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FORUM: Generation screwed (Mar. 2026)

April 7th, 2026 · No Comments

Doug Ford sticks it to the students

By Jessica Bell

In the name of “saving” Ontario’s financially strapped colleges and universities, the Conservative government has decided students should foot more of their tuition bill.

Come September, the maximum share of grant funding available through the Ontario Student Assistance Program (OSAP) will drop from 85 per cent to 25 per cent. The tuition freeze has also been lifted, allowing colleges and universities to increase tuition by up to two per cent per year.

That means bigger loans and more debt. 

Postsecondary education is already expensive.  

Students broke down the cost of going to school at a recent student roundtable we hosted at Queen’s Park.  Raymond Bhushan, an engineering student at the University of Toronto, said he spent about $17,000 a year on tuition as an undergraduate, $13,000 a year for a room in a shared house, and $10,000 a year for food and basic expenses. That’s roughly $40,000 per year—or about $120,000 in costs over a four-year degree.

And now it’s going up.

These fee hikes will impact who goes to college or university, and who doesn’t. “Doug Ford wants postsecondary education to be just for the elite,” said Arpit Nigam from the OCAD Student Union. “And that’s what it will become.”

Students with help from the bank of mom and dad will manage.  Everyone else will face an impossible choice: don’t go—and limit your earning potential for life. Or go—and carry crushing debt well into your 30s.

When defending the cuts to OSAP grants, Ford, at a recent press conference, suggested students were choosing programs with no practical value. 

“You’re picking basket-weaving courses,” he said. “There’s not too many baskets being sold out there.”

The truth?  Most of the students I meet want practical and meaningful careers—engineering, nursing, IT, carpentry, education, social work, public policy. They understand how tough the job market is and how expensive Ontario has become. 

Along with his tuition-hike announcement, the premier also committed to increase government funding to colleges and universities.  He described his announcement as “historic” and “generational,” but the funding crisis he’s attempting to fix was largely of his government’s own making.

Ontario provides the lowest per-student funding in Canada by far, while students here pay the highest tuition.

For years, institutions papered over chronic underfunding by dramatically increasing international enrolment and charging those students three to five times more in tuition than domestic students. When the federal government tightened immigration in 2025, international enrolment dropped by 70 per cent and the model collapsed.

Universities laid off approximately 2,500 workers and suspended or closed 2,700 courses and programs.  Colleges laid off about 8,000 workers and suspended or closed 700 courses and programs.   

The anger students are feeling is not just about tuition and debt. It’s about making it even harder for a generation that already feels like they’re being left behind. 

One in four young people are looking for work. Wages are stagnant. Rent and groceries are sky-high. Owning a home or raising a family feels increasingly out of reach. Talk of economic hardship or climate apocalypse isn’t conspiracy theory talk anymore—it’s part of everyday conversation.

Students notice that while this government is asking them to pay far more than previous generations did, the Conservatives continue to fund the scandal-ridden provincial Skills Development Fund which gives funding to businesses to provide training. Why not reinvest that Skills Development money back into public colleges and universities? 

Political apathy can fester in moments like this.  When survival takes all your energy, activism feels like a luxury. The Conservatives are counting on that exhaustion.  I think they’ve miscalculated.

We’ve seen what happens when governments push too far.  

In 2012, Quebec students organized against the proposed tuition hike from $2,168 to $3,793 under Premier Jean Charest. (Gosh, these costs seem cheap to my Ontario ears.) The student protests became tuition strikes which grew into one the largest student protest movements in Canadian history. The government passed emergency legislation to ban large protests, but that only escalated opposition. 

The protests culminated in the ouster of the premier and the election of the Parti Québécois in the fall of 2012, which halted the tuition increases.  

Students are often dismissed as politically disengaged. History says otherwise.

If this government thinks students will quietly accept a future of deeper debt and diminished opportunity, they may be in for a surprise.  This isn’t just a budget line item. It’s a generational fight.

 Jessica Bell is the MPP for University-Rosedale and the Shadow Minister for Finance and the Treasury Board. You can reach her office at jbell-co@ndp.on.ca or 416-535-7206.

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Tags: Annex · Columns · Opinion

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