Ottawa’s plan to cut child-care subsidies for low-income graduate students is hurting those people who need support the most, and people should be vocal about opposing this change.
The decision to limit child-care subsidies for graduate students comes because of rising subsidy applications, the city’s general manager of community and social services Aaron Burry told the Ottawa Citizen.
However, excluding graduate students is not the right place to go.
Caring for a child is always demanding, but graduate students have extra things to worry about. In between taking challenging and expensive courses and in many cases having a full-time or part-time job, a child adds to the worries. The subsidy is also only for people in low income brackets. Taking this much-needed money away from them is more damaging than it can be for a lot of other people.
Without vocal opposition, this new policy will not change. People need to let their city councillors know that there is a large part of the population that wants this policy back to what it was before. Carleton’s and University of Ottawa’s graduate student associations have an open letter to the city on their website.
Though this may not affect all or even a large subset of students, this is an opportunity for students to come together and protect something that is worth protecting.
