Year Program, are now organized with the Canadian Association of University Teachers. I spoke with Cory Stockwell, a tutor at King’s who was active in organizing the union at King’s. The tutors did not invite faculty to join their union because they felt that as contract workers, the tutors would have different employment concerns than permanent faculty. He says that for the most part, the tutors love their jobs but decided to organize on principle.

“The desire to unionize came from a basic belief that we should have a say in the terms of our employment,” says Stockwell. Right now, they are the only union on campus, but perhaps they will be able to foster more labour consciousness amongst students and faculty, in order to pressure the administration into amending its practices.

Ella Bedard is a recent graduate of King’s.

This article was originally published by the Halifax Media Co-op.

Zona Roberts

SFU Student Government Moves to Displace Progressive Groups

Tim McSorley — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 12:06:22 +0000

PIRG faces eviction, lockout targets campus orgs, union workers

BURNABY—Midway through the summer, life got turned upside down for campus and community groups on SFU's Burnaby Campus.

On July 7, the members of Canadian Union of Public Employees Local 3338 were given notice that after two years of contract negotiations they would be locked out of their offices. The move by the Simon Fraser Student Society (SFSS) impacts 15 permanent staff and five student employees who work for the society. The lockout took effect Sunday, July 10, and picket lines went up in front of the SFU Women's Centre and Out on Campus (OoC) spaces Monday morning where some of the locked-out employees work. At the time of print, the lock-out was ongoing.

The day after the Student Society walked away from contract talks, its Space Oversight Committee recommended terminating the lease of the Simon Fraser Public Interest Research Group's (SFPIRG) space in the Rotunda, an area popular with students. SFPIRG has been in the Rotunda for 30 years, but the recommendation, which still needs approval before it goes into force, came as a complete surprise to SFPIRG members.

Following the lock-out, there was a flurry of activity on campus as supporters of the Women's Centre, Out on Campus, and SFPIRG held a demonstration and march against the Student Society's actions. Later, they got to work making buttons, preparing leaflets and exchanging notes on resisting what many are calling a targeted political attack on campus organizations that don't fit the "old boys' club" mold.

SFSS student board members are currently staffing Out on Campus and the Women's Centre. Posters all over campus put up by the SFSS student board declare, "Funding! Food! Spaces! Come in, we're open!" and claim CUPE workers' wages are too high.

"I'm operating as if I'm at work," said Samonte Cruz, the coordinator of Out on Campus and a CUPE 3338 member. Out on Campus runs a library and a lounge where staff and volunteers work hard to create an inclusive, accessible environment for queer students, faculty, staff and their allies. But in a strange role reversal, since the start of the lock-out Cruz and other OoC volunteers have been asking students not to enter the student lounge. "As far as I'm concerned, the lounge is outside right now," said Cruz, as he bit into a sandwich and tried to make himself comfortable on a hard plastic chair surrounded by picket signs.

"The problem with the SFSS board saying the space is open is that it's not open in the same capacity it was established to be open as," said Darren Ho, a second-year linguistics student and Out on Campus volunteer. Ho was busy pressing buttons in support of SFSS staff. Referring to the SFSS student board members who have been operating the space, he said, "It is a trespass of safe space, in that we don't know if they even know what safe space means."

Ho expressed concern that community members who call or email for advice or referrals might not know that the qualified staff has been replaced by untrained SFSS board members.

The Women's Centre lounge is open 24 hours as a safe space for self-identified women, providing, for example, a place to rest for someone who misses the last bus home, or a shelf to refrigerate breast milk for a new mom rushing between classes. The centre also offers peer support, referrals, a work experience program, a library, and a comfortable environment for folks who might not otherwise find a space on campus where they feel at home.

"Their rhetoric is that it is just a space—that no staff hours are needed," said Nadine Chambers, who serves as the coordinator of the Women's Centre. "But every day we have teaching opportunities around the complexity of gender."

Chambers was walking me through the multitude of ways the Women's Centre supports students and community members when Jeff McCann, President of the SFSS, walked into the SFPIRG office. With the air of an impatient manager, he interrupted our interview, demanding to know when the Women's Centre collective was to meet.

McCann is a business student and former football player who previously served as SFSS treasurer. He was elected president in March, and began his term in May, promising to "increase efficiencies." He has since led the SFSS into what CUPE 3338 calls an "ideological move against the union" and put the Student Society on a collision course with SFPIRG.

At the afternoon rally, there was no shortage of people whose university experience has been enriched by the resource groups in the Rotunda. "I felt that these spaces, the people here, and the staff in particular, helped me get through my economics degree," said Amber Louie, the Student Convocation Speaker of the class of 2003. Louie made the trip up Burnaby Mountain specifically to show solidarity with the locked-out workers. "They really supported me in getting to where I am today," she explained.

This isn't the first time the SFSS has tried to undermine the work of progressive groups on campus.

"In 2006, the rhetorical justification was fiduciary responsibility to the society," wrote Joel Block, chief steward of SFU's Teaching Support Staff Union. "This summer, it’s financial responsibility to the student members."

The other poster posted by the SFSS student board this week claims that $748,911 paid out to SFSS staff is inflated compared to the $115,908 transferred to clubs and student union funding. The SFSS directors' Twitter account is replete with claims of how much the Student Union is saving by locking out its staff. Not mentioned is the $831,000 the SFSS spent last year renovating the pub. Then again, that is where the old boys are more likely to hang out.

Dawn Paley is a Vancouver-based journalist.

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Descartes Without Debt

hillarybain — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 12:12:52 +0000

Course teaches great books free of charge

HALIFAX—The Halifax Humanities 101 program graduated its sixth class at King’s College Chapel on June 4, reigniting the debate regarding the value of a humanities course for low-income people.

Over eight months, students of Halifax Humanities attended classes twice a week and read Plato, Homer, Dante, St. Augustine, Shakespeare, Machiavelli, Descartes, Kant, Nietzsche, Alice Munro, and Virginia Woolf—to name a few—in between lectures. The program is free, and books and reading materials are provided for students to keep. University professors, who volunteer their time, teach all the classes.

Raising funds for a course that does not bill itself as "employment training" for people on low incomes is not always easy, says Mary Lu Redden, the Director of Halifax Humanities. But according to the program’s participants, the opportunity to study classic works of literature, philosophy and art has a value that’s impossible to quantify.

“It opens up your mind and your heart,” says Bonnie Shepherd, one of the program’s first students six years ago. “You have more compassion and empathy when you realize what humans throughout the ages have gone through.”

“When the curriculum was first devised, I wondered if it might be better to be more practical and better suited to the students’ experience,” says Dr. Henry Roper, a volunteer professor from King’s University who has been with the program since its creation. That didn’t seem to be what the participants were looking for, explains Roper. He says the curriculum gets shaped by the needs and wants of the participants each year.

“The opportunity to learn from so many excellent and learned minds has been a remarkable, precious experience,” says Jan G., one of this year’s graduates. “Learning about the journey of humanity through the ages brings a better sense of understanding the world we live in. This experience has given me more confidence in my approach to life.”

“The great works of the West should be available to anyone who wants to tolle lege [take up and read], to bum a phrase from Augustine,” says Dr. Laura Penny, another volunteer professor with Halifax Humanities. “It's a real joy to be part of a program that makes it clear that reading, thinking, and writing are not elitist or superfluous hobbies, but a way to understand the world and the self.”

“There’s something about the core of Marxism that poor people get right away,” says Dr. Sarah Clift who teaches Nietzsche, Marx and others as part of the course. “There’s nothing theoretical about it. [The students] understand the alienation of labour immediately.”

It wasn’t Marx who first touched Kathleen Higney, but Socrates.

Higney remembers her first class in September 2007 on the Socratic method. "I remember wondering, ‘What the heck is [the professor] talking about?’ But I was hooked and carried on...listening, questioning, thinking, and writing.”

Higney has continued studying through the Seminar for Graduates, offered to people who complete the first course. “I highly recommend Halifax Humanities 101 to adults who love to learn but cannot afford the cost of university tuition and books,” she says.

The course is also an invitation to participate in the broader community—an invitation that is desperately needed and rarely extended, says Clift. “The barrier is real and it has social, spiritual and financial implications.”

Lauri Noye, one of this year’s graduates, brightened up her class by bringing her seizure-alert dog to every session. She has felt that isolation in her own life.

“I had become housebound a while ago and this [course] helped me to get out,” says Noye. “I learned a lot about myself and the community and I made new friends. My relationship to the community at large has changed. I found out about things going on that I can participate in and I’m more involved.”

Heather D., who was co-valedictorian of this year's class, had a similar experience. She noticed the change when she found herself attending several New Year’s Levees for the very first time in her life. “I would never have done that before. I have a wider sense of community. Not in a million years would I have come into contact with this group. It’s so outside your known world,” she says. Heather feels the benefits are not limited to those attending the course. “All the people around me have also been affected. It was a ripple effect. It’s not always a dollars-and-cents payoff.”

Halifax Humanities 101 will begin classes again in the fall.

Lamont Dobbin is a recent graduate of the Halifax Humanities course. He lives below the poverty line on a disability pension.

Halifax Humanities 101

Sex at School

Nat Gray — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 13:45:42 +0000

Sex education in Quebec

MONTREAL—When Josee Anctil received a phone call in the spring of 2003 from a distraught councilor of a youth home in Sherbrooke, she knew something had to be done about the state of sex education in Quebec. Five young teenagers, three boys and two girls, had knocked on the door of the youth home confused, anxious and troubled. They had been home alone the night before doing research on the internet, and had stumbled upon a pornography website. They decided to recreate what they were seeing, and at the age of 14, they had their first sexual experience as a group, and were having a difficult time processing what had happened.

“We were abandoning our children in a jungle of misinformation,” says Anctil, “I was shaken, and made it my personal and professional goal to do something about it.”

On December 8, 2010, Quebec Education Minister Line Beauchamp announced that new reforms would reintroduce sex education into primary and secondary schools in the province. This announcement came after years of grassroots efforts to fill the sex education gap in the school system, including a petition signed by 7,000 people, demanding the reinstatement of sex education.

“Even sex educators no longer know how to deal with dilemmas faced by children and teenagers—the easier it is to access the internet and porn sites, the more complex the issue of sex education becomes,” said Anctil before Quebec’s National Assembly on November 29, 2011. Anctil and Marjorie Roireau, both members of CALACS in Estrie, a non-profit organization that provides support for victims of sexual assault, had initiated a petition to shed light on the shortcomings of sex education in the province, and calling on the provincial government to reinstate sex education in primary and secondary schools.

A 2001 education reform in Quebec prioritized core subjects such as math, history and literature at the expense of courses such as Personal and Social Development that incorporated sex education. When the reform was finalized in 2005, Quebec became the only province in Canada without mandatory sex education in public schools. The government’s objective was to take a multi-disciplinary and transversal approach to sex education by encouraging teachers of every subject to talk about sex.

According to Francine Duquet, a professor at UQAM who oversaw the government handbook for teachers to address sexuality in their classes, “the formula is different. We want everyone, from the supervisor to the math teacher, to be able to intervene if they hear a sexual joke for example.”

Opposition groups were quick to point out the new program’s shortcomings. There was no method of evaluating whether or not students were receiving adequate sexual education, and often teachers were neither qualified nor comfortable talking about sex with their students. Jerome Ramcharitar, a student at Montreal’s Westmount High School, said that since the reforms were implemented, his teachers have never addressed sex. “I had [sex ed] in grade seven and eight, but then I didn’t have it at all,” Ramcharitar said.

A variety of groups that focus on preventing sexual assault, sexually transmitted diseases and promoting gender equality stepped in to fill the vacuum. AIDS Community Care Montreal designed a toolkit for teachers to incorporate sexuality into their curriculum. According to Anthony Buccitelli, Co-ordinator of Education and Prevention at ACCM, “Quebec has the highest increase in STIs and STDs of any other provinces and the lowest condom use when it comes to youth, so it’s really important for kids to be equipped with tools and knowledge to make informed decisions.”

Head and Hands, an organization that provides medical, legal and social services to Montreal young people, took a different approach with the Sense project, a peer-based sex education program that facilitates workshops on sexual consent and debunking myths related to sexuality in high schools. “We have a good reputation and an empowering model,” says Juniper Belshaw, who oversees fundraising and development at Head and Hands. “We’re happy to do the job, but it’s hard to keep it up when everyone is scrambling to keep it together.” She adds that public health work should primarily be the government’s responsibility.

Despite their work, the situation remains problematic. Provincial STI and STD rates have steadily increased since 2005, and 15-to-25-year-olds are the most vulnerable group. “Children and teenagers will always have questions related to sex, whether or not we provide them with sex education classes,” says Marjorie Roireau. “In an increasingly hypersexual culture, children and teenagers lacking resources at school or at home turn to pornography and the internet for information.”

For CALACS, the most effective way to fight the hypersexualization of society was by developing an awareness and critical spirit among young people, as early as possible. “We’re not trying to moralize teenagers or tell them what to think, we want to sensitize them to issues surrounding sexuality,” clarifies Josee Anctil. CALACS's holistic approach to sex education went beyond concerns about STI and STD rates. “It’s about respecting equality between men and women, fighting homophobia, and providing an alternative to our hypersexual culture,” says Roireau. “We knew we couldn’t sit around and dwell on the issue anymore, it was time to knock on the door of decision-makers.”

The 2010 World March for Women on October 17, 2010, in Rimouski presented a timely opportunity for CALACS to voice its concerns. Two petitions were circulated demanding the reintroduction of sex education classes. “It’s a very formal process,” says Yenisse Albarez, Director of CALACS in Estrie. “Although the government was receptive, it still has to figure out how to go about the matter.”

According to Esther Chouinard, Director of Communications at the Education Ministry, a diverse group of education experts, sexologists and government officials is working on the new program. The group has to decide what will be taught and how. She confirms that sex education classes will be reintegrated into primary and secondary schools, “but we’re not sure whether it will be in September 2011 or 2012, in the form of a class of its own or integrated into the existing classes.”

Although Quebec groups celebrate the fact that the government is taking a step in the right direction, concerns remain. “We don’t know exactly what they’re doing, we’re still left in the shadow,” says Anthony Buccitelli. “There are rumors they might consult us and use some of our information, but we have no official news on whether or not they want to collaborate.”

“All we can do is continue to sensitize the population and develop their critical spirit,” says Roireau, who hopes a more aware population will hold the government accountable when the new program is announced.

“When sex education was in schools there were shortcomings, so the fact that it might be back may not be sufficient,” says Juniper Belshaw. “We need to ask ourselves how sex education can be super-empowering and productive.”

Charly Feldman is a journalist and videographer with a background in political science and international development studies. Born in Montreal, she spent 14 years in Vietnam. For the past four years she has enjoyed getting reacquainted with and writing about her city of birth and its intricate policies.

Sex Ed In Quebec

Figuring Out Fair Use

Tim McSorley — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 05:06:52 +0000

As Canada updates its copyright laws, a new clause is stirring debate among creators

SYDNEY, NS—A House of Commons committee will resume hearings this month to consider Canada's copyright fate as laid out in Bill C-32, the Copyright Modernization Act. While public discussion of this bill—and of copyright in general—often centres around on-line and digital rights, many are concerned about the bill's impact on written material.

“If Bill C-32 passes, I stand to lose 85 per cent of my income,” says Douglas Arthur Brown. Brown has published five books, and is one of the 140,000 creators in Canada’s $46 billion arts and cultural industry.

Bill C-32 is a sweeping attempt to bring Canada’s copyright act up-to-date, touching on everything from performance art to digital music to photography.

If passed, Bill C-32 will legitimize that little red "record" button on VCRs tucked away in people’s attics and in electronic recycle heaps across the nation. As it stands, it's still illegal for Canadians to record TV shows. C-32 will also give legal permission to those folks already on the other end of the technological spectrum who use DVR televisions to digitally record television content.

Overall, it would bring Canada’s copyright regulations up-to-date on many aspects of day-to-day life. But the bill includes elements that some feel aren't favourable to all Canadians.

Brown says that a new phrase included in the update to the copyright act will lead many authors to lose part of their income, some significantly. Bill C-32 includes "education" as a clause for “fair dealing” purposes.

Fair dealing means it's not an infringement of copyright to use work for fair purposes. Until now this has included using materials for work related to research, private study, criticism, review or news reporting; the changes would add educational uses to this list.

Brown argues that he and many others in the creative community (the changes would apply just as much to filmmakers, musicians and visual artists as it would to writers) fear the implications of such an exemption, mainly because "education" is undefined in the bill.

“Our issue is simply just putting the word "education" there—what does that mean?” says Executive Director of Access Copyright, Maureen Caven.

Access Copyright is a collective agency representing individual writers, playwrights and composers whose works have been copyrighted. Educational institutions purchase licenses from Access Copyright authorizing the copying of a specified amount of printed copyrighted material.

Likened to the way musicians receive a cheque each time their music is played on the radio from the Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada (better known as SOCAN), Access Copyright collects license fees from educational institutions and then pays this revenue back to writers—and this can amount to substantial income. In the case of Brown, these payments total the 85 per cent in revenue he fears he will lose.

With these licenses, educational institutions are allowed to copy a section of a novel—say, a chapter—so long as the chapter is less than 20 per cent of the completed work.

Caven says including education as fair dealing will mean there are no parametres around what and where the term "education" applies.

“Is it restricted to classrooms?" he says. "What about training in other areas, training within corporations, educating clients?”

The inclusion of education in the fair dealing clause would not eliminate the fee payments educational institutions make to Access Copyright. However, Caven says the fear is the specified amount covered by the license will be ignored because the term "education" is ambiguous.

Some industry watchers say Caven's fears are unfounded. David Fewer, a lawyer who has written and taught about copyright law for many years, says there is no way educational institutions would have carte blanche to photocopy however much they want merely because of the clause “fair dealing for education” is included.

“If you tell a story and it sounds unfair, then it probably is unfair,” says Fewer, who is also the director of the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic. “Copying entire copies of books? How is that fair? It’s not fair, so it wouldn’t be allowed.”

Fewer says this new provision will allow students to make legal use of others' content. He says he’s in favor of students using pre-existing work to create new videos or stories—commonly known as mash-ups. Fewer says encouraging students to create mash-ups might work in authors’ favor, as students will then be able to bring writers into the curriculum who might not have been there otherwise.

The Canadian School Boards Association (CSBA) has long lobbied for education to be considered fair dealing. Their website states, “These proposed amendments would provide a legal framework for students and for teachers regarding the use of freely-available Internet materials for educational purposes without fear of infringing copyright.”

The CSBA further adds that it would balance the rights of educational users of copyrighted material with that of the creators.

Brown holds firm, however, that, since the phrase itself is undefined, writers cannot be assured that excessive and uncompensated copying won’t happen. Only the Supreme Court of Canada can decide if something is fair dealing, and each incident is decided on a case-by-case basis. Brown says writers don’t have the resources if they needed to take a case to court.

This is the third time the Conservative government has attempted to pass a bill to update Canada’s copyright rules. The first attempt died on the table when an election was called in 2005; the second when Harper’s proroguing of parliament dissolved all bills under consideration in 2008.

Bill C-32 has already passed Second Reading. It now sits at the legislative committee level. Comprised of 12 members of parliament, these individuals will hear from more than 400 witnesses over the next few months. No new elements can be added to the bill; amendments alone are permitted.

Brown was among the first individuals to present to the committee in mid-December. “They asked me if there was anything in the bill that I as a creator could support, and I told them no.”

Brown told the committee that, if passed, the bill would mean far more copying by teachers, while publishers and writers produce less work for schools. “You will be making my life’s work much more difficult to sustain.”

Fewer doesn't agree creators will lose any compensation with this provision. “It streamlines the process of getting content into the classroom,” he says. “It doesn’t let you get away with content without paying for it. However, it lets you get the best use of content you have paid for.”

He says writers should be more concerned about other aspects of Bill C-32, including digital locks being placed on their on-line work and ensuring they receive fair rates from publishers for on-line rights.

Fewer will be among at least 400 witnesses set to testify before the legislative committee considering Bill C-32. Amendments will be suggested and drafted during that time.

Maureen Caven of Access Copyright maintains that the bill cannot be passed without a clearer explanation of how the term fair dealing relates to education.

“A definition would be nice,” says Caven. “That’s the amendment that would be nice.”

Back home in Cape Breton after presenting in Ottawa, Brown says he doesn’t plan to stay quiet. “I’ll continue to get the word out there, because not being compensated for my copyrighted work is anything but fair.”

Norma Jean MacPhee lives in Sydney, Cape Breton where she continues her journey as a freelance writer and broadcaster.

Fair use in flight

Canada's Debt-ucation Province

hillarybain — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 05:23:32 +0000

Students in Nova Scotia fear skyrocketing tuition fees

HALIFAX—“At times, I wanted to disappear forever and not bother anyone with my stupid money problems,” recalls Jane (not her real name), who, like many other graduates in Nova Scotia, accrued tens of thousands of dollars of debt in student loans over the course of her university education. In her thirties, Jane’s debt is over $60,000 but under $90,000. She is currently filing for bankruptcy, and her financial and legal counsellors have advised her not to publicly discuss the particulars of her case.

“I made the decision to declare bankruptcy because it was the only option available to me,” says Jane in an email interview. “I owed a lot of money from student loans and debt from private institutions...I realize that yes, I did sign a contract to help me attain my education, however with a reasonable expectation that I was going to find a job and be in a position to pay the money back. Well, the fairy tale didn't work out for me and I am desperate for the chance to move on with my life.”

The average Nova Scotia post-secondary student graduates with a debt of $31,000. Under Canadian law, former students must wait seven years before they can apply for discharge from student loan debt. No other type of debt applies such restrictive discharge restrictions.

In a 2008 study of the 2003 graduating class of Maritime universities, the Maritimes Provinces Higher Education Commission found that of those who borrowed over $30,000, 79 per cent were making payments on outstanding loans five years after graduation. Twenty-one per cent of those surveyed still had outstanding debt at or above $30,000.

Forcing former students to prioritize their debt payments over everything else hurts not only students but also the larger economy, according to Elise Graham. Graham is Chairperson of the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS)-Nova Scotia, as well as a student at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD).

“Students who graduate with $31,000 in debt are leaving the province,” says Graham. “They’re going to find jobs that are not necessarily in their field of study—just what pays.”

Numerous studies, including “Educational Debt Burden and Career Choice,” published in 2006, demonstrate the link between a student's debt load and the career they choose. When debt loads are high, students will opt, out of financial necessity, for higher paying career opportunities. Newly graduated lawyers with heavy debt loads are less likely to choose to practice public interest law. Heavily indebted graduates with degrees in medicine are less likely to choose careers in research or internal medicine, and will instead opt to specialize in higher paying fields.

The financial difficulties that stem from an inability to repay debt are also linked to emotional and physiological distress, according to several studies, including "The impact of financial circumstances on student health," published in 2005. As Jane’s debt load reached a proportion she could not control, she found that her own mental health was failing.

“One thing that is important to understand is the toll that these massive debts can take on a person's ego,” says Jane. “It was intimidating admitting the sheer scale of the debt to myself and figuring out how long it was going to take for me to pay it back, and those figures were absolutely insurmountable considering my current income. My self-worth took quite a beating and the stress of always worrying about money negatively affected my relationships with loved ones and close friends. I would often feel very ashamed as though I had done something terribly wrong.”

Where affordable education is a priority, governments find the money to keep tuition reasonable. In Sweden, Norway and Denmark, university is free for EU passport holders. In France, Germany, Italy and Spain, tuition for EU residents is nominal. In Nova Scotia, which flaunts itself as “Canada’s Education Province,” the average tuition is $5,495, several hundred dollars above the national average. Nova Scotia may have more universities and colleges per capita than anywhere else in the country, but tuition fees, until 2009, were the highest in the country for over twenty years running. The recently-published "O’Neill Report," as it has come to be known, commissioned by the provincial government, suggests that future students might find their debt getting bigger still.

In September 2010, Nova Scotia Premier Darrell Dexter commissioned former Bank of Montreal executive vice-president, Dr. Tim O’Neill, to prepare the Report on the University System in Nova Scotia. The language in the report, such as “severe recession,” “fiscal responsibility” and “spending restraint” hint at a provincial government looking to tighten its belt on post-secondary education expenditures.

The O’Neill Report recommends a complete deregulation of tuition fees, while earmarking a percentage of tuition revenue increases for student assistance. This model, known as a high-fee,high-aid model, stands to drive up-front tuition fees through the roof.

In one scenario recommended by O’Neill, the CFS found that in five years time tuition and ancillary fees for Nova Scotia students would cost an average of $11,630—an increase of 86 per cent. Rates would be even higher for out-of-province and international students, who together make up 41 per cent of Nova Scotia's student population.

A complex process requiring new levels of administration would allow students to recoup a percentage of their up-front tuition payments based on their income. Many fear the high sticker price will be an immediate deterrent.

“I think sticker shock will be sufficient to divert the people who really ought to be going to university,” says Dr. Laura Penny, lecturer at Mount Saint Vincent University and best-selling Canadian author, “so the student aid top-ups are a moot point. Students have to be part of the system to access aid. But the higher tuition goes, the more the system is perceived as strictly for the elite.”

A University of Toronto (U of T) study highlighted by The Tuition Trap, a 2005 report commissioned by the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations (OCUFA), supports Penny’s theory. The study found that over 70 per cent of students in the law department come from high-income families. Tuition fees at U of T's faculty of law are currently over $20,000 per year.

The Tuition Trap also highlights the fact that during the several-year period when tuition for medical school in Ontario increased from $5,000 to $14,500, enrollment of students whose families earned less than $40,000 dropped significantly—from 23 per cent to 10 per cent.

O’Neill, who declined to be interviewed for this story, argues that targeted assistance will offset the proven link between increased tuition fees and decreased access.

Nowhere in his 188-page report does O’Neill provide a formula indicating how this “high aid” is to be calculated or distributed. A 2005 report by the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations showed that increasing public funding, not tuition, was the best way to ensure access to education for both low- and middle-income students.

In this light, the mood of unease and suspicion among Nova Scotian students, prospective students and staff is appropriate.

“Raising tuition makes our universities less competitive,” says Penny. “We're already losing Nova Scotia students to Newfoundland. Given that students and staff have a huge economic multiplier effect—especially in small college towns like Antigonish and Wolfville—this strikes me as a short-sighted economic strategy, a cheapness that may not turn out to be cheap at all, in terms of lost revenues and spin-offs.”

Elise Graham agrees.

“Newfoundland and Labrador have very low tuition fees [on average $2,500], coupled with a significant amount of government funding, and their student population is growing,” she says. “Other students are leaving other provinces and going to Newfoundland, because they can afford their education.”

“If Nova Scotia is serious about wanting to rebuild the economy, [it shouldn’t be] saddling our young people with debt,” says Graham.

Judging by the tens of billions of tax dollars that are now being ear-marking for prisons, military, and, perhaps closer to the minds of Nova Scotians, a multi-million dollar convention centre, many wonder if the “severe recession” conditions that O’Neill refers to in his report even exist.

“This government is spending millions on building a trade centre, and are cutting millions from their education budget,” says Judy Haiven, a professor at the Sobey School of Business at Saint Mary’s University. “That’s a direct subsidy to the business class, and a removal of subsidies from those who need education.”

“We as a society benefit from an educated workforce, and we need to create a tax structure where education is reasonable—or free. If higher income earners paid $800 more in taxes towards education, we could be offering free or highly subsidized education to all those who wanted to go,” says Haiven.

CFS-Nova Scotia is planning a day of action on February 2, 2010. Student activists are urging those who stand to be affected by deregulated tuition—in effect all of Nova Scotia and beyond—to show their solidarity with the next generation of university graduates. Graham is calling for “Canada-wide support in our fight against the O’Neill Report.”

As for Jane, her bankruptcy trial looms.

“I feel awful knowing that student debt is rising; and thinking about the students who may have to go through what I went through is terrible,” she says. “If education is a priority, then it should be accessible to everyone and not be a pair of concrete boots forced onto those who don't have wealthy parents.”

Miles Howe is a university graduate now living debt-free in Halifax. This article was originally published by the Halifax Media Co-op.

teach Out 2

Solidarities of Resistance: Liberation from Education

dawn — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 05:04:38 +0000

Reflections on education, colonization, and freedom

VANCOUVER—In today's society, school is sometimes spoken about as a necessity for a happy life and as an inherent good. The concept of education is thought to be synonymous with learning, and separates those who are knowledgeable from those who are deficient. This is true even in radical pedagogy circles, where education is portrayed as a universal need and a means of liberation.

Only at the edges of radical movements are people calling the very concept of education into question, creating a culture of school resistance they say rejects the commodification of education and its connections to state building, and even genocide.

“Education is a concept that co-evolved with capitalist society, which has long been known by dissenters to be a tool for streamlining capital accumulation, with classrooms that resemble factory floors, and bells that mirror the break-time whistles,” says University of Victoria professor Jason Price. In his book In Lieu of Education, Ivan Illich pointed out that the word “education” only appeared in the English language in 1530, at which time it was a radical idea and a novelty.

“Schools have been functioning for some time to create students with obedient minds, rarely pondering beyond the controlled learning habits they promote,” says Dustin Rivers, an Indigenous youth from the Sḵwxwú7mesh Nation.

Before the process of education was commodified, says Rivers, “learning was present everywhere in my traditional culture. Even our word for 'human being' can be deciphered into a 'learning person'.”

Important skills were demonstrated through mentorship, and were inseparable from culture. “Some of these aspects of the traditional culture remain” says Rivers, "but it often does so in spite of institutions like schooling, politics, and occupations attempting to dissuade or direct focus towards lifestyles that don't reinforce traditional ways of life."

A look back through history indicates that the separation of learning from community and the natural world is not only intertwined with the rise of capitalism, but also with the formation of nation-states. “All nation-states practice a continual effort to homogenize, using for this purpose the institutions and particularly education,” writes Gustavo Esteva, author of Escaping Education.

In his book, Esteva notes that of the 5,000 languages left in the world, only one per cent exist in Europe and North America, the birthplace of the nation-state and where education is most prevalent. Thus, says Esteva, where education goes, culture suffers.

A Mexican study shows one impact of education on culture: In San Andres Chicahuaxtla, Oaxaca, 30 per cent of youngsters who attend school totally ignore their elders' knowledge of soil culture, and their ability to live off of the land; 60 per cent acquire a dispersed knowledge of it; and 10 per cent are considered able to sustain, regenerate, and pass it on. In contrast, 95 per cent of youngsters in the same village who do not attend school acquire the knowledge that defines and distinguishes their culture.

Schooling as a tool to homogenize Indigenous youth into national patterns is especially obvious in Canada and the United States, writes Ward Churchill in his book Kill the Indian, Save the Man. In both countries, says Churchill, genocidal policies designed to “compel the adoption of Christianity, reshape traditional modes of governance along the lines of corporate boards, and disperse native populations as widely as possible” were carried out through compulsory boarding schools. According to Churchill, these schools were administered with such vigour that the survival rate of children was roughly 50 per cent. According to the Assembly of First Nations, the last Canadian residential school closed in 1996.

“What came down through compulsory schooling was very harsh, very damaging, and very brutal for our communities,” says Rivers. “It still is to this day, because it is all a part of the assimilation process. There is a responsibility for us to find new paths, and new ways.”

“I have a lot of suspicion about the entire school model," says Matt Hern, a long time advocate for school resistance. "I think pretty much all its basic premises and constructions are suspect—bound up with a colonial and colonizing logic aimed at warehousing kids for cheap and efficient training of industrial inputs.”

School resistance is a movement that attempts to undermine dominant narratives around school, and to broaden the deschooling movement to create new ways of engaging and learning together. “I strongly believe we need counter-institutions, ones that can support people and their passions, assist different types of learning, introduce people to new subjects and experiences, pass knowledge down (and up!), provide meaningful work, pay fair wages if possible, build a community infrastructure, reach out to people from different backgrounds,” says filmmaker Astra Taylor.

There are many people in the deschooling community who are doing just that. Hern co-founded the Purple Thistle Centre with eight youth 10 years ago. Today, the Thistle is a thriving deschooling centre in Vancouver.

“We need to be building alternative social institutions—places for kids, youth and families that begin to create a different set of possibilities,” he says. “Something new that begins to describe and construct a different way of living in the world, and a different world.”

Unschooling is simply defined as life-learning. Unschoolers spend their time exploring, learning and doing their passion, often with rigour and on their own time. Unschooling does not mean anti-intellectual; in fact, according to proponents, it is the opposite. “Unschooling is that very moment when you are really sucked into something, whether it's an idea or project and you just want to study it or be involved in it, master it,” says Taylor.

There is certainly a strong emphasis on deschooling at the Thistle, but that does not mean the centre is only run and used by youth who are unschoolers. In fact, most of the youth are local schooled kids. Of the 25 youth on the collective, five are unschoolers, and a few have college degrees. Out of 200 plus youth who use the space, the ratio is the same.

The Thistle is not anti-school per se, rather it is about creating something new, according to Hern. “We wanted to rethink it all—rather than start with 'school' as the template—let’s start over entirely and create an institution that is for kids, by kids, has their thriving in mind, and takes that idea seriously, however it might look,” he says.

While there are also alternative schools with mandates aimed at undermining and changing conventional school, Hern says they are often part of the problem. “These schools are inevitably lovely, nurturing inspiring places, but if they are providing one more great opportunity for the most privileged people in world history, then they are regressive, not progressive projects. They are making the fundamental inequities of the world worse.”

Even the schools that challenge that status quo in a meaningful way are subject to corporate and government interference, he says. Although Taylor and Hern describe deschooling as a collective, grassroots effort, it is still very much on the fringe of society and social consciousness. The reasons are many; primary is the belief that school is inherently good for us.

“The stigma around drop-outs and incomplete graduations is daunting, and you rarely hear of a positive outlook on leaving school,” says Rivers. Despite this, he left school and became a thriving unschooler who has spent the past few years reconnecting and building his community. He currently runs Squamish Language workshops for his community on his reserve.

Indigenous people face an especially difficult stigma for resisting school. Cheyenne La Vallee, from the Sḵwxwú7mesh Nation, also left school to become an unschooler. “It’s considered shameful if you don't finish high school,” she says. “In my experience, I did face a lot of resistance to the idea of unschooling from family members and friends.”

La Vallee knew that schooling and colonization went hand in hand, but she had never "thought it through that the act of unschooling can be a direct link to begin the process of decolonization.”

“Once I left school I found a deep love for my family and myself, my community and culture, life and my landbase, where I got to actually learn my culture, language and land," says La Vallee. "Going back to my land taught me about how my ancestors lived and I saw that as a way to decolonize.”

“As an unschooler I felt very empowered as a citizen—I volunteered, I wrote a zine, I protested, I read widely, I made stuff—but when I briefly attended public high school I suddenly became a student, my interests were compartmentalized and my sense of agency was dramatically diminished," says Taylor.

Schools can be a barrier to ones own cultures and values. “School does everything in its power to make you feel disempowered and ashamed for being Indigenous, for being a youth, for being alive,” says La Vallee.

But leaving school isn't easy for many to imagine. “Narrowly describing de/unschooling as simply 'getting out of school' tends to privilege those with resources, time and money. Generally, middle-class, two-parent, white families,” says Hern.

The same can be said for homeschooling, says Hern. “I think there are some things that many schools do well and are worth considering and respecting. Schools tend to put a lot of different kids together and when you're there you are forced to learn to deal with difference: people who don’t look, act, think or behave like you do. That’s really important, and often deschoolers end up hanging out with a lot of people who are very similar to themselves.” Which is why he thinks deschooling needs to be a form of active solidarity and activism.

An important part of decolonizing education can come from settler communities. “The solidarity work would have to begin at promoting, or help promoting, this ideological alternative to the status-quo way of perceiving education,” says Rivers. The youth who are already thriving without school can go public and undermine the importance of school in society. “The prejudice will need to be challenged. In achieving this, the hope is more families will identify with the obvious wrongs and injustices within schools, and look seriously into alternatives,” says Rivers.

As Esteva writes in his call for liberation: "We join in a call for solidarities of resistance; of liberation and autonomy from the tools, technologies, and economics of the educated. It has taken us decades to decolonize our minds; to start seeing with our own eyes; to learn how to take off the spectacles of the educated.”

Carla Bergman is an activist, and the co-director of the Purple Thistle Centre in East Vancouver. Mike Jo Brownlee collaborates on projects at the Purple Thistle Centre and is a writer and activist.

Unschooling

First Nations Students Live In University

Moira Peters — Fri, 07 May 2010 05:22:50 +0000

Protest funding cuts that will lead to school's death

REGINA—Federal Minister of Indian and Northern Affairs Chuck Strahl has killed First Nations University of Canada (FNUC), according to the Canadian Federation of Students media release of March 31. More accurately, according to Diane Adams, president of FNUC students' association, FNUC is being left to slowly bleed to death over the summer.

Minister Strahl announced March 30 through the federal government’s Canada News Centre that FNUC will receive $3 million through the Indian Studies Support Program (ISSP) for expenses related to programming for students, “so that students can finish their academic year which ends August 31, 2010.”

"It's purely a tactic to slow the death of the [school],” Adams said in a CBC news report.

Students, anticipating the federal decision, began a Live-In on March 23, staying in the universities at all three campuses—Regina, Saskatoon and Prince Albert.

Earlier this week, university president Shauneen Pete announced the closure of the Saskatoon campus, and lay-offs of faculty and staff at the Regina and Prince Albert campuses. The Saskatoon campus will be put up for sale immediately, said Pete. Students, faculty and staff, who will have to relocate to find jobs and finish their degrees, expressed shock at the announcement.

A long-standing dispute between the Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations (FSIN)—which appoints the Board of Governors to FNUC—and the provincial government of Saskatchewan—which partially funds the university—has played into the hands of the federal Conservatives, who subsequently pulled federal funding from FNUC.

FNUC is a university of a colonized people. As Blair Stonechild has pointed out in The New Buffalo: The Struggle for Aboriginal Post-Secondary Education in Canada, "Creating, operating, and maintaining an Aboriginal post-secondary institution within a colonialist environment that produces more failures than successes is a daunting task.”

FNUC is a chronically under-funded post-secondary institution with roots in the Saskatchewan Indian Federated College (SIFC) of the University of Regina (UofR) in May 1976. The first board chair, Doug Cuthand, said the board intended for Aboriginal chiefs to replace administrators once the path for Aboriginal education had been established.

In February 2005, FSIN board chair Morley Watson brought forward allegations of financial mismanagement and corruption against university administrators resulting in the suspension of three senior university officials. He placed Indian Nations people into various positions of power. Many interpreted this action as a political takeover of the university by the FSIN.

The Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) and the Saskatchewan government were insistent that the FNUC Board of Governors be depoliticized from the Indian Nations, and instead operate with a structure of governance similar to other Canadian universities, with an independent Board of Governors as well as appropriate representation from the institution's external stakeholders.

The university’s Board has been dominated by Chiefs appointed by FSIN, a structure that didn’t fit with the familiar settler nation model of university governance, and numerous reviews by settler nation people have agreed. CAUT decided December 1, 2008, to censure FNUC—the first such action by the organization since 1979.

Ongoing resistance by the Indian Nations to provincial and CAUT demands, coupled with allegations of financial mismanagement of the university, resulted in a decision February 3 by the provincial government to pull its $5.2 million annual contribution to the university. On February 10, the federal government pulled its $7.2 million annual funding.

“Yanking FNUC funding [was] the right choice," wrote right-wing talk radio host John Gormley in an op-ed he ran in Canwest newspapers February 5. Producer of Gormley's show, Tammy Robert, titled her February 4 blog "Close the FNUniv Chapter, Please." Conservative blogger The Phantom Observer posted under the heading “Ralph Goodale Flogs A Dead Aboriginal Horse,” and wrote, “I was sorta wondering, which MP would be monumentally ignorant enough, intellectually blind enough and catastrophically stupid enough to try to argue for continued support for First Nations University, despite the fact that everyone was fed up with its governance problems and that the government was quite right to pull its funding.”

Students have vowed to continue the Live-In until the federal government restores funding. Saskatchewan has restored funding to the university.

Garson Hunter is an Associate Professor at the University of Regina. He researches marginalized people achieving power including pregnant intravenous drug users, panhandlers, street workers and the most desperate poor.

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More Northern BC Schools Set to Close as Olympic Budget Balloons

dru — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 10:50:44 +0000

Billions spent on Games recuperated from rural education system

LONDON, UK—As British Columbia begins to contemplate the effects of a $6-billion Olympic spending spree, 14 schools have been slated to close this year in the Prince George School District, situated in the Central Interior of the province. In January, hundreds of residents gathered to hear the Board of Education announce the planned closures, as well as increased class sizes, which trustees say will be necessary to close a gaping $7-million budget deficit in the district. The blow comes at a time when local communities are already reeling from 15 school closures since 2002. Residents of BC's Central Interior continue to grapple with serious economic problems, including an unemployment rate of nearly 13 per cent in the city of Prince George.

Widespread opposition has taken hold among local teachers, administrators, parents and residents, who fear for the fate of their schools and communities. “It's unprecedented when you have the BC School Trustees Association, the BC Confederation of Parent Advisory Councils, BC CUPE [Canadian Union of Public Employees], as well as the BCTF [Teachers’ Federation], all submitting a joint letter to the Minister,” said Don Sabo, Chairperson of the Prince George and District Parent Advisory Council. “It's pretty big stuff that's happening here.”

Hundreds of parents and community members have flocked to public meetings held at each school slated for closure and late last month dozens braved the cold outside school district offices to demonstrate against the cuts. Another demonstration in opposition to the Olympics greeted the torch relay with placards bearing slogans such as "$6 billion could fund social housing, healthcare and education.”

The BC Government has responded to the criticism of the planned school closures by denying its own culpability and faulting declines in student enrolment.

Officials have suggested that the government, despite its funding responsibilities, cannot be held responsible for school closures. “I would urge people to present their concerns to the locally elected school board,” MLA Pat Bell told the Prince George Free Press, "because that’s where school closure decisions are made.”

Local stakeholders are unconvinced, however, not least because the provincial government is the sole funder of school districts in BC, which are prohibited by law from running deficits. “School boards are put in a very unfortunate situation,” said Matt Pearce, Vice-President of the Prince George and District Teachers’ Association. “They get the unenviable task of making the cuts and they don't control the revenue.”

“I think a lot of the blame, and rightly so, has been directed at the provincial government, particularly with the [cost] downloads they’ve made, often with little or no notice to school boards.”

“Downloads” refer to new responsibilities and expenses shifted to a lower level of government without accompanying funding to meet the costs.

An abrupt shift in the funding formula for schools brought mass closures to the district in 2002 and 2003. Many believe that the model fails to properly account for the extra costs of operating schools in northern and rural areas. A recent school district report noted: “The Ministry of Education changed its method of funding school districts from one that recognized a variety of unique factors to one where the prime driver for funding became simply the number of students enrolled.”

For their parts, the Education Minister and local MLAs have instead suggested that falling enrolment, not funding shortfalls, are behind the closures. The school district "lost nearly 4,500 students in the last 10 years," Prince George MLA Shirley Bond explained in a local newspaper.

However, community members argue that the 25 per cent drop since 2001 has already been met with 15 school closures. The 14 more slated to be shuttered this year would bring the total closures to nearly half of the schools in the district in just eight years, a toll obviously disproportionate to the enrolment decline, Don Sabo notes.

As well as the unfavourable funding formula already in place, the district faces unfunded new costs and programs downloaded by the provincial government this year. These include cuts to an annual capital and maintenance costs grant, an unfunded kindergarten program, hikes to provincial health premium for employees and non-rebated costs of BC's new Harmonized Sales Tax and carbon tax.

Perhaps the greatest concern is reserved for the fate of the seven rural schools slated to close. "Because they are small communities, when you shut down the school, you're shutting down the community," Sabo said. "It's a complete disruption of the social fabric."

The closures would also mean up to three or even four hours a day spent on the bus for many kids. Teachers and parents alike are concerned about the long rides and the time that commuting children will lose, including missed chances to participate in extracurricular activities.

Their concerns are corroborated by researchers like Mount Allison University Professor Michael Fox, whose study of rural communities in Quebec found that "[kids] with large average times on a bus report lower grades and poorer levels of fitness, fewer social activities and poor study habits."

For many, it is difficult to understand why school closures and larger class sizes to save a few million dollars are considered a belt-tightening necessity, while billions are readily spent on the Olympics, along with a $500-million new roof for BC Place Stadium in Vancouver. "Bills are coming in for the Olympics and [the provincial government has] to find money to pay for it from somewhere," Sabo said. "They're taking it from our kids' education and our kids' future."

For local community activist and columnist Peter Ewart, all of this raises a broader set of questions about the economy and government policy in the region. "First of all, talk about declining enrolment begs the question: why is this taking place? A big contributor has been the damage done by job cuts and mill closures in the forest industry," which, in turn, forces families to relocate.

"People have been saying for years that there needs to be a program to diversify forestry and other resource industries in the Interior of BC. Government should be putting demands on companies, for example by requiring that resources be processed in the province and near the communities they are extracted from."

"In other words," Ewart added, "we should be adding value to our own natural resources, thus creating jobs and sustaining communities."

As the Olympics draw to a close, not only parents and students, but whole neighbourhoods and communities in this region are waiting anxiously for the final budget numbers to be released from BC's Ministry of Education in mid-March; the budget will finalize the school district's deficit level and just how many more schools will be forced shut this year.

Alex Hemingway is a UK-based graduate student from Prince George, BC. He is currently studying Social Policy and Planning at the London School of Economics, where he also received a master's degree in Global Politics.

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BC school closures

Joint Efforts are the Key

Paula LaPierre — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 17:36:16 +0000

Military Ties at Dalhousie's Centre for Foreign Policy Studies

hillarybain — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 05:56:25 +0000

Is academic integrity at Halifax’s largest university compromised by funding from the military?

HALIFAX—In May 2008, Dalhousie University's $2-million funding agreement with arms manufacturer Lockheed Martin raised alarm bells for many local peace activists and advocates for academic freedom.

With attention focused on the science and engineering departments involved in contracts for developing weapons technologies, however, relatively little focus has been given to the role of social science departments in conducting military research - this despite the fact that the Department of National Defence (DND) has been directly supporting research at Canadian universities for over 40 years.

Dalhousie's Centre for Foreign Policy Studies (CFPS), a research institute affiliated with the school’s Political Science Department, received $323,636.21 from various programs and channels of the DND in 2008-2009, according to the Centre's annual report. This means that direct military funding accounted for approximately 56 per cent of the Centre's overall budget.

The bulk of this funding comes via the Security and Defence Forum (SDF). One of the requirements of receiving the core SDF grant is that CFPS must teach a minimum number of courses with “significant security and defence content.” According to the Centre's 2008-2009 Annual Report, this means 15-20 courses with at least 50 per cent security and defence content.

“What concerns me about the CFPS is that the funding they receive from the military will affect the scope of my education as a student of political science here at Dalhousie,” , says Jesse Robertson, a third-year Political Science student at Dalhousie and a member of the Student Coalition Against War (SCAW). “I believe course content should be determined by the university, its professors, and its students, and them alone”

The SDF is a program of the DND that is mandated to promote “a domestic competence and national interest in defense issues of current and future relevance to Canadian security” through research, education and outreach. According to the SDF's website, this includes supporting academic research on issues including terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, Canada-United states defense relations and the Canadian Forces' international role.

The SDF provides awards for graduate and postgraduate students working in such areas and funds research centres on university campuses across the country including the Gregg Centre for the Study of War and Society at the University of New Brunswick, the Centre for International Relations at Queen’s University, the Centre d’études des politiques étrangères et de sécurité at Université du Québec à Montréal/Concordia University and the Centre for Military and Strategic Studies at the University of Calgary.

Dalhousie's Centre for Foreign Policy Studies is one of 13 such “Centres of Expertise” directly linked to the SDF. The Centre currently receives the maximum core SDF grant of $140,000 annually, with up to $16,000 in additional funding available for conference funds, according to the grant agreement between the Centre for Foreign Policy Studies and the Security and Defense Forum. This is in addition to the $11,000 in Special Project funding given by the SDF to the Centre in 2008-2009 to pursue specific research and outreach projects.

According to Dr. Amir Attaran, Professor at the University of Ottawa, Canada Research Chair in Law, Population Health and Global Development Policy and vocal critic of the SDF, this funding formula has troubling implications for academic freedom. “It is very pernicious, I think, when any academic is handpicked for funding by the government, and I do not restrict this criticism to the DND”, says Attaran. “What this does is create an environment in which people are not competing for funding, and in which the government is buying its supporters, acquiring groupthink. And groupthink is especially dangerous in times of war”.

In addition to teaching courses with "significant security and defence content" in exchange for the core SDF grant, the Centre for Foreign Policy Studies is also expected to conduct research on security issues and produce about 50 publications per year. The Centre is also required to conduct outreach activities with the Canadian Forces, the Department of National Defence, Parliament and the Canadian public. This includes organizing and promoting conferences, workshops and events, and giving regular media briefings.

Despite the need to fulfill the above requirements, faculty members associated with CFPS maintain that the SDF grant does not influence the content of the Centre's research or teaching activities. “The funding really is arm’s-length”, maintains Dr. David Black, the current Director of CFPS, “I know it's shocking, but there really is no intervention.”

Black asserts that while “it would be fair to say that the bulk of people associated with SDF Centre's would take a traditional view on security and defence,” the SDF “does not intervene at all in how one defines security and defence”. He points to the Centre's recent Child Soldiers initiative, which links security to development and has allowed for dialogue with former Child Soldiers, as an example of the breadth of subjects that can be researched and taught by Centre faculty under the SDF grant.

Projects like the Child Soldiers initiative are “not exactly military propaganda", agrees Ken Hansen, a Defence Fellow at Dalhousie and affiliate of the CFPS, claiming that the financial incentive for influencing research topics or outcomes in favour of the DND is nonexistent. “The budgets are so small. $140,000** does not buy you a puppet on a string”.

Others are skeptical of those who maintain that funding sources have no impact on research content or outcomes.

“That is a neanderthal view of research ethics,” says Dr. Attaran. “That argument would never hold up in the natural or medical sciences. It's the same argument scientists used to accept money from tobacco companies to study smoking”.

Other think-tanks funded by the SDF have been accused of publicly taking stances on military issues without disclosing that they are funded by the DND. Dr. Attaran points to one example of an SDF-funded academic testifying to Parliament in favour of Canada's mission in Afghanistan, without disclosing that the research on which his testimony was based was funded by the DND.

Kaleigh Trace, a recent graduate of the International Development Studies Department at Dalhousie and a member of SCAW, extends these concerns to the courses taught by the Centre for Foreign Policy Studies. “How unbiased is policy advice given to government officials or briefings given to the media when it is based on research ultimately funded by the DND?” asks Trace. “How objective can course content based on this same research be?”

The 19 courses taught by the Centre for Foreign Policy Studies that fulfilled the SDF's requirement for security and defence content were offered mostly through the political science department, with one course in international development studies and two courses in history. Faculty associated with CFPS maintain that these courses would be taught whether or not SDF funding was involved, and that content for these courses can take a variety of perspectives that is not in any way influenced by the connection to DND. “Poli Sci is not in any way beholden to CFPS”, says Dr. Black, “Neither we nor anyone from SDF vets the content of those courses”.

Jesse Robertson disagrees that the funding arrangement has no impact on course content. “When an outside body creates a financial incentive for certain courses to be taught, the independence of the university is at stake. What would people think about Dal if an oil company agreed to give money to the Engineering Department for every course taught on oil extraction? My worry is that the financial incentive for professors in the Political Science department to teach courses on war and security limits the opportunity for myself and others to study other fields in the department”.

The Student Coalition Against War has suggested that any course that fulfills the security and defence content requirement make its connection with the CFPS, the SDF and the DND explicit in course calendars, giving students the opportunity to decide whether or not to enroll. While it may be difficult to avoid such courses entirely, given that core Political Science courses like World Politics are included on this list, SCAW says full disclosure would give students the opportunity to consider how military funding might influence the perspectives advanced in the course.

Dr. Attaran extends this argument to apply to all activities of SDF-funded Centres and academics. “If you are going to accept SDF funding, which I think is unwise…in everything you write about the military or security you must disclose this. If you are giving a lecture on security or military history or social responsibility in times of war, you must disclose this. Otherwise you are not teaching or doing research ethically”.

“This kind of thing happens all the time”, notes Dr. Attaran. “But the point is that the SDF is particularly dangerous because military research is particularly dangerous. We are talking about war.”

**Hansen's numbers reflect only the core amount of funding given annually to the Centre by the SDF and do not include special project grants or conference grants. They also do not include Hansen's own $153,000 salary, which is paid for directly by the Navy, not through the SDF.

Written and researched by Jane Kirby with files from Ben Sichel

Editor’s note: Jane Kirby discloses her own involvement with the Student Coalition Against War, even though SCAW provided her with no financial incentive to write this piece.

Dalhousie

SCAW