On a Thursday evening in High Park, the room was full before the event began.
Students, union leaders and opposition MPPs packed into a west-end community hall, all energized to challenge recent changes to the OSAP funding model.
The Ontario government announced on Feb. 12 changes to the post-secondary sector that include $6.4 billion in funding, yearly two per cent tuition hikes and changes to the loan-grant ratio.
It’s the latter announcement that has spurred multiple protests. The structure changes to a minimum of 75 per cent loans and a maximum of 25 per cent grants, down from the 'good ol’ days' of a maximum of 85 per cent grants and 15 per cent loans.
Narren Sivasegaram, a Grade 12 student at C.W. Jefferys C.I., was blunt about his concerns for his future.
“No young person wants to start their adult life in the hole,” he said.
Sivasegaram was clear about the benefits of OSAP under a predominantly grant-based system.
"OSAP empowers students to get out there and become contributing members of Ontario's economy and build the province up,” he said. “So, Doug Ford, by cutting OSAP, is hurting the province, and it's hurting the people who are going to build the province up in the future."
The movement is growing beyond a student-led protest, with local MPPs, labour organizations, student organizations, and youth-led groups in attendance, seizing the opportunity to rally around the students and promote the possibility of government change.
Rawan Habib, the executive director of the Canadian Federation of Students - Ontario, said there needs to be consistent increases in post-secondary funding.
“The program is on the verge of collapse due to this province's inability to prioritize it, an inability to fund post-secondary education adequately,” Habib said.
Habib says there is an ulterior motive behind funding education.
"It's all part of a privatized agenda to really make education even further inaccessible and make it only accessible to the particularly wealthy."
A day before a planned rally at Queen’s Park on March 24, Marit Stiles, the leader of the Ontario NDP, said she would bring forward a motion in the legislature on March 23 to restore OSAP funding.
"Doug Ford has shown again just how out of touch he is with where young people and families are at in Ontario right now,” Stiles said.
She said people are “up in arms about this” across the province as families struggle with the high cost of living.
“You know, people may not understand that if you haven't been in school for a long time, but the truth is, tuition right now is very high, and so, you know, asking people to take on that debt means, you know, generational debt,” the opposition leader said.
Stiles said she doesn’t think the OSAP system was broken.
"I don't buy that from Doug Ford, I think that he saw some TikTok video, maybe, and came up with this idea that there was like massive fraud,” she said.
Alex Fontanin, a finance student at TMU, who is privileged enough not to need OSAP, was there on principle.
“You should still fight these OSAP cuts, if not for you, for your province and the people around you,” he said.
Fontanin said that there are benefits to having an educated society.
“When a society is well educated, society is safer, more wealthy and more prosperous,” he said.
These town halls, rallies, protests, and recent high school walkouts could signal the beginning of change, whether it be a walk-back by the Ford government to the previous OSAP funding model, or perhaps they will gain enough steam for a regime change.
The young people who were too young to vote were there, articulating a hope for the future, keenly aware that they would have to fight for it.
Despite many expressed grievances, the crowd was energized, at least for this night, at the prospect that their collective empowerment could facilitate real changes.
As Fontanin said, it isn't just about the underprivileged.
"Just because you were born with a silver spoon doesn't mean you have to be a Doug Ford,” Fontanin said. “You can still fight for a more equitable and fairer society."
