I still can’t understand how Rex Murphy, then President of Memorial University Student Council managed to get students free tuition plus a $50 living allowance from the former Premier of Newfoundland Joey Smallwood’s.

The whole story reads like something you’d see in a political fiction film but it worked.

Today, in Ontario the situation for students is getting worse and worse. Tuition and student debt increases while quality decreases. In the recent Ontario budget, there is something in there about wanting to cut down student debt but it has a few strategic flaws:

a) There is no long term strategy of funding post-secondary education system so University presidents will continue to wonder if the next government will play the political card of “investing into the future” while lobbying to deregulate all tuition fees, just ask American students who come to Canada to avoid the expensive tuition of how thats working out for them.

b) There is no long term strategy on tuition fees, will they simply continue to go up and up 4.5-8% cumulatively every year towards infinity? Um, unless the finance minister plans to stimulate inflation in this Province, those increases are far from inflationary.

Post-Secondary Education problems seem to be the most under reported story in Ontario, how about the current Rex Murphy do a story on that.