Decades before most of us had ever heard the phrase “novel coronavirus,” researchers at universities around the world were advancing our understanding of vaccines. Their basic research laid the foundation to develop the vaccines that changed the course of the pandemic, in record time.
Basic research — the type of work in science, social sciences and the humanities that has no obvious application nor agenda — is the core of scholarly production. It’s central to the value that universities bring to contemporary societies.
Education
Muslim young women who wear the hijab are stigmatized because of their religious and ethnic or racial backgrounds. Community-based reports in Winnipeg have documented how Muslim young women have been humiliated and threatened by their peers and teachers in schools through physical attacks, bullying, and harassment. These experiences often happen with limited if any accountability from schools.
In the neverending right-wing-led campaigns against social progress, public schools are frequently targeted. And there’s a reason: while battered and underfunded, these institutions are still symbolic of the actualization that we are more than just individual agents or even the sum of our parts; that differences needn’t divide; that a fairer, kinder future for all of us, starting with our kids, is always worth committing to, investing in and being collectively responsible for.
This report calls on the provincial government to work with school divisions, unions, and the ministry of education to equalize wages for educational support staff across the province. Pay disparities are not present for teachers across the province. The Manitoba government, which controls all significant funding sources in our school system, must play an active role in ensuring that these wage gaps are eliminated and ensure that rural school divisions operations are no longer subsidized by substandard wages paid to a predominately female workforce.
Over the last three decades, no province in Canada has moved more aggressively, or more consistently, to cut public funding to universities than Ontario. Ontario’s funding model, if it can be called that, is simply less funding, year after year.
TORONTO — The government of Ontario should double its funding to public universities in the province, a new report from the Ontario office of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives says.
Previously published in the Winnipeg Free Press October 26, 2023
INVESTING in adult education should be a cornerstone of the new Manitoba government’s approach to supporting people who want to work. In his speech on election night, Premier Kinew was emphatic in his commitment to supporting people who want to move into the paid labour force. Adult education is an effective and relatively inexpensive way of doing that.
Previously published in the Winnipeg Free Press September 9, 2023
As educators and children are heading back to the classroom next week, it’s worth reviewing what they’re returning to after seven years of funding shortfalls and cuts. Teachers are doing their best with the resources they have, but it’s not enough.
What happens to a public school system when top-down funding cuts are imposed with little to no consultation or assessment of the ongoing needs of the system? No one wins.
Five years after public health insurance was rescinded from international students in Manitoba, and in the aftermath of the most volatile years of the COVID-19 pandemic, this report brings together testimonials shared by international students across a variety of venues to highlight the ongoing challenges they face with respect to healthcare access and the active ways inwhich students themselves have engaged in advocacy around this issue.
Previously published in the Winnipeg Free Press August 21, 2023