:eek: what?!

Exactly, that's why I stand by my statement that only the lazy and stupid will ever vote NDP.

All these social programs cost money you dumb mofos! and guess who gets to foot the bill? The most productive citizens.

What these social programs the OP (and all you NDP losers) think are so great are in essence wealth transfers.. you take money (in the form of taxes) from people who are working their asses off and giving it to the least productive people in society (i.e. the misfits, losers, welfare, whatever).

Not only are you taking money from the good and giving to the losers.. in the process, you're making our whole society less competitive. This happens because people start to lose incentive when the taxes on their labour gets so high thats its just not worth it to them to work, so they choose to work less.

And its not just high taxes, but how the tax revenues are spent. When you take hard working people's money and give hand outs to Surrey teenage mothers, or to people who are too lazy to even hold a steady job, its demoralizing.

And how about workers subsidizing old people? This is one of the dumbest thing ever. Its one of the prime reasons why people in Canada don't save. They think that when they're old the "government" will support them. When people in society don't save, it not only puts them as individuals in a bad situation, but our entire country as well. This is so because the economy requires huge capital investments in technology, education and general assets. This money has to come from somewhere but if our citizens don't save, they can't invest so there are only two outcomes: 1) our economy weakens because we are no longer competitive, or 2) we have to borrow money at high interest from foreigners to buy the new assets to remain competitive.

Note: I am not against taxes in general, just taxes on labour (i.e. income tax) and how that revenue is wasted on the least productive citizens. I am however a huge supporter of "sin taxes," that is taxes on bad behavior, e.g. the carbon tax. I think they should increase carbon taxes 10 fold but decrease income taxes by the same amount.

I am a student at Simon Fraser and I pay for my own tuition and I think ALL subsidies should be eliminated.

Why the F should the taxpayer have to pay for someone else's school fee's? You don't see the student's helping to pay for the same taxpayer's electricity or grocery bills! This is freaking retarded!

From my position, I can see that half of all students shouldn't even be in college, they're wasting their time and wasting tax-payer money! If tuition for college wasn't subsidized and they'd have to pay the FULL (i.e. REAL) price they (the students) would be compelled to think for once and contemplate if being in college is really worth the opportunity costs.

Having to pay full price for tuition also helps weed out the weak. If students had to work (i.e. get a job!) to pay for the full price of their education, only the students who really want to (and deserve to) be there will choose to stay. And by knowing how much their education really costs, the remaining students would be studying that much harder.

And don't bring up the BS about how this would leave the less well off students hanging because it doesn't. A committed student will find her way. She can always get a job, get a scholarship or get a student loan to pay for her tuition.

Eliminating subsidies to college fee's will also lower the burden of taxes on every working person. Or at least put those tax revenues to better use, like building green infrastructure.

^ very well put, and exactly what I wanted to say.

Quick question to all NDP supporters, what happened to the Fast Cat Ferries the NDP government built years back? :stupid:

leaglize it!

vote green!

I hope you know that if there was no subsidy and ALL of a student's educational cost came from the student's pocket, an average student would be paying well over $10k a year for tuition alone.

You're telling me you can make $10k + enough to survive other living expenses in vancouver while working part-time during school + full-time during summer?

If the average student was paying $10k annually, there would be LITTLE to NO loans, bursaries etc.

Tutition subsidy is there for a reason. Post-secondary students are the individuals that will shape our future society (future doctors, lawyers, politicians etc.) It's also there so only the really needy students can get the loans..not everyone gets them (Why should a general arts student get loans for her $5k tuition when a Vet student could barely make ends meet with his $80k+ tuition)

I know at UBC the admission is becoming harder each year with no increase in seats (also due to lack of gov't support) so the competition is fierce. I honestly believe many of the students at my school worked pretty hard to get to where they are now and most deserve their current subsidized tuition (maybe it's diff at SFU)

edit: let's face it. Canadian gov't is pretty much socialist when it comes post-secondary schools. It is pretty much set up so that everyone has an equal chance regardless of their economic background. It should stay that way too.

liberals is the lesser of the main 2 evils.

however i still question gordon campbell as a liberal leader.

Bullshit.

If a person really wants a post-secondary education, they could work full time for a few years and save up for their education. They could then work part time while enrolled and get scholarships and government loans to make up the rest. If they can't even do that then they don't deserve to be in college.

Have you even looked at the facts before speaking..? or even checked out the liberal's platform?
Here is the liberal party's platform, go to page 25/55 of the pdf or page 23 in the document itself to look at information pertaining to post secondary education. http://www.bcliberals.com/media/FULLPLATFORM.pdf

I think the liberals have done a very good job. A tuition freeze will only decrease the amount of money universities have to spend on new infrastructure, programs, etc. Tuition was below national levels anyways and is now correcting itself. And this is coming from a guy who is paying over $7000 for his tuition alone not including books which we all know are rapeage in disguise.

i hate Gordon Campbell, and Carole James doesn't appeal to me either.. I like the Liberals for the country but not for the province

And as to your comment regarding Arts students: you've obviously have not kept up with current economic trends. The most sought after people today are not your run of the mill graduates but grads who have substantial creative capacity. Ingenuity is the only skill that cannot be commoditized and outsourced. The most successful companies today recognize this and they're hiring and promoting accordingly. Companies today are opting for students who've majored in diverse subjects that develop this artistic and visionary mindset. A great many of these subjects just happens to fall under the Arts umbrella. (case in point: Ted Turner, founder of CNN, studied greek literature; and Steve Jobs has noted on numerous occasions that the calligraphy courses he took in college made a deep impact on how he though about design)

And as for the UBC vs SFU argument, they are both sub-par establishments at best and seeing that they both have very similar pre-req's for enrollment; your assertion that a Simon Fraser student may have it easier does not hold ground.

I get my facts from journals that publish school endowment stats every fiscal year. You get your facts from a political party website. I wonder which has more room for bias? I've spoken to over thousands of alums from as far back as 1950's up to ones that graded last year, all from different disciplines. I believe I voice somewhat representative from a university student's point of view of multiple disciplines & era. I'm not here to bash on Liberals nor support NDP. Hell, i dont even vote.

I pay a bit more than double of your annual tuition, but that's not the point.

Tuition freeze has it's +'s and -'s. BC's tuition levels were below national avg in the 90's, but recently it's been jumping up 2-5% each year. If you take taht 2% of your $7k a year, it adds up to quite a bit if you did your degree in 5 years.

Isn't VSB going to be under $44 million deficit next year? They've closed down so many elementary schools too. But the K-12 education issue is a whole 'nother can of worms.

^ One of the reasons that they are closing down so many Elementary Schools is that not enough people are having kids, and many of the new immigrants that do have children are moving out to suburbs instead of living in Vancouver.

Yeah, we should take a few years off after grade 12 to work at our minimum wage jobs so i can save up for half of my undergrad tuition. I'll be out when I'm 26 with $12k debt then go back to working at a min- oh wait no, $14-hour job now! :rolleyes:

You first msg came off as 'screw subsidizing university student's educational costs', but just now you make it sound like it's so easy to work during school, get all the scholarships, loans etc.

Like i said already, if education wasn't subsidized, everyone would be looking for jobs, everyone would be applying for loans, you would need 90%+ GPA to get scholarships. There's only so much jobs, loans, scholarships to go around for every student. Youre' telling me that you can do all that and if one cannot achieve those goals they dont deserve to be in school? I mean you sound like a smart guy with real good time-management.

I wasn't trying to put Arts student down in any way. I was just making examples of expensive program to something that's more general and cheaper.

But since you brought it up I found sthing quite odd; i've recently spoke with many recent Arts alums @ work, and most tell me they're either working in a field that's totally unrelated to their degree, or they're back in school majoring something else.

Dont get me wrong, I'm not saying social thinking/creativity is not useful.

I never made a UBC vs SFU argument. Dont put words in my mouth please.

Good post, glad someone is informed.

The birthrate of Canadians is approaching 1, while the birthrate of recent immigrants is > 2. Immigrants tend to settle in suburbs with high populations of their own race/religion/culure and despite the hongers here, many immigrants don't have the $$$ to live within Vancouver, they are forced out into the burbs, Toronto is a great example of this.

This is how the system works in the US, and it works well. if you need a oan to attend school you can get one, yet it will depend on what program you're taking. Banks don't tend to give loans to philosophy majors, yet will throw cash at potential doctors.

This is the problem with subsidized education. We have a lot of people taking worthless degrees on our dime, especially since admission standards are such that someone with a D HS average can still get admitted to university.

It stopped being about "higher education" a long time ago. My mother gave me this advice:

What she meant is that anyone can get a degree as long as they stay in school, you can graduate with Cs and Ds all the way through.

Thanks.

I've been in this province 7 months, and I know more about BC politics than many of the sheep that will unfortunately cast their vote this election.

Its all about educating yourself, I wish more people took the time to.

You're welcome (thank my post too! :D).

All governments need a check-and-balance, yet good governments should not be ousted for the sake of change. The BC liberals have done a lot for this province economically, I worry the NDP would turn BC in the direction Ontario is going under the Ontario liberals.

The Ontario liberals are truly left, unlike the fiscally right BC liberals.
- Ontario income tax is near the tops in the country, I saved $2K income tax by moving to BC!
- Ontario corporate tax among the highest in North America. Why would business want to go there? Its not, business is leaving, quickly!

Does this sound familiar? Like the last BC recession where the NDP was in charge and business and employees left BC? I hope so, and hope its a lesson learned.

I just want to say 1 thing here:

I have been going to school since just after the freeze. I can honestly say that SFU and UBC are both 400-500% better now than at the end of the freeze. With increased tuition comes increased $$ to infrastructure, increased attraction of better professors, more research money, more facilities and everything else. I pay roughly $8000/year over the past 4 years at UBC for tuition alone and I can say that I don't mind paying that much considering how good the school is becoming.

One thing I do not agree with is the price of student housing..but thats a completely different topic all together.

Good luck with that. :lol

Even with people moving out to the 'burbs, there's not enough students available to justify keeping many of the schools open. Two local elementary schools have closed over the past couple years, and a high school recently had to change from an 8-12 to simply a middle school in order to properly disperse students in order to keep the remaining local high schools at a relatively decent capacity.

The other problem with existing and established neighbourhoods such as my own is this: Many families are living in their homes for many, many years and not moving out in order to bring in new, young families. My parent's street has maybe thirty houses from one end to another. When I was growing up, I could count on one hand the number of houses that didn't have children. Now that I've grown up, as has the rest of my old neighbourhood friends, we've all moved away, but the parents are still living in the same houses. Now I could count on one hand the amount of houses on my street that has children attending local schools, instead of the other way around. There aren't enough families moving in to take over my generation's schooling needs, meaning schools are being shut down, programs are being cut, and everything else that goes along with it.

People can't simply buy into the NDP's and teacher's association's blind propaganda.

That's the case for my old elementary school too when i went back to speak some of my old teachers.

Still, budget cut is still there.

Its hard to blame them though, cause of how overpriced housing is here.

There's a lot of elderly living in homes they will never sell, instead gifting them to the next generation when they finally pass. Its cause their family will never afford to buy in that neighbourhood, and the alternative to selling is taking some profit and moving into a closet of a condo with a sky-high condo fee.

Also the high cost of housing here means more people invest in their own homes, and don't have a lot left over to invest elsewhere. Why would you sell and turn over your investment, incurring high commission fees? Its not the same in other provinces, where housing is cheaper, so its easier to make the decision to move multiple times.

Oh, I'm in no way blaming people for doing this at all. I know my parents reasons, I know my neighbours reasons, and I fully understand it. All I was trying to say is that instead of people blindly listening to the NDP talk about how the Liberals are closing countless numbers of schools (supposedly for no reason), they should try to educate themselves (hah!) about why said schools are being closed.

I think the schooling thing is just evolution of the neighbourhood. They roll in cycles, I live in a new subdivision where there are new homes anywhere from just finished to 3 years old on the top end. I don't know exactly how many homes but theres a ton. On my block I'd say at least every other house has a kid under the age of 5 most around 1-3 years old. Being a new neighbourhood it's the opposite problem, not even close to enough schools for all the kids especially in another couple years.

I actually had this exact converstation with the dad of one of my old elementry school friends who I ran into. He was telling me the samething, when his kids were young everybody in his area had kids. They all cycled out around the same time and now the area is full of a bunch of 45-60 year old adults with no children living at home. It's the natural progression of areas.

You have just forfeited all right to argue in political discussions as far as I'm concerned. You can't bitch about something in which you don't participate.

Voter apathy is the single greatest political problem in this country, at both the provincial and national levels. Greater than scandal. Greater than governmental waste. It's easy to blame politicians for doing a lousy job, but we give them little incentive to clean up their acts. Vote them in. Vote them out. Send them a message. Write your MLA. Get involved. Do these things or shut the fuck up.