The government’s policy choice of deregulating student tuition fees has meant a doubling of those fees since 2002. The impact of that policy change along with the government’s long-standing drive to cut corporate tax rates has led to a perverse outcome in 2010: tuition fee revenues exceed corporate tax revenues by close to $300 million in the budget documents tabled by Finance Minister Hansen.

http://www.straight.com/article-296487/vancouver/cindy-oliver-bc-budget-effectively-freezes-funding-postsecondary-institutions

Another reason to sign the anti-hst petition starting on April 6

I am already warming up my pen charles!

Now if a youngster has a parent working at UNBC tuition is free. Real nice perk. Is this fair considering the governmnet funding.

Not at all Seamutt. All students should be equal and pay their fair share.

Students go to university to learn and get a degree, not to subsidize staff relations that get a program not offered to other tax paying citizens, and not to subsidize staff benefits, and and not to subsidize student user groups, and not to subsidize sports-plex's.. and ect ect.

If employees or their spouses and children want to take courses it should be fully accounted for by the university as a real cost.

Post secondary education has become nothing much more than a tool to eliminate people from access to certain jobs, thereby increasing qualifications for the good pay. Makes sense if its a true system of merit and not a system of advantage....

Charles, corporate tax rates have been cut for a variety of reasons. But the main reason is that business loans are amortised from business profits. And taxes on those profits only make it more difficult for those loans to be liquidated. The failure to do so eliminating that business's further access to Bank credit, and on a broader scale nationally, a stagnant business sector.

In business accounting, a Bank loan to a company is not classed as 'revenue' to that busiuness when it is received. And the repayment of that loan's principal will not be classed as an 'expense' as it is reduced.

The interest paid on it is an 'expense' ~ but repayment of the principal sum is not. That sum is repaid out of 'profit', if there is any, which in business accounting is operationally SALES minus EXPENSE. What's left over, in other words, after the bills have been paid.

When the rate of business profits are falling, businesses cannot fully repay what they have borrowed. And eventually this leads to a contraction of further credit being offered, as has been the case in this latest recession.

The rate of business profit, in general, is falling in every modern industrial economy. Has been for decades.

There are exceptions in certain industries, I know. But in general, this is the case. If you want proof, just look around you at the number of businesses, large, medium, and small, that are no longer in business.

In any such economy with ongoing 'labour displacement' present, overall Consumer incomes are continually declining in ratio to the overall "costs of production" continually coming forward into prices of all the goods and services we need and desire at their point of final sale into the consumer market.

Each increase in productive efficiency "displaces" current labour costs, which are somebody's income, in favour of what we call capital costs.

In the whole economy, when these incomes are so displaced, spending from incomes falls, and so do business Sales and profits.

The fall in profit then "chokes off" the use of existing productive capacity far short of its potential productivity, resulting in a further drop in profits. Existing 'labour costs' (incomes)can be reduced, (making the overall situation worse, even if it seems beneficial to the individual concern making the cuts), but 'capital costs' cannot be. They represet money that was spent in the past, and now must be recovered and repaid to the Banks as agreed in a loan contract.

When the Banks cannot be fully repaid what they have previously lent, they become extremely reluctant to lend any more.

And this exacerbates the whole situation, leading to the necessity of the "government" ( which is always thought to be 'credit worthy' due to its ability to tax ~ though it, too, is now stretching that ability to the limit), having to take measures to raise consumer product prices ("stimulus spending" ~ to try to boost the rate of private profit), and then impose more taxes to repay what it has borrowed.

If those taxes are imposed on businesses, they only will find their way into prices, (and WE, not the business, will be the payor.) Raising those prices, here and abroad, since every business must recover its 'taxation' costs that way, or it won't be in business.

Cutting corporate income taxes, while necessary if businesses that ever hope to be globally competitive hope to survive against businesses based on lower taxed regimes, is a flawed solution. What is needed is a change in National accounting, to boost consumer incomes in a manner that doesn't 'cost' that raise into 'prices'. This is not difficult to achieve.

A two percent increase in tuition is a reasonable amount. Feezing tuition, as the NDP government did in the 90's is a irresponsible form of vote buying. Colleges and Universities must be able to set their own budgets and tuitions so they have the resouces to attract quality instructor, update technology and provide quality education. Freeze tuition and these will fall behind. The University will become plagued with poor performance, low employment rates for graduates and poor attendance as student will seek a quality education that will be recognized by employers elsewhere.

For the record, my Wife is a current student at UNBC.

I am all for government support of post secondary education, but not in the form of tuition freezes and the current unfair forms of student aid. The current system rewards foolishness, encourages fraud and punishes the responsible. My wife doesnot qualify for any aid because we have too much stuff, (ie a vintage car I purchased when I was 17 instead of buying beer) and a modest amount in RRSPs. We have watched others who have made more money than us in the past 15 years receive numerous grants because they either hide their assets or spent their money foolishly on trips, partying, and other depreciating assets.
If the governments wants to fairly support students, it should distribute support evenly to all BC resident students, not just the ones who use/abuse the system.

The decade or so of tuition freezes were a bad idea, rather than have a slow steady increase, there was a huge backed up surge when the freeze came off.

It is good to see increases are back down to normal (near inflation) levels.

If the university did not increase tuition, it would have to cut in other places as the cost of everything from professor salaries, to building maintenance has gone up. The more they cut from other areas the less prestigious the university becomes, until people don't want to go there, and the degree is not respected in industry.

My children will be heading off to university &/or college within the next 5-7 years, and I want the universities and colleges to have good programs and opportunity for them to get a good education & a degree that employers will respect.

I have to agree with rural on the fact that governments tend to try to screw over those families that are financially responsible and save and invest, as opposed to blowing their money on booze and yearly trips to Mexico.

Socred, you are right that loans have driven unearned wealth in the last 40-years that can be argued is a profit when the power of leveraging is fully assessed, but you are wrong that it is a good reason to then not tax business in a fair and equitable way because they then have to declare their leveraged profits.

Most of the productivity gains you speak of have very little to do with actual ingenuity, but rather were a by-product of fake wealth in the form of new debt that financed capital asset improvements (and industry consolidation), which displaced the labor (often with no real efficiency gains), and the local ownership... but the biggest reason for productivity gains in the last 40 years has been the globalization which sees corporations skirt their responsibilities to labor and the environment by taking advantage of third world regulations to undercut the developed worlds society and economy for short term profits; thereby forcing the competition to do that same taking on debt and moving operations oversees to compete and stay in business.

So you are arguing that globalization is not the problem and that subsidizing this process is the solution, rather than just having an economy that is based on the same rules for everyone where everyone plays from the same rule book that respects our environmental, monetary, and labor laws. This is no argument to make in saying that it justifies the free ride corporations are getting under 'free trade' when costs for training their future labor is being downloaded onto the students in a way that burns up the concept of equal opportunity, which is the basis of a 'free enterprise' economy.

I have a son going to UNBC and am happy to pay the extra 2%. The alternative is going anywhere else and paying 100% more. Isn't it great to live in a town with 2 very good post secondary institutions. I also put money away for education and passed on several vacations to do so. We all make choices in life and they should revolve around our family. We would be way healthier as a society if we did.

Eagle, I'm not against taxing businesses in a "fair and equitable way", though I'm not quite sure how you're going to assess what is "fair and equitable" in a world where every country believes it has to import some other country's 'money' (i.e., always run a "favourable" balance-of-trade internationally) to live.

And, aside from a tax on business profits, (which are, in general, shrinking for reasons I tried to explain), virtually ALL other forms of taxation imposed on businesses ~ property, sales, carbon, etc. ~ are all going to flow through into the prices those businesses have to get for their products if they hope to stay in business.

To the extent those prices are collected from the public from sales in BC, or Canada, WE are the ones really paying those taxes. Not the Companies.

This is one of my objections to the HST. Right now, the Provincial 7% Sales Tax component charged on business Capital and operating costs for companies that EXPORT has to be recovered in the price of those exports. The tax is really paid by foreigners buying our products as a component of the costs that have gone into those prices.

With the HST, those taxes become Input Tax Credits to the business. And the lost take to the government will be made up from new taxes PAID BY ALL BRITISH COLUMBIANS on ALL the things not now BC Sales taxable at 7%.

Gordon Campbell tells us we must do this to "remain competitive". It's akin to having us believe that if we all worked for next to nothing, and consumed next to nothing of our own production, we'll get 'rich' through exporting All the rest of it. Or at least, we'll ALL "have jobs". For in such a scenario, how could we not fail to be "competitive"? Of course, I was always under the impression that one could very easily go broke just sitting on one's butt doing nothing, too. Why anyone would ever believe they have to "work" at going broke is beyond me. But that seems to me to be the proposition Campbell & Co. are pushing. Perhaps he sees some great 'moral virtue' in "work". Those favourably fixed that do precious little of it themselves often do.

I'm NOT arguing that 'globalisation' is 'not' the problem, at all. I think it IS a very large part of the problem. But it's more of an "EFFECT" of something else than the acual "CAUSE" of the basic problem in itself.

The "cause" is a fiancial system that is not fully "self-liquidating" in each successive cycle of production. That isn't a difficult problem to rectify economically. We already attempt to do it, but irrationally, and in a way that distorts the reality that 'finance' is supposed to reflect. That's what we need to change.