The cold temperature on the picket line today did not halt Canadore College students from joining their teachers.
Students came out sporting signs showing solidarity with their teachers who are collectively moving into week four of the provincial college faculty strike.
See related story: Frustration mounting as college strike approaches week four
Tiara Ciesielski is a semester four nursing student from Mattawa, who now lives in North Bay.
“We deserve some of our tuition back because I’ve been wasting the four weeks of my life and I’m not progressing in my school,” she stated bluntly.
Ciesielski says students are frustrated, some unsure if their bus or travel plans at Christmas will need to be changed if an agreement leads to an extended semester.
“Students take out 1000’s of dollars in loans to make it through a semester so if we have to restart just living for four months, we could have been working from September to December, we could have been working full-time, we could have been making money and now we are going to have to pay back these loans, we are going to have to pay tuition and everything else again and it just to us seems that we are just being completely left out of the conversation,” she said.
Leslie Stamp is a mature student also in the nursing program. She went back to school in hopes of acquiring full-time work as a nurse here in North Bay.
Stamp and Ciesielski believe its clearly best to side with the teachers who are fighting for more full-time faculty members and less contract work in the future.
“I completely understand with their frustration, I have friends who are faculty workers as well and I think besides my frustration as a student being off,” said Stamp.
“When you initially sign up to go to post-secondary your objective is to get a full-time job at the end of it right, so it really does not seem fair that the people teaching us don’t have a full-time job when that’s our objective at the end of it,” said Ciesielski.
“So I understand where I’m coming from for that and they need to be able to live and some of the contract workers are making only 10 per hour when you take aside all their preparation for lectures and everything like that, and that is below minimum wage. So that is not fair to us and me personally, I would love to become a faculty member eventually later in my career, and I would want a chance to have a full-time career.
“So they are kind of fighting for everybody and the future.”