CalgaryLiberal

Archive for the ‘Youth Politics’ Category

The question for a lot of students is how they’ll fund their education at the post-secondary level. This tends to be answered by pursuing debt, through government lines of credit, bank loans, and working.

As it currently stands more and more students are going into debt to fund their educations. And policies enacted at all levels of government are not helping. In fact, I’d argue policies enacted over the last decade have made things worse.

Specifically, the incentivising of debt.

As it currently stands the Albertan government is creating a system in which students can pull out debt from the government to pay for their education that would, after exceeding a certain limit, be paid back up until that limit. Say, for example, I take out $30,000 to pay for my education (I wish) and the cap is $25,000–I would pay back $25,000 after my degree has been completed.

That ‘cap’, as it were, can also be called “loan relief”.

What is does is two things:

(1) It creates a situation where an institution can continually increase tuition seeing that there is no downward pressure on prices due to students possessing a feeling of separation from the actual costs of university. This helps no one, and transfers the majority of funding of student education solely on the student when/if the loan program ceases to exist.

(2) It creates the financial disconnect for high school students and parents. Going into post-secondary education is a serious endeavor not to be taken likely, and financial issues presses this firmly into the minds of attendees and funders. Without this pressure on the part of student and parents students end up attending university not as a desired path for their self-improvement but simply because they can and society/family encourages them.

The second increases attendance at university dramatically but doesn’t contribute to any gain to society, as per the universitys’ function. The first point harms the student and their family. Both points gorges both government and student, while giving our underfunded universities a way to increase their coffers, albeit at a cost that is too high for Canada to bear.

Compounding all of this is the insistence that there isn’t a problem and no solutions are being actively floated by political folks. Reliance on debt and fundraising on the backs of students is seen as the status quo right now and will likely continue on, with Conservative funding cuts harming institutions thus forcing them in crease revenues via tuition. As noted in “(1)” above the academic institutions of Canada can continue to increase tuition with limited response by students, government, and funders, which ultimately creates a situation where tuition, year by year, is growing at an incredible speed.

Students still are graduating with more and more debt, thus harming their ability to perform to their maximum when they graduate, and an unproductive system continues in its existence. The current financing system in place is both detrimental on the short term and long term–and nobody is talking about solutions to this.

Nobody has really brought up youth unemployment lately. Err, or at all.

It’s not a priority for the Conservatives since, as the old trope goes, the youth don’t vote and even if they did they’d vote Green, Liberal, or NDP. Not a group they particularly want to either kowtow to or support, and therefore they do not.

The NDP are running around doing their regular thing, nipping at the heels of the Liberals as the Opposition’s opposition.

And, well, there’s a noticeable lack of discourse in general about youth unemployment.

And it’s going to hurt Canada in the long term if it isn’t resolved.

As it currently stands youth (15-24) unemployment is pegged at 15.2%, around double the national average, and that isn’t including people who have simply given up.

Am I calling on the government to help out? No. It’s just that this trend will, and I guarantee it, harm and haunt all those involved in politics and in Canada.

In an economy that has an emphasis on previous experience, accreditation, and references, the graduating classes, high school or otherwise, over the next while will be hurt. There is a pressure in this economy to have previous experience and in the long term where a portion of the population has been targeted by this there’ll be a sizable portion of Canadians that will find it continually difficult to find gainful employment. It’s going to hurt Canada in the long term.

As a student paying for his own education out of his own pocket, working his buttox off to try to graduate without debt, and struggling, I can say that a lot of my fellow university students will go deeper into debt come September. Cuts in university funding by both level of governments, increases in tuition, and increases in “fees”, are going to hurt students and youth even more.

Both immediately and in the long term we’re going to be hit, and hit hard, as Canadians by this ambivalence and malfeasance. It’s almost like nobody is backing us up here. It’s like youth unemployment, the cuts to education, and ambivalence towards youth by all those in Ottawa. It’s frustrating to say the least.

This is a post about youth politics, specifically at the university level. While it is divergent from my regular topics this post highlights things that can be broadened to politics in general. I would love to hear your comments at the bottom of the page if you think anything stands out or anything seems rather intriguing.

Also, before you start reading please note that these are students that are engaged in these activities, and that running in elections and losing/winning them are part of a unique learning experience in life. These students, along with myself, are learning a political craft when we engage in these activities that will, most likely, last us a life time so some careful study and gathering of lessons learned are important. If I seem a small bit extreme on some of my points, well, I have felt that bite before and want to communicate it to those who are about to feel the same so as to remove as much pain as possible.

Anyways, SAF stands for “Students for an Alternative Future”. It’s pronounced ‘safe’. It was a slate (a “party”) in the University of Calgary’s student government’s election in 2010. It ran thirteen candidates and in the end only had three representatives elected. The only ones elected were faculty representatives at that, as well, and no executives were pulled from their ranks.

The combined budgets of thirteen candidates, the combined effort of thirteen people with their individual networks, and, on top of all of this, in possession of a familiarity with each other within a core piece of that slate for the last two years, fell short. I had the joy of being at the table when the slate was first floated, actually. And from the very second it was started I knew it was bound to failure.

It was easy to see. First of all, there were five instances (five!) where a vision was crushed in favour of having an agreement amongst the members of the slate. The example that sticks out to my mind the most was the idea of having a liquor store on campus (for safety and alcohol awareness, etcetera) which was shut down by one of the candidates. Things that would have differentiated them as a group were tossed to secure cohesion.

So they ran a bland, ideological slate based on three principles:

TRANSPARENCY
EQUALITY
ENHANCING THE STUDENT EXPERIENCE

The problem, however, is twofold: everyone was running on this platform and it was misapplied to the audience they sought to target.

On the first point, of the principles being shared by all in the election, well, it’s obvious. All of the candidates running had to deal with transparency, equality, and serving students. Nobody–nobody–went against that grain. Nobody said they wanted an opaque executive or government. Nobody was promoting inequality. Nobody said they wanted to turf the student experience and make student’s lives a never ending hell.

It didn’t differentiate itself from the other guys. It was vanilla, and didn’t do anything to inform or change the opinions of students.

On the second point, a group of people who have never had to deal with a un-transparent organization, unequal organization do not have the emotional push to react to a policy such as theirs in such a manner that would cause them to vote for SAF. A dominant voting group at the university would be the resident students who tend to be 17-19, in their first year of university, and who have never held a job or paid taxes. Unchallenged youths entering, for the first time, a place away from home and ready for an experience that would educate them about the world both emotionally and scholastically.

And this runs counter to those who are interested in cynical, second-guessing politics of demanding transparency and equality–the emotion and the logic required to think about politics in terms of transparency and equality requires one to have an opinion strongly about it and the group SAF targets did not gel to that norm.

Secondly, SAF had no internal structure other than it being a group of friends. A party, or a slate, requires that control and leadership takes place. A group of friends working together and very much unwilling to argue or debate passionately to avoid hurting feelings is destructive to creative energies required to generate quality policy. You need the authority, the law, and the codes to contextualize any debate within it and keep the group functioning… but at the very same time, you need that vitriol and passion to jump in and bash some heads. SAF avoiding this process and created lacking policy because of it.

What was created was, as noted earlier, a vanilla level of policy with no vision.

Thirdly, the candidates were dramatically unprepared, both in knowledge and in time commitment. I suppose this is, sadly, a side effect of having no incumbents and only one past candidate in their slate. They just were unprepared and provided bland answers that dithered and dathered without saying anything concrete. This is likely another compounding factor in their inability to generate policy.

Time commitment, quite frankly, was also lacking. In terms of researching the Students Union, reading on the changes to the way that the government existed, and following Student Legislative Council meetings, only one or two showed any effort to show up and learn. And the slate candidates who bothered to show up? They were elected.

Fourthly, the slate did not have the experience necessary to challenge certain positions. The Students Union at the University of Calgary manages almost $20million each year and is one of the most powerful student unions in North America. Seriously. It controls 20,000+ square feet of commercial property, has an operating budget in the millions, and is expected to represent students to the university, within themselves, to the governments at all three levels (municipal, provincial, and federal), along with to private interests. This is complicated stuff.

And none of the candidates had the experience of either running before (except for one) and no incumbents were with them, so they were uninformed about the gravity of what they were trying to take control of.

Fifthly, the opinion makers were solidly against the slate. You know the conversant, bubbly people who talk to everybody about everything? And who, by virtue of their connections, can spread knowledge, both good and bad, about a group of people? That’s the group that SAF didn’t talk to and didn’t try to at least curtail.

It hurt them, too. I am positive that one of the executive candidates would have won if it wasn’t for her name being tied down to the SAF slate, and the loss to the students at the university if huge because of it.

Sixthly, there was a branding issue. The supposed leader of the slate didn’t utilize the slate logo on his posters. Not only this, though, but the supposed leader was generally seen to be (because of point five) controlling the slate to engender his ego (which the slate was never meant to do, by the way). So the first thing most people knew was that the slate was the tool of a person who was disliked, power hungry, and, well, probably uncaring about student needs because of this.

Seventhly, the SAF were not bold. The first thing on their site that pointed as to why they should vote for them is that “We want to take in the ideas of those involved, incorporate those who wish to be and give the best student experience to all students.” That is not bold. It isn’t even populist–it’s not delivering what people want but hiding in a corner until you grab power… and then your in a position where it doesn’t matter what small promises you made to listening to students were.

Eighthly, they did not have a uniform method of communication. They did not share a twitter account, but had 10. They had separate facebook groups, while having a shared one at the same time. If they were interested in having one message to the largest audience possible they had to bring their resources together and target–hard–the students at the university.

Ninthly, and this bleeds into point eight, this leads into a greater point of there being no coordination of resources or, quite frankly, a budgetary strategy. Coordination of their budgets only occurred in the last four days of the election.

And, finally, there was no electoral plan. They did not know who they were targeting, who they were contacting, or who they were trying to get to vote for them. They formed no coalitions, didn’t contact any clubs, and didn’t orchestrate cross-student group cooperation.

With a race that drew almost 4,000 votes for just for Arts Faculty Representative (my position) out of a little under 8,000 students, well, that’s bad politics. While it’s great to have a policy (which they didn’t have) it doesn’t matter at all if you cannot communicate it to as many people as possible. SAF failed at that, and it doomed them before they even started.

The reason I didn’t run on that slate (I was propositioned by twelve different people about seven or eight times) was because of this gargantuan problem of vision, structure, and lack of strategy. I saw this, almost instantly, from the start, and it instantly pushed me away from joining up with their slate.

Two youths stated that their questions were rewritten in a PMO-youth engagement event. Such questions were changed so that they didn’t talk about abortion or other hot button issues (which is what youth tend to ask about and, of course, did). The environment, for one, is being killed from the schedule for the G-8 summit and was likely one of the fatalities in the youth event.

The PMO has over the last few days tried to draw attention to the economy and for fiscal management, likely trying to ditch the abortion, human rights, the increasing influence of christian interest groups, and other issues that have been bothering Harper and the Conservative Party.

Anyways, the Conservatives seem to want to regain control of the media and their messaging and the PMO is denying that they rewrote the questions.

If you note in this article one of the youth handlers stated to one of the youth that:

“I would appreciate if you could just work with us so that we can keep this consistent message,” she said. “I’m just supposed to keep this under control.”

Hm. Well, err, that was rather brazen of the PMO. I guess they were expecting the press to be rather quiet. I expect quite the opposite, now.

The handling of youth by the Conservatives is a wonderful foil to what I’ve experienced with the Liberal party. The Conservatives killing off their youth wing, too, when they voted to end the PCYF. If you want to engage in politics and are young it seems the only choice (and, from my humble and a little bit more than biased point of view) it’s to join the Liberal Party of Canada.