Almost six years after the Ontario Superior Court struck down the Ford government’s last attempt at defunding student life, it appears we are once again at an impasse. Currently awaiting its second reading at Queen’s Park is Bill 33, or the Supporting Children and Students Act.

Among a wide range of reforms to education and childcare in the Province which have nearly all been firmly decried by those who would be first affected by its implementation—be they elementary teachers, post-secondary students, workers at large or proponents of human rights—is the total overhaul of the ancillary fee system which currently funds the majority of student life and its democracy in Ontario.

In 2019, Ford’s government first tried to pass its Student Choice Initiative (SCI), a policy under which ancillary fees—that is, fees affixed to the tuition cost of attending any given post-secondary institution which serve to fund everything from collegiate sports to campus radio stations and student newspapers like ours—were divised between essential and non-essential services.

Designated as essential were “Athletics and recreation; Career services; Student buildings; Health and counselling; Academic support; Student ID cards; Student achievement and records; Financial aid offices; Campus safety programs” (per the Ontario ancillary fees guidelines). Inessential was everything else.

We would not be here if the SCI only arbitrarily designated any possibility for students to represent themselves politically, form clubs or have any semblance of a shared social life as non-essential and left it at that. Pending recognition of their essential nature, levy-funded groups could go on undisturbed by the Initiative, but those without that recognition had the source of their funding made optional.

Through the publication of a breakdown of attendance costs, universities and other post-secondary institutions were placed under the obligation to allow each individual student the opportunity to opt out of paying for what were deemed inessential ancillary fees.

Through the arduous labour of the Canadian Federation of Students and other student representative groups, the SCI was defeated in courts. Today, the Ford government has repackaged those same measures in its Supporting Children and Students Act.

The Act allows for the Lieutenant Governor of Ontario to “specify which fees may or may not be…required of students to pay by a college or university, including fees that students may only be charged or required to pay if they are refundable at the student’s request.”

What this represents is a doubling down by the Ford government: where they were previously stopped from arbitrarily declaring which ancillary fees ought to be refundable, they are now attempting to enshrine in law their right to do so.

This represents an important step in the Ford government’s project of the demolition of student politics in order to make way for a world where student life revolves solely around the purveyal of essential services to students, and also collegiate sports.

The post-secondary student, in this fantasy, is the recipient of services—healthcare where necessary, transportation to attend classes, and so on—but never engaged in any sort of cultural or literal production of their own. Counterattacks like CFS’ make apparent what so scares the Ford Conservatives about students’ ability to speak for themselves.

Still, proponents of the Bill will argue that it aims not to defund student life but to subject the ancillary groups which contribute to it to the scrutiny of those it purports to represent, or work for. So, they will say, if student newspapers cannot financially support themselves off of the assent of their respective student bodies, then they ought to be defunded.

Those who stand for the self-representation of students must stand firmly against such an antisocial way of thinking. Every student will not see much out of the pennies of their tuition which goes to fund this biology club or that free breakfast program—but they will, inevitably, themselves find use in some minor ancillary fee which others see no return on.

More importantly, should there truly be an ancillary group for which no one finds use, or which acts against the interests of the student body at large, what mechanism might students have to address that fact in the desolate landscape left behind by the disinterest of a majority in a nonetheless crucial service like a student newspaper or a campus radio station?

A fervent opposition to the Supporting Children and Students Act must then naturally emanate from the simple principle that we owe things to each other. We owe it to each other to fund the services which make student life a life rather than a hospital, some lecture halls and a bus—even the ones we don’t personally use.

We owe it to each other to create a democratic space where students can be heard, one without the financial borders or expectations of expertise which bar off so many students from ever speaking their mind in any public capacity.

We owe it to each other to put some of ourselves, some of our financial resources into the construction, expansion or maintenance of a public forum, or public services available to those with whom we share our education. Any less makes us a cellular assortment of strangers; not a collective.

The systems which rule over our education—universities, governments, student associations and unions—make decisions for us as a collective. If we do not defend the resources which allow for us to express ourselves as collective, then we speak as one against a hundred.

Ironically enough, it’s at the precise instant that our provincial government attempts to grant itself the right to chip away at our communal student life that we must put to use our collective voice.

In defense of a student life, of which arises a student perspective, and a student voice to make heard that perspective; in opposition to nothing else but busing to class, sitting among an assortment of strangers all experiencing the same loneliness and then going home, we stand against Bill 33.

To get involved in the fight for student life write to your MPP about Bill 33 or consult the Ontario Federation of Labour’s Stop Bill 33 page.