Some quick fixes come quicker than others
There’s no problem too small for the premier to solve. Personally.
LCBO stopped giving out free paper bags to customers?
No problem — this week, the premier persuaded it to reverse course. Now he’s bragging about bringing back bagging.
From buck-a-beer to bags for booze, you have to admire Ford’s talent for salesmanship and showmanship on the small. Just not his leadership on the big issues, like higher education.
Last week, you may have heard Ford proudly announcing a new medical school for York University to be built in Vaughan. Another day, another victory lap:
“I can’t wipe the smile from my face,” he crowed.
On paper, the new medical school is a good idea in bad times — 2.3 million Ontarians still need a family doctor. But the fine print and minuscule numbers tell a different story.
Sure, there’s $9 million for initial planning, spread over four years (which works out to about $2.2 million a year), and a promise to cover capital and operating spending when the time comes — count on it.
But Ford is deeply conflicted about the campuses of Ontario. He can’t decide whether he wants to build them up or tear them down.
York is promised a new medical school — money to come. Yet it is drowning in $600 million of red ink, while other campuses sink into chaos.
At least eight universities across Ontario are looking at deficits in 2023-24, for a combined total of $152 million. And some 12 universities are projecting operating deficits in 2024-25, adding up to $293 million.
This is a crisis created entirely by Ford’s Progressive Conservative government. Playing the populist card in 2019, the premier decreed that universities and colleges must cut tuition by 10 per cent, followed by a freeze every year thereafter, through 2026.
Ford is playing Robin Hood in reverse — making universities ever more affordable for affluent families, while neglecting student aid for the poor who still afford the fees, with or without a freeze. (Disclosure: I’m a senior fellow at Toronto Metropolitan University and the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy.)
A government cannot in good faith compel universities to cut fees without making up the difference in lost revenues. Instead, while bleeding campuses all those years, the Tories goaded and incentivized them to tap into seemingly limitless foreign student revenues.
The government gave them carte blanche to raise tuition for overseas students at sometimes triple the rate charged for domestic students — fostering greed and gouging. Today, as my Star colleague Kristin Rushowy has documented, foreign students make up more than half of the student body at many colleges, and as much as one-quarter at some universities.
That’s too much of a good thing. The result of this overreach — and the strain on housing — was a recent federal cap on foreign student visas and work permits that has hit post-secondary schools in Ontario harder than anywhere else in Canada.
Searching for a fix last year, the government appointed a blue-ribbon panel that called for a compromise — a five per cent tuition increase and a $2.5-billion funding infusion to help campuses catch up.
But Ford rejected the tuition increase outright, refusing to unfreeze revenues. His government grudgingly allocated barely $700 million (or roughly $233 million a year) to be divvied up among 47 campuses in the post-secondary — a fraction of what the panel had suggested.
So how did the premier personally react to these recommendations from a panel of his own creation, dealing with a mess of his own making?
Speaking at the York medical school announcement, Ford lashed out at foreign students taking up valuable spots in Ontario, displacing locals and upending the student mix in medical schools.
“My No. 1 pet peeve … I just want to support Ontario students. And God bless everyone else coming to our country … (who) pays a little more,” he began.
All this from a premier who has made foreign students — and foreign revenues — a pillar of his postsecondary strategy in Ontario while freezing tuition domestically and starving schools of funding.
“I understand that money pays for some of the local students right now … what is the percentage, it’s 18 per cent?” he mused, muddling the numbers. “Get rid of the 18 per cent. I’m not being mean, but I’m taking care of our students — our kids — first.”
Our kids first?
“I want 100 per cent Ontario students going to these universities,” Ford vowed.
And so the premier who engineered the massive expansion of foreign students throughout the system now complains about the imbalance in our medical schools.
He promises another quick fix — just like he fixed the disappearing bags at the LCBO. Except that Ford had his chance to repair the damage when his own blue ribbon panel recommended a road map to stabilizing Ontario’s colleges and universities.
Rejecting that blueprint, Ford is slowly dismantling the province’s post-secondary system, while bankrolling the construction of a new medical school. Count on it.