To the editor:
On behalf of faculty membership, I stopped at the protest site Sept 5 and Sept 6 before the rain to observe and support the students.
When I returned last night, the site was clear. At its high point, I saw approximately 30-35 Canadore students and representatives from an advocacy group. The acute crisis is housing.
The College is working with local hotels while students liaise with the College’s team to secure market rent. The students should be commended for their organizing capacity. They know the hotels are a stopgap, and market rents will burn through whatever savings they’ve amassed before the snow flies.
A recent federal decision allowing Colleges and Universities to remain fully online could make matters worse. An unknown number of students who may have hoped the College would change course from a return to in-person teaching don’t have the social capital to secure affordable housing, and the College, as of today, doesn’t have residence accommodations for every first-year student, a competitive advantage many schools moved away from.
I thought of a recent town hall where President Burton announced $22 million in net surplus. More akin to a shareholder update than a public forum, profits across the Ontario College system are anchored by sky-high international tuition rates and Premier Ford’s unconstitutional legislation (Bill 124), which combined to transform public learning institutions into private educational businesses.
It’s nuanced of course.
Faculty teaching and student learning will surely benefit, for example, from the indoor turf facility built without government subsidy. But I’d rather see public infrastructure with a public mandate, operating in the community for the common good, without exorbitant international tuition fees paying the bulk of the freight.
I hope they at least name the building after Jobandeep Sandhu, an early harbinger of exploitation back in 2019 when the Canadore international student was deported for the crime of working more than 20 hours a week driving truck!
Years later, seemingly undeterred (or perhaps with the blessing of Ford’s ‘open for business’ approach) by provincial caps imposed by the Ministry of Colleges and Universities, Canadore has among the highest ratios of international enrollment, according to the auditor general.
There hasn’t been much public consultation to grapple with the downstream local impacts in a tight housing market, but the College appears to have increased its international enrollment in North Bay to maintain its lucrative footprint at its southern Stanford campus.
As our local representative, MPP Fedeli deserves a dose of scorn for what ultimately is a system failure they’ve helped to engineer.
Across Canada today, provincial governments recognize the value of expanded international enrollment, most notably by exerting downward pressure on minimum wage and compensating for reduced public expenditures.
While Fedeli will surely point the finger at his federal counterparts, he’s just as much to blame for turning away from the issue.
The auditor general was clear back in 2021 that the rate of international growth at several Colleges including Canadore wasn’t aligned with provincial regulations yet the ministry “did not take timely action to ensure compliance with the Public College Private Partnerships Minister’s Binding Policy Directive” – all while union leadership sounded the alarm about the likely local impacts.
Now in 2023, Ontario’s Colleges and Universities are still among the lowest in provincial spending, and it’s been like that for decades. In response, many Colleges like our own have erected private institutions, like Stanford, unencumbered by domestic tuition freezes, granting the same credentials with non-unionized faculty. Maybe I don’t donate enough to the Conservative fundraising apparatus to see a Greenbelt advantage but damn any politician that tweets about their trade missions abroad while being architects (notably, as finance minister) of social and economic inequality at home.
One year ago, we sat down with the College to raise the alarm once again about reports of students sleeping in their cars.
We all teach with an ear to how things are for students away from school. We have a moral imperative and a vested interest in student success and wellbeing. Teaching tomorrow’s workforce is our career. We know that students do well in the classroom when things are going reasonably well away from it.
That playing field is far from level now, and I remain convinced that the College must be better community stewards. They’ve produced some work plans, but we typically have more questions than answers. They’ll argue they’ve made progress on student housing, and there’s some evidence to substantiate their claims. But it seems more likely than not that their current growth strategy has outpaced what the community can muster, at least in the absence of stronger rent controls, actual adherence to provincial regulation, and a more robust affordable (not McMansions built on protected farmland) housing supply, all public policy failings of Ford and Fedeli, whose priorities remain elsewhere.
And so it is that some international students find themselves in common cause with many poor and working-class Ontarians struggling to find affordable housing and bearing the consequences of system failure in North Bay.
Sean Lougheed is faculty union president with Local 657, OPSEU at Canadore College.
In 2017-18, Canadore College in North Bay, Ont., made $12.25 million in tuition revenue from domestic students and $41.3 million from international students. In 2022-23, domestic tuition revenue rose to $14.5 million and international tuition skyrocketed to $131.5 million.
https://globalnews.ca/news/
Ontario's Ministry of Colleges and Universities officially caps the number of international students that a public college can have at one of its private career college partners. The quota is a maximum of two times the number of international students enrolled at the public college's home campus.
But the provincial auditor general found a number of colleges have exceeded those limits in recent years with seemingly no consequences. North Bay-based Canadore College's private partner had 8.8 times the number of international students as the college itself; at Northern College in Timmins, Ont., the ratio was 8.6. Alpha College is at about 4.5-to-1 compared with St. Lawrence College's home-campus enrolment, or more than twice the allowed ratio.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/
AG Report with Canadore data
https://www.auditor.on.ca/en/
