Geoff Russ: Ordinary Canadians shouldn't have to pay to educate people who hate them
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They form one of many cancerous cells of post-secondary students who spend most of their energy trying to undermine and demoralize everyone around them.
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To McGill's credit, it moved to cut ties with the students' union in April after it helped to lead a storming of the campus to protest the Israeli government and western support for it. Nonetheless, academia has much to answer for after spending years fostering this toxic political climate.
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Universities are packed with derision and outright slander for those who make higher education possible. Businessmen are portrayed as greedy, exploitative capitalists, while blue-collar labourers are portrayed as akin to racist zoo animals that must be studied as such.
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Those same people help ensure that public university tuition in Canada is generously affordable by covering the lion's share of the costs through taxpayer subsidies.
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At McGill, for example, a four-year undergraduate degree will set a young Canadian student or their family back by C$22,000 from Quebec, or C$48,000 if they come from outside the province. Even paying international student fees, an American who attends the University of Victoria will pay C$150,000, far less than they would fork over at the University of Oregon, which would cost C$188,000 for state residents or C$349,000 for anyone else.
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Canadian students who go abroad for their education will fare far worse. A three-year undergraduate degree at Bangor University in Wales, equivalent to a four-year degree here, for non-British students costs about £60,000, or about C$111,000. The University of Florida projects that out-of-state students will pay a little more than US$183,000 for their four-year degrees, which is roughly $250,000 in Canadian dollars.
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Earning an undergraduate degree in Canada is a bargain, but those who make that possible only get scorn and humiliation in return.
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The generations that arrived in the colonial era laid the bricks of places like Trinity College in Toronto and Dalhousie in Halifax, which were foundational to the growth of Canadian higher education. Today, their memory is filed under the category of 'settler.'
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'Settlers' can never be a positive force in the asinine racial theories of decolonial ideology, which have infiltrated public discourse everywhere. The existence of Canada has been a good thing for the world, however, and nothing will change the fact that it is a colonial country founded by settlers.
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