Political triangulation is a thing that centrists know well; it’s where you adopt a position of your opponent to appear pragmatic, denying the opponent a position to attack from, then paint them as the extremists unworthy of your vote.
There are exceptions to this rule. Adopting policies which are inherently racist or bigoted in nature should be avoided.
But these are desperate times for the federal Liberals.
There’s an undercurrent of resentment in various western nations about “foreigners” who “come here and take [x, y, z] from our own folks and we need to take it back”.
What they’re not telling you is that politicians who follow through with these anti-foreigner policies aren’t interested in providing “for our own”, they’re just full of hate towards the different looking folks and used a right-wing populist mythology to score your vote from you.
The joke is on you.
It’s a hard truth that every province relied on a mix of foreign students (who pay full rates) to help subsidize domestic students who were largely subsidized.
Ottawa has unleashed a policy change to severely restrict the number of foreign students under the pretense that they want to stop the “cash cow” of milking foreign students of money (at full tuition rates).
This is going to ring popular in certain voting blocks to be sure; but popular doesn’t always mean ‘right’.
This policy change won’t open up those former seats in universities to domestic students..the extra money that subsidized the domestic seats the rest of our students chase after has been chased away.
If anything, expect that tuition rates in many provinces to either go up – or enrollment to decrease.
Right wing populism has real world negative consequences, I just didn’t expect that to flow from federal Liberals – not this blatant at least.
There is one upside though. It will help fully expose the funding shortfall that government at every level is guilty of when it comes to post secondary education.
The view from Pete 