the students v. doug ford

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Who will OSAP cuts impact

Did you know that, prior to Ford's 2026 cuts, Ontario ranked last in per-student funding in Canada? That's right, the province with the third most expensive city in Canada run by a neoliberal conservative provincial premier – who barely builds more private housing, financialises basic needs, has no actual plans to make employment more accessible especially for youth – is now cutting funds to help one’s education.

Let’s hone in on who this will affect.

According to several reports, racialised people are more likely to live in poverty in Canada. Furthermore racialised immigrants are more likely to be in poverty, with white individuals making it out poverty by the second generation, and racialised people making it out by the third generation or later. These trends are trending upwards since 2020, with no plans from the premier to reduce it. As discussed earlier, Ontario – the GTA in particular – faces mass neoliberal and financialisation projects and affordable/social housing projects receive little social assistance rates from the Ontario government. There are barely any plans to make affordable housing, transit, or bring in decent employment opportunities geared towards lower-income and racialism youth.

So, we have racialised people, especially women, who already work low wage and/or precarious jobs (if working any job at all), and living in an apartment they and their family can barely afford rent for due to limited protections and affordability policies. Post-secondary schooling is now even more outta reach for these folks, despite the fact they pay taxes at the same rate as someone who is much more rich and able to afford post-secondary education outta their own pocket that should directly fund their desire to be educated and form networks at the academia level.

This pushes already financially and socially vulnerable students to pay from their pockets, take out even more loans, and be in debt after graduation. This only reproduces poverty cycles for the student and their family, which may disincentivise them from attending post-secondary.

Though an anecdote, I am currently a university student in Ontario, and access to education has been by far the most important thing in my life. It helped me build networks with professionals, professors, and classmates alike, which led to a job and experience in the field I actually enjoy. These opportunities are prevalent throughout schools in Canada, and to gatekeep them through finances is, put bluntly, racist, sexist, and classist, given the intersectionalities and direct correlation between the categories. They will further subjugate lower-income, racialised, and immigrant students and their families.

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30% of families in Toronto won’t be able to send children to any form of post secondary because of these cuts to OSAP.

THIRTY PER CENT OF TORONTO’S FAMILIES ARE LOW INCOME.

So many futures cut short based on vibes and misinformation. It’s so unfortunate that no one in this government has budged even though this is a priority for just about everyone. Imagine having to reevaluate your entire plan because your government refuses to invest in you and your education.

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Mar 4 2026

Queen’s Park

Hands Off Our Education Rally

Thousands of people from across the province came together to show the Ford Government we aren’t happy. Students — high school and post secondary, teachers, professors, staff, and family; all made their voices heard.

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It seems like the Ford Government has made it pretty clear that they are afraid of an educated population. I mean why else would they do everything in their power to make it harder for people to study?

There have been several attempts by this government to quash dissent in a way that is extremely harmful to the progression of our society.

1. The courts ruled that he was to release his phone records; he proposed changes to Freedom of Information Act Requests legislation.

2. They’ve gone in and removed elected school trustees from their positions, they are actively changing the structure of school boards, firing hundreds of teachers, Paul Calandria’s notice to high school students to “leave politics out of grad ceremonies”

3. Ford’s attempt at stealing YTZ to expand and allow for jets; moving the science centre when the original is still structurally sound. When anyone speaks out against this, he talks over them, ignoring the facts.

4. The ABSURD police presence at the end of the March 4th rally where several people were roughed up and assaulted at the hands of the police.

The list goes on.

It is shameful that this is the type of neoliberal regime we must live in. Ford is a bully. He and his government must be stopped. It starts with us recognizing how everything is all connected.

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Repost from CFSON

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Cheat Sheet: Your Guide to Understanding the Changes to OSAP

Students will be eligible to receive a maximum of 25% of their OSAP funding as grants, down from 85%.

Students will be eligible to receive a minimum of 75% of their OSAP funding as loans, up from 15%. This represents a 400% increase in loans.

Students at private career colleges will no longer be eligible for grants at all.

Low-income students will have additional costs absorbed through an enhanced Student Access Guarantee, but the government hasn't explained how that will work.

In addition, publicly funded colleges and universities will also be permitted to raise tuition fees by up to 2% for 3 years, and then by 2% or the 3-year average rate of inflation (whichever is less) after that. The current 3-year average rate of inflation is 2.8%, so don't expect that 2% increase to be going anywhere any time soon.

(source)

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Feeling helpless about what’s happening to OSAP? Here are some ways to get involved:

Join the Ontario NDP’s Save OSAP campaign

Join the Canadian Federation of Students-Ontario

Call or write to your MPP to voice your concerns. Don’t know who your MPP is? Find them here.

Have a tip? Send us an ask!

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Don’t forget to stay in the know.

Keep checking the OSAP tag on Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, and Twitter! New things pop up every single day. From interviews to campaign updates. Education is an important pillar of organizing.

Your students’ union is also a great tool for staying informed!

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The OSAP Data Gap

We all know Doug Ford loves to make things up to make his policy ideas seem reasonable in comparison. We’ve all heard his comments on basket-weaving courses and how students are going out and blowing their OSAP money “buying fancy watches and cologne”. It’s like he opens his mouth and you just know some nonsense is going to come out. But what’s really galling about his latest round of nonsense regarding the changes to OSAP is that the Ontario government actually makes it really hard to prove that he’s lying.

Like when you hear about kids getting OSAP when their parents already make six figures so they can get a luxurious 400 square foot condo in downtown Toronto on the taxpayer’s dime, you’d think there’d be some evidence to back that up, right? And maybe there is, if you work for the province. But if you’re just some guy, you just have to take the premier at his word. Because as it turns out, despite pretending that the government values openness and transparency in providing data and not misusing taxpayer funds, they don’t actually publish any information about who gets OSAP, how much OSAP they get, or what they get OSAP for. 

In fact, if you want to know how much OSAP debt the average student has, the government has only published data for 2003-2013, and it’s all aggregated by degree type. It doesn’t tell you anything about who these students are, what they studied, where they studied, where they live – nothing.

That means that if you want to say that cutting OSAP unfairly hurts minority students – racialized students, new Canadians, lower income, etc. – you kind of just have to guess. Based on this recent post from the CCPA, we know that racialized groups are more likely to have student debt, and that households with student debt are more likely to fall behind on bill payments AND more likely to have to resort to predatory payday loans. But that information is based on data from Stats Can collected through the Survey of Financial Security, and it doesn’t actually tell us if that’s OSAP debt or something else. The SFS also doesn’t collect any data points on ethnicity other than racialized or non-racialized, and also doesn’t collect any data points on immigration status.

The last point is especially troubling to me since we see evidence that the longer a family has been in Canada, the less likely they are to attain the highest levels of education. The 2021 census reported that 26.7% of Canadians had a bachelor’s degree or higher. Among first generation Canadians, that number jumps to 38%; but by the third generation or higher, it’s down to 20%. The effect is the same even controlled for visible minority status. But what’s driving that? Is it worse access to education? Worse access to OSAP? Who knows!

Let's not pretend the government doesn't know what it's doing by either choosing not to collect this kind of data or choosing not to publish it. Just as in public health spheres, "consistently and systematically omit[ting] or misrepresent[ing] the racial and ethnic identities of people who face the greatest structural...risks" makes it impossible dismantle the structural barriers they face. If we don't know how policy impacts are distributed across a given population, we can't assess whether it's working the way it's supposed to. If we don't know if a government policy is working, we don't know if the government can be trusted to make decisions for us. That should trouble all of us.

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OSAP Debt Calculator

To help you get a sense of the implications of the proposed changes to OSAP funding, we made this calculator that estimates how much debt you would have carried under the existing model, and what that amount would be instead if you had been subject to the new model. (Note that this only includes tuition, because as we've discussed elsewhere, Ontario doesn't publish granular data on who has OSAP debt or how much!)

Just to give you an idea of what we're talking about, here's what it would look like if you did a four-year undergrad in the humanities and graduated in 2011:

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You might think that the changes to OSAP have nothing to do with international students. After all, international students can’t get OSAP, so how do they fit in?

You see, back in 2024 the federal government saw that Canadians were struggling to find affordable housing, so instead of doing something smart like, oh I don’t know, building more housing, they decided to reduce the number of international student visas being issued. In 2024 the federal government capped that number at 485,000. 2025 saw a further reduction by 10%, down to 437,000. For 2026, the government has announced a further reduction by 7%, lowering the number to 408,000.

I guess the thing they didn’t take into account is that international students pay significantly higher tuition fees than domestic students? And that maybe those tuition fees are load-bearing for a lot postsecondary institutions? Because in 2024, Ontario universities lost an estimated $300 million in revenues associated with international students who, for obvious reasons, never materialized.

In 2025, that number jumped to $700 million.

And in 2026, Ontario universities might be seeing more than $1 billion in lost revenues.

Now, I’m not here to argue whether we should be charging international students such high tuition that just a 16% reduction in international student visas is now contributing to the total meltdown of Ontario postsecondary education. That’s a different argument for a different day. But the fact is that cutting international student visas hasn’t solved the housing crisis (duh) and it also hasn’t solved the affordability crisis (double duh), but it has put Ontario universities into crisis mode such that they’re begging the provincial government for more funding just to break even.

And sure, it’s cool that Doug Ford has apparently decided to give them that funding. What’s decidedly not cool is that he’s doing it by taking that money out of OSAP and calling that a win.

[saveourosap]

Cheat Sheet: Your Guide to Understanding the Changes to OSAP

Students will be eligible to receive a maximum of 25% of their OSAP funding as grants, down from 85%.

Students will be eligible to receive a minimum of 75% of their OSAP funding as loans, up from 15%. This represents a 400% increase in loans.

Students at private career colleges will no longer be eligible for grants at all.

Low-income students will have additional costs absorbed through an enhanced Student Access Guarantee, but the government hasn't explained how that will work.

In addition, publicly funded colleges and universities will also be permitted to raise tuition fees by up to 2% for 3 years, and then by 2% or the 3-year average rate of inflation (whichever is less) after that. The current 3-year average rate of inflation is 2.8%, so don't expect that 2% increase to be going anywhere any time soon.

(source)

[saveourosap]

Feeling helpless about what’s happening to OSAP? Here are some ways to get involved:

Join the Ontario NDP’s Save OSAP campaign

Join the Canadian Federation of Students-Ontario

Call or write to your MPP to voice your concerns. Don’t know who your MPP is? Find them here.

Have a tip? Send us an ask!

[saveourosap]

Cheat Sheet: Your Guide to Understanding the Changes to OSAP

Students will be eligible to receive a maximum of 25% of their OSAP funding as grants, down from 85%.

Students will be eligible to receive a minimum of 75% of their OSAP funding as loans, up from 15%. This represents a 400% increase in loans.

Students at private career colleges will no longer be eligible for grants at all.

Low-income students will have additional costs absorbed through an enhanced Student Access Guarantee, but the government hasn't explained how that will work.

In addition, publicly funded colleges and universities will also be permitted to raise tuition fees by up to 2% for 3 years, and then by 2% or the 3-year average rate of inflation (whichever is less) after that. The current 3-year average rate of inflation is 2.8%, so don't expect that 2% increase to be going anywhere any time soon.

(source)

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References

Arumuhathas, S. (2026). Intersectional realities: Addressing the gaps in equity infrastructure to include racialized international students at a Canadian university. Journal of International Students, 16(8), 1-22. https://doi.org/10.32674/pzt79b15

Blancher, P. (2026, February 19). Colleges and Universities minister defends OSAP cuts. In The Canadian Press. Canadian Press Enterprises Inc.

Bond, M. (2026, February 17). Premier Ford suggests some students taking advantage of OSAP as he defends cuts to government grants. CityNews. https://toronto.citynews.ca/2026/02/17/premier-ford-suggests-some-students-taking-advantage-of-osap-as-he-defends-cuts-to-government-grants/

Canada Historical Inflation Rate. (n.d.) https://www.rateinflation.com/inflation-rate/canada-historical-inflation-rate/

Coherent Digital. (2017). Data Infrastructure for Studying Equity of Access to Postsecondary Education in Ontario. Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario.

Coherent Digital. (2019). Postsecondary Participation and Household Income. Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario.

Corral, D., Arayata, C. A., Childs, R. A., & de Leon, M. C. (2025). The propensities and purposes of racial and ethnic student data collection in Ontario universities. Race, Ethnicity and Education, 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/13613324.2025.2585193

Canadian Federation of Students-Ontario. (2010). Racialised impact of tuition fees: assessing the social cost of post-secondary education. Canadian Federation of Students-Ontario = Fédération canadienne des étudiantes et étudiants-Ontario.

Government of Canada, Statistics Canada. (2025, August 18). Employees with low pay, 2024. https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/14-28-0001/2025001/article/00002-eng.htm

Government of Canada. (2025, November 25). 2026 provincial and territorial allocations under the international student cap. https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/news/notices/2026-provincial-territorial-allocations-under-international-student-cap.html

Government of Ontario. (2020). Average OSAP debt [Dataset]. Open Data Canada.

Government of Ontario. (2026, February 12). Ontario Investing $6.4 Billion to Support Postsecondary Sector’s Long-Term Success and Sustainability. https://news.ontario.ca/en/release/1007034/ontario-investing-64-billion-to-support-postsecondary-sectors-long-term-success-and-sustainability

Gupta, Tania Das & Rajdeep Sidhu (2023). When the State Is Complicit in Gender-Based Violence against Women: Exploring Experiences of Housing Violence among Punjabi Women International Students in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). Canadian Ethnic Studies, 55(3): 101-121.

Holtzman, G. S., A. Khoshkhoo, N., & Nsoesie, E. O. (2022). The Racial Data Gap: Lack of Racial Data as a Barrier to Overcoming Structural Racism. The American Journal of Bioethics, 22(3), 39-42. 

HousingTO. (2025). HousingTO 2024–2025 Housing Progress Report. https://www.toronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/978e-HousingTO2024-2025ProgressReport.pdf

Mullen, A. L., & Li, Y. (2025). Belonging beyond borders: a comparative analysis of international and domestic students at a Canadian university. Higher Education, 90(3), 801–818. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-024-01351-6

OCUFA. (2026, February 13). New funding announcement welcome, but still leaves Ontario at the bottom of the heap, increases student debt - OCUFA. https://ocufa.on.ca/press-releases/new-funding-announcement-welcome-but-still-leaves-ontario-at-the-bottom-of-the-heap-increases-student-debt/

OFL’s Sid Ryan Calls on the Ontario Student Movement to Take to the Streets to Stop Punishingly High Tuition Fees: OFL Officers to Join Mass Protest in Montreal. (2012). Marketwire.

Pandher, J., Dhami, S. (2024, August 26). Thousands of international students in Canada face deportation, sparking protests nationwide. CityNews. https://toronto.citynews.ca/2024/08/26/canada-international-students-deportation-protests/

Premier Doug Ford recorded highest level of per-person debt in Ontario’s history. (2026). In Canada NewsWire. PR Newswire Association LLC.

Revington, N., & August, M. (2020). Making a market for itself: The emergent financialization of student housing in Canada. Environment and Planning, 52(5), 856-877. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X19884577

Snisarenko, A. (2026, February 17). Ford tells students to not pick 'basket-weaving courses' in wake of OSAP cuts. CBC News. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/doug-ford-osap-cuts-9.7094009

Spring, C. J. (2024). The Costs of Inclusion: Debt, Migration, and the Privatization of Post-Secondary Education in Canada. [Doctoral dissertation, York University]. YorkSpace Institutional Repository.

Statistics Canada. (n.d.) Chart 1 Poverty rates among people in Canada in the third generation or more, 2020. https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/230823/cg-b001-eng.htm

Statistics Canada. (n.d.) Table 37-10-0003-01  Canadian undergraduate tuition fees by field of study (current dollars). https://doi.org/10.25318/3710000301-eng

Tranjan, R. (2026, March 18). Kicking away the ladder: The true cost of changes to the Ontario Student Assistance Program. Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. https://www.policyalternatives.ca/news-research/kicking-away-the-ladder-the-true-cost-of-changes-to-the-ontario-student-assistance-program/

Wickham, E. (2026, April 10). Ontario’s recent policy changes are part of a larger pattern to centralize power and silence dissent, critics say. Press Progress. https://pressprogress.ca/ontarios-recent-policy-changes-are-part-of-a-larger-pattern-to-centralize-power-and-silence-dissent-critics-say/

Queiser, S., Wilson, B., & Huh, J. (2024, November). Fighting for our future child and Family poverty report card, Toronto 2024. https://campaign2000.ca/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/2024-Toronto-Report-Card.pdf

Social Planning Toronto. (2024, December 2). Fighting for our Future: Child and Family Poverty Report Card, Toronto 2024. https://www.socialplanningtoronto.org/childpoverty2024#