Taxi ride

This is a small city. You get to know people. In stores, on the bus, driving taxis.

I called a cab the other day, and the driver was someone who had driven me before. During that earlier ride he had told me that his son was studying on our campus so I asked him how his son was doing, and he told me he was enjoying his programme, and that he — the father — hoped the son was doing the right thing. Then he told me that he had recently retired from his job but was driving a cab to put his son through school. He mentioned that he could not have afforded to send his son to another city. We talked a bit about student debt and how a university degree now seemed to be equivalent to what a high school degree had once been. He dropped me off and we said good bye.

That cab driver and his family are our constituents. They are the people the UNBSJ campus exists to serve, and they are the ones who are being treated with contempt by anyone who claims a university in Saint John is unnecessary or are acting in any way, such as the threatened “co-location” amalgamation with the community college, that would undermine our degrees.

This is a sore point with me for personal reasons as well. I am the first member of my family to have gone to university, and I could not have gone had not the Ontario government then had a decent system, since clawed back, of grants and loans.

It is depressing beyond words to realise that to many, people like me were a demographic blip, the symptom of a flush economy that is only a memory now, rather than members of the community taking advantage of a right that should be open to all.

So, here’s this blog. To us.