ANALYSIS AND OPINION
By E.P. Chant, Managing Editor, Student Publications
Just to let you know: The battle continues.
There are still a number of student government leaders in Ontario – including President Nick Goran of St. Clair’s Student Representative Council (SRC) – who are persisting in their lobbying of the provincial government to bolster the amount, and relax the eligibility requirements of, the strike-related “Hardship/Compensation Fund”.
A couple of weeks ago, while the work-stoppage by Ontario’s unionized college faculty members was still taking place, the Ministry of Advanced Education and Skills Development (MAESD) announced that a special fund would be established to compensate students for financial damages they had sustained arising from the disruption of the academic year.
1. Initially, the ministry announced that the fund would be financed with the “cost-savings” of each of the 24 colleges associated with the strike – which is to say, chiefly, the wages-and-benefits they had not had to pay striking profs during the span of the strike.
2. Gradually, that morphed into “the cost-savings of the non-payment of wages, minus the new expenses pertaining to re-start-up and amending the operation of the academic year”.
3. Then, finally, the fund was simply pegged with a dollar-amount: there would be $5 million available to compensate students for their hardships.
Our math (and that of some other number-crunchers and bean-counters) suggested that Scenario Calculation Number 1 (above) should have resulted in a fund in excess of $100 million. Scenario Calculation Number 2 is harder to pinpoint, but would probably have been in the $25 to $50 million range.
Scenario Calculation Number 3 – the current $5 million – well, nobody knows where that figure came from … although it is fair to suggest that it is an entirely arbitrary amount that was just pulled out of thin air by The Provincial Powers That Be.
The latest scuttlebutt is that the ministry simply resurrected the compensation fund figure from the previous faculty strike in the 2006. But that is an “apples and oranges” situation in relation to this year’s work-stoppage. The 2006 strike lasted for (“only”) three weeks, compared to this year’s five. Also, it occurred in March – so, while they were certainly upset, most students were prepared to “ride it out” because they could still see the end of the school-year in achievable sight. In contrast, both the duration and time-of-year of the work-stoppage of 2017 has been catastrophically damaging to the psyche of many students, which should have (one would think) led to a bolstered compensation fund.
“Oh, no, no, no,” the MAESD responds. “We consulted with student leaders extensively about the fund, and everybody was on-board with how it would be set up.”
“Consulted extensively”, in the ministry’s mind, means a conference call and a meeting or two, during which Minister Deb Matthews talked and the student leaders were expected to listen and nod their heads …
… But they didn’t. During those absurdly brief chats and afterwards, the student leaders have persistently asserted that the fund is monetarily insufficient, and overly restrictive in terms of its eligibility-to-apply conditions.
Indeed, many of the student leaders have argued that all students have been damaged or inconvenienced to one degree or another by the strike, so all should receive some compensation – if only “token” in amount. That sentiment, too, was endorsed, loud and clear, by a Facebook poll staged by the SRC, with the overwhelming majority favouring “cash for all” as opposed to the fund’s plan of “compensation only for those who can provide documented proof of strike-related expenses”.
Given the total cash involved, the cash-for-all option would, indeed, lead to token pay-outs: about $20 per full-time student …
… Or, if the Hardship Fund could be bumped up – say, doubled from the preliminary, $5 million pittance – then all students could receive that $20 at Christmas-time, and the case-by-case, documentable-damage-sufferers could also receive their specific compensation.
Lobbying goes on towards that end (or something similar to it), but God only knows how it will turn out, given that the provincial government is already patting itself on the back for its avowed largesse in creating the Hardship Fund in the first place.
The highly debatable adequacy of this compensation package is a microcosm of this entire fiasco.
Look, the Ontario Public Service Employees Union and the College Employer Council carried out their mandates almost exactly as one might have expected, under the customarily adversarial nature of collective bargaining negotiations. Whether you agree with their issue-stances or tactics, they fulfilled their functions in The Great Scheme Of Things.
But as Overseer And Regulator Of The System – and The Ultimate Defender Of Students When The Adversarial Nature of Negotiations Run Amok – the entire provincial government failed students at every step of the way …
… And it continues to do so now, with its pig-headed refusal to re-examine the sufficiency of the responsiveness to students’ sense of betrayal.
