GUELPH POLITICAST #123 - Canadian Federation of Students Ontario

The provincial election has finally begun! It doesn't feel like it, but the campaign is just now getting underway as we count down to the election on June 7. If you're looking for interviews with the local candidate, those will be heard on Open Sources Guelph starting next week. For the next few weeks on the Guelph Politicast, we're going to talk about the issues!

To kick things off, we're going to talk about post-secondary students and the issues that concern them. That may sound like we're going to talk a lot about tuition fees and other matters in education, but you may be surprised to learn that young voters in college and university are concerned with many of the same issues everyone else is: jobs, healthcare, childcare, transit, and yes, the every increasing cost of post-secondary education.

To take us through all this from the student perspective is Nour Alideeb, the Chairperson/ Président of the Canadian Federation of Students-Ontario. CFS represents 350,000 college and university students in Ontario and and works with 35 partner student unions on campuses across the province. And since university funding and administration is in provincial jurisdiction, an election is the best chance they have to impact policy and decisions.

So with that in mind, this week's podcast is dedicated to those post-secondary issues and challenges. We cover a wide-range off issues including the need for affordable housing geared to students, the growing need for regional transit as more students are commuting to school, and what can be done about the growing mental health needs of students. We also touch on the job action on several campuses this last year, and yes, most importantly, the effect of those every increasing tuition fees.

So let's do some old fashioned book learning about what matters to students on this week's Guelph Politicast!

If you would like learn more about the CFS efforts to raise awareness about election issues, you can visit their election website here, and you can learn more about the CFS-Ontario by clicking here.

The theme music for the Guelph Politicast is from the KPM Klassics collection by Syd Dale.

The host for the Guelph Politicast is Podbean. Find more episodes of the Politicast here.

Remember that the Politicast Podbean channel is also the host for podcast versions of Open Sources Guelph. The previous Thursday's episode of Open Sources will be posted on Mondays.