Dollars and education sense

In the 1960s, CKLY Radio occupied an old house on the main drag of Lindsay, Ont.
In the 1960s, CKLY Radio occupied an old house on the main drag of Lindsay, Ont.

That summer of 1969 came to an end for me with a flourish. I pulled out all my favourite LPs (record albums) from the CKLY Radio (Lindsay, Ont.) library to air that night of the finale. I assembled all the best recording star anecdotes that I could use with each of my choices of songs. I called all my friends who’d been listening to many of my all-night broadcasts from Victoria Day to Labour Day, through that summer, in hopes they would listen. And when 6 a.m. arrived and my final show of the summer came to an end, I signed off.

“That’s my final All Night House Party broadcast,” I said into the microphone. “Thanks for listening. Maybe I’ll see you next year.”

That summer I had worked from May 24 weekend – 10 p.m. to 6 a.m., six nights a week – through to the September Labour Day Monday. I was proud of the broadcasting I had done. I was honoured to have gathered a pretty loyal following around the Kawartha Lakes region. And I felt pretty confident the manager of CKLY Radio would invite me back the next summer to repeat the show. (He didn’t.) But most important, I deposited my last on-air pay-cheque in the bank. I had worked about 13 weeks. I had added an important broadcast credit to my resume. Even better, I had raised enough cash from my CKLY pay-cheques, to cover my tuition – about $1,200 – to go back to Ryerson that fall and complete the courses for my Radio and Television Arts diploma.

I discovered this week, from data released by Statistics Canada and from listening to senior economist Armine Yalnizyan of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA), that by comparison I had it very easy back on 1969. Yalnizyan explained on both CBC Radio and TV that I had probably worked – on average – about 230 minimum-wage hours at CKLY to pay for my undergraduate diploma, while students attending much the same kind of media course today would have to accumulate the equivalent of 570 minimum-wage hours.

“We say to our kids, ‘Go to university if you want a good professional degree,’” Yalnizyan told the CBC. “But that’s getting more difficult to do.”

In other words, tuition – the money today’s youth and their families have to save to keep those students in class and accumulating the appropriate credits – costs two and a half times as much today as it did when their Babyboomer parents or grandparents were saving cash for a college or university education 40 years ago. According to the latest research from Yalnizyan’s CCPA the smallest increase in the number of hours required to pay for tuition was n Newfoundland and Labrador – about 16 per cent; while Ontario has experienced the greatest increase of minimum-wage work to pay tuition – about 173 per cent.

There’re a lot of numbers in there. But what they mean essentially is that our kids and grandkids, trying to pay for their post-secondary educations, have to work at two or three jobs during their down time (usually in the summer) in order to emerge from their holiday break with enough cash in their bank accounts to pay colleges and universities the tuition for the coming year.

In addition to the hardship this whole scenario inflicts on students, it also creates an odd result at colleges and universities, perhaps to their benefit. The post-secondary institutions now have to gear their programs to have students in their halls of higher learning not for three or four years. Now the students enroll in programs over a period of five or six years, inflicting even greater hardship on families funding their kids’ education. And if the students can’t raise the cash in their savings accounts, it means they have to go further into debt, not by just a few thousand dollars, but more often by tens of thousands of dollars.

“I’ll be paying off my student loans well into my 40s,” I remember hearing one of my students lament.

Just this week, I overheard a number of my own journalism program students. They were discussing the nature of the courses, the background of the students and the tuitions they paid for their educations. Typical are the tuitions for University of Toronto (Scarborough College) – somewhere in the neighbourhood of $8,000 per semester. That’s about five times what I would have paid 40 years ago. But when I asked one of my students about the UTSC tuitions, she shocked me.

“That $8,000 is nothing,” she said. “I’m an international student (from outside Canada). Our tuition for the same course is nearly four times that amount, over $30,000.”

I wondered how many more summertime all-night shows I might have had to broadcast had I been an international student. I’d never have made it.

Quiet victor

Nelson Mandela emerges from Robben Island prison in February 1990.
Nelson Mandela emerges from Robben Island prison in February 1990.

The morning the world changed, I had tumbled from my warm bed, found a cup of coffee to help me on my way and driven from the countryside to the old CBC Radio building on Jarvis Street, next to CBC corporate head offices in downtown Toronto. By 5 a.m. I had cleared my head and my throat to deliver one of my first newscasts for the CBC Network that morning. Little did I know within the first hours of my shift, I would be part of something momentous.

“Here is the CBC News,” I said at the top of each hour that morning to begin the five-minute hourly newscast. But that day I also got the chance to announce repeatedly as the top story, “Nelson Mandela, the black African leader imprisoned for treason since 1963, has this morning left notorious Robben Island prison, a free man.”

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Closest to the premiers

A few weeks ago, as I showered, shaved and made my way to work, CBC Radio’s local Toronto morning show invited audience comment. Host Matt Galloway wondered: “Where do Torontonians go, to find absolute silence?”

In a matter of a few seconds, I had an answer and texted it to him: “Sealed inside the rare books section at the Robarts Library, right down to the white gloves so your hands don’t rustle pages.”

I hadn’t thought about Ontario’s 17th premier in a long time. But when Galloway posed the question, I quickly remembered research I had conducted back in the early 1970s. I needed to find excerpts from particularly rare books and the only source was the then brand new John P. Robarts Research Library at the University of Toronto. By coincidence, this past week, I’ve been reading my colleague Steve Paikin’s new book, “Paikin and the Premiers.” Among other things, Paikin reminded me that Premier Robarts gave this province much more than a quiet research library.

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Lost art of listening

Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt, during the Arab Spring revolution, when a dictator had to listen or else. Photo SourceFed.com

About a year ago, I was invited to speak to the Writers’ Community of York Region. As the date of the talk approached – last Sunday, Dec. 9 – I began to prepare my presentation. Normally, for these kinds of talks, I rely on my collection of personal anecdotes, remembrances and war stories – literally and figuratively – to get me through the event. Then, I remembered why I had been invited.

“This is a group of writers,” the speaking convenor had said. “So they’ll be interested in your research and writing… You might want to address the challenges of being a journalist and non-fiction writer.”

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Between the eyes question

Toronto Police march in tribute to officer killed in the line of duty in 2011. Photo courtesy Octavian Lacatusu.

Everybody’s been talking about it this week. Most people have an opinion. Some blame gangs. Others point their fingers at government. A few say the courts are too lenient. But just about everybody has something to say about guns and gun crime. It came up at the milk store the other day. One man looked at it this way.

“Hey, it could be a lot worse,” he said. “Look at Detroit.”

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It was a wonderful life

Late on June 6, 1944, Lt. Garth Webb (standing at centre) and his 14th Field Regiment artillery crew paused to reflect on the highs and lows of their D-Day experiences.

The day before the big opening the French police built a security fence around it. Workers set up wooden benches for an audience of 5,000. Rain left the glass and titanium-clad building on the Normandy beach glistening like a polished jewel. And inside the museum itself Canadian army cadets removed the pins from nearly 44,000 poppies – the pinless Remembrance symbols would be dropped from an aircraft during the ceremony – symbolizing the number of Canadians killed in the Second World War.

“I was on this beach 59 years ago,” Garth Webb said during the opening of the Juno Beach Centre on the D-Day anniversary in 2003. “And it’s just as big a thrill to be here today.”

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The right to know

The Toronto mayor chased the Star reporter away from his backyard wall last week.The subject of Rob Ford’s reaction to reporter Daniel Dale’s investigation of land adjacent to the Toronto mayor’s property has come up in conversation a lot the past week. Some acquaintances of mine have described Dale’s poking around Ford’s backyard wall as provocative. Others find the Toronto mayor’s behaviour embarrassing. But I was taken aback by one friend’s criticism of Dale’s newspaper.

“That’s the ‘socialist’ Toronto Star for you,” he said.

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Speaking truth to power

Ross Perigoe criticizes a major Canadian newspaper for its commentary after the 9/11 attacks.
Ross Perigoe criticizes a major Canadian newspaper for its commentary after the 9/11 attacks.

In the days following 9/11, the West had revenge top of mind. Within days of the terrorist attacks, U.S. President George Bush promised his armies would avenge the deaths of the 3,000 Americans killed, claiming that the perpetrators were “Islamists commanded to kill Christians and Jews” and that they were therefore “wanted dead or alive.” Most in North America accepted his Wild West form of justice.

At the time, however, a professor at Concordia University in Montreal did not. Almost at his peril, journalist and educator Ross Perigoe criticized the powers that be, in particular the Montreal Gazette, for what he called its racist response to 9/11.

“I am in the Place des Arts metro station,” Perigoe cited a Gazette editorialist on Sept. 19, 2011, “I see three men, one wearing a turban. I start to shake.”

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Fighting humbug

No one owns Christmas
"...Christmas has done me good."

It’s been hard this year. Teaching and marking at the college – with a particularly challenging crop of journalism and broadcasting students – have nearly swamped me. Close friends have battled health problems, so I’ve spent what little time I had left trying to help. On top of that, I’ve found myself shouting at the radio in anger because the “the holiday season is here” advertisements began right after Halloween – they didn’t even wait for Remembrance Day to pass. Finding the Christmas spirit, this year, has proved tougher than usual.

I expect all that to change this Sunday, however, when I go to church.

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The price of these words

Cover image from "International Free Expression Review 2010," published by the Canadian Journalists for Free Expression.
Cover image from "International Free Expression Review 2010," published by the Canadian Journalists for Free Expression.

I hear it among my colleagues often – industry complaints. Some of my friends in newspaper journalism worry about the uncertainty of their jobs. Others in the magazine business object to their copy being squeezed by over-sized ads. Meanwhile, those of my associates in the electronic media whine about insufficient pensions to cover their expenses when they retire.

I wonder if any of them would ever complain again, if they knew the plight of Cameroon Express editor Bibi Ngota. Earlier this year, while imprisoned at Kondengui prison in Cameroon, he died of “abandonment (and) improper care,” according to official records.

Why was he in jail? According to a press release from the organization Canadian Journalists for Free Expression (CJFE), “(He) was charged with ‘imitating the signature of a member of government,’” short for criticizing the Cameroonian government.

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