British Columbia

Student occupation greets SFU fee hike

Enough is enough, students at Simon
Fraser University decided unanimously
before occupying the campus administra-
tion building Jan. 23 after the Board of
Governors voted in a tuition fee hike for the
10th straight year.

Some 150 students took over the board
room after governors failed to hear pleas to
freeze tuition for next year and wait for a
report from a proposed royal commission
into post-secondary education in B.C.

A spirited rally saw hundreds of suppor-
ters jam the university’s south concourse
Wednesday, and some 50 students and stu-
dent teachers continued the occupation,
while the rest organized support actions on
the outside. The end of the occupation was
contingent upon the outcome of a meeting
today with Advanced Education Minister
Bruce Strachan in the government’s down-
town Vancouver offices.

“We lobbied the board offering them
realistic alternatives to a tuition fee increase,
and they voted us down by a majority of

10-3. They said that freezing tuition would
send the wrong message to the govern-
ment,” Rebecca Raby of the Simon Fraser
Students Society told the rally.

“Well, we’re sending our own message to
the government — the buck stops here,”
she declared to wild applause.

Raby, the society’s internal relations
officer, noted the occupying students had
struck a statement of principles that
declared education a right, and that the
current financing of post-secondary educa-
tion and student financial aid undermine
that right.

Between speeches, students chanted
“freeze the fees” in support of the student
society’s third annual campaign to end tui-
tion hikes at Simon Fraser.

External relations officer Christoph Sick-
ing acknowledged students from Douglas
College and even from campuses in the
Interior in the crowd, and reported that the
Canadian Federation of Students national
office, the Ontario Federation of Students

When, oh when, will Vancouver city
council finally take the plunge and set up
some form of rent review board to roll
back unjustified rent increases. Never, if
the Non Partisan Association has its
way.

Rent increases of 50 and 60 per cent
have become common. For people living
on a few hundred dollars a month, this
creates an impossible situation.

Not all landlords are guilty of impos-
ing such huge rent increases. Some of
them have limited their increases to
increases in the cost of living. That is not
unreasonable. But a large number of
apartment owners are charging all the
traffic will bear, knowing that they have
tenants at their mercy. They know there

are no vacancies. Tenants have no place
to go and landlords can charge what they
like.

It’s immoral and completely unjusti-

fied. It’s exploitation and profiteering of
the worst kind. But under our laws, or
rather the lack of them, it’s quite legal.

It was not always like this. We had
rent control legislation in B.C. until 1983
when it was abolished by the Social
Credit government. That assured the
support of landlords and developers for
Social Credit election campaigns.

The issue has come up in city council
time and again. In fact it’s coming up at
almost every meeting now as tenants step
up their demands for rent controls.

It came up against city council on Jan.
9. Committee of Progressive Electors
aldermen Libby Davies, Bruce Eriksen
and I demanded that city council set upa
municipal rent review board of its own
with power to roll back excessive rent
increases.

But the NPA majority wouldn’t
budge. All it would do was to agree that
another request be made for the province
to reinstate the office of the Rentalsman.
It was just a way of passing the buck

NPA fiddles while city
housing crisis worsens

because the NPA knows the Social
Credit cabinet is adamantly opposed to
rent controls of any kind.

The NPA majority on council said
that if the cabinet fails to bring in rent
control legislation at the next session of
the legislature, it will “look at other
alternatives.” That meaningless threat is
hardly one that will cause the provincial
cabinet to change its position.

There are only two solutions at this’
point for the zero vacancy rate and
excessive rent increases.

The first is the establishment of a rent
review board with power to limit unjusti-
fied rent increases and to roll them back
where they are excessive.

The second is a large scale program to
build affordable housing. Our city is
today one of the fastest growing in Can-
ada. Plenty of housing is being built for

Harry
Rankin

the wealthy but none for ordinary citi-
zens. :

This is the situation that needs to be
corrected.

Do you remember when the Social
Credit government sold the Expo 86
lands (worth now between $1 billion and
$2 billion) to a Hong Kong billionaire for
$145 million? Only $50 million of that
had to be paid immediately; the balance
was to be paid over a 20 year period.
Later the $145 million was reduced to
$125 million.

At that time the government also
agreed to pay the cost of cleaning up the
contaminated soil on Expo 86 lands.
Now it is revealed that the cost of the
cleanup could be as high as $60 million!
That’s more than the government got as
a down payment for the land.

What a scam. It never was a sale, it
was a giveaway right from the start. The
Hong Kong billionaire is getting Expo 86
lands for nothing. B.C. taxpayers will
now subsidize him for taking it.

2 ¢ Pacific Tribune, January 29, 1990

and students from the Maritimes had sent
messages of support.

“We're united on this and we’re sticking
together,” he declared.

Support messages were also read from
the Marineworkers , and Boilermakers
union, the Communist Party, the Canadian
Association of Industrial, Mechanical and
Allied Workers, the Vancouver and District
Labour Council, the Downtown Eastside
Residents Association, NDP MLA and
education critic Barry Jones, and several
other individuals and organizations.

Following the rally several hundred stu-
dents marched to and around the adminis-
tration building. In an impromptu address,
university president William Saywell told
the protestors he agreed that a new structure
for post-secondary education financing was
necessary.

The occupation was spontaneous, but
followed a formal protest that began with a
“beggar’s banquet” dinner of macaroni and
cheese and music on campus the afternoon
before the Board of Governors meeting.

That day also, 5,000 students rallied at
the University of Victoria and staged a four-
hour boycott of classes over impending
hefty tuition hikes.

It was Credited with helping to inspire the
occupation, which began after the board
heard presentations from the Student
Society pointing out the hardship lower
income students face from spiralling tui-
tions and suggesting the board use a $2.4
million surplus to hold fees at the current
level.

Students were stunned and angry, the
Simon Fraser student newspaper The Peak
reported, when the board acknowledged
the student concerns and then proceeded to
vote for an increase of $3 per credit hour, or
approximately 5.6 per cent for the upcom-

_ ing semester, raising tuition fees to more _

than $1,600 for two semesters.

Inside the administration building, Paul
Mendes, former Student Society president
and a student representative on the Board
of Governors, in an interview assessed the
continuing fee hikes as a means of making
universities the preserve of upper income

students, while those from more modest
backgrounds are ghettoized in the colleges.

He said that the board, in imposing a
cumulative hike of more than 200 per cent
since 1979, “has not done enough to recog-
nize that the problem has been a deliberate,
systematic underfunding of the post-
secondary system by the provincial govern-
ment.

“On Jan. 17, (Premier) Bill Vander Zalm
went on TV and said we’ve led Canada in
education. We beg to differ, and we're tired
of what has been essentially a scam of the
taxpayers.

“In fact, what we’re seeing is an educa-
tional system that is subsidized by everyone
for attendance by the few ... and we’re just
fed up with it,”” Mendes, one of three gover-
nors who voted against the tuition hike,
said.

~ In the meeting with Strachan set for
Thursday, the student representatives were
seeking a commitment from the minister to
set up a meeting with Vander Zalm, who left
for Europe Wednesday.

Mendes said the students who jammed
the board meeting Tuesday were genuinely
shocked at the fee hike vote, since they had
presented the results of several months of
research backing their call for a freeze.

Simon Fraser University has been raising
its academic standards over the past few
years in an effort to cut back on applica-
tions, he observed: “Since the Forties
they’ve been encouraging people to get a
post-secondary education. In the Eighties,
they’re trying to kick people out.”

The creation of university-degree courses
in colleges and the development of a univer-
sity in the Interior, staffed entirely by ses-
sional instructors, means ‘a two-tiered
system is developing in the province: uni-
versities for the wealthy, colleges for eve-
rybody else,’ Mendes said.

~~ The Canadian Federation of Students-

Pacific Region has been waging its own
campaign for a freeze on tuitions, and has
the support of faculty, college administra-
tors and other. groups in its demand for a
provincial royal commission into post-
secondary education financing.

By February 1...

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