Third-year engineering student Keithan Bala begins his day at 7 a.m., operating computer machining and coding. For the rest of his day he is a sales associate for Plato’s Closet, a thrift store in Toronto. Between his two jobs in the summer, Bala works approximately 65 hours a week in hopes of saving enough money to live in downtown Toronto for the school year.
He lives in a two-bedroom apartment and pays $1,125 a month for rent.
Bala is one of thousands who look for living accommodations while attending post-secondary in Toronto. The city currently has three universities, Ryerson University, the University of Toronto (U of T) and York University (York U), with another new one planned for construction.
Toronto will soon become the home of Ontario’s first French language university, Université de l’Ontario français (UFO), in fall 2021.
Bienvenue au Toronto
Part of the reason the new university was chosen to be located in the city was because of its increasing French-speaking population, according to Dayne Adams, the chair of the governance council of UFO.
According to Statistics Canada, Toronto has the third highest population of francophones in the province.
The city has 19 per cent of Ontario’s francophone population, Ottawa has the highest at 42.7 per cent and northeast Ontario has the second, at 20.7 per cent.
“We are the population that is increasing in numbers and we have nothing to offer in education past the post-secondary level in this city,” said Adams.
When the provincial government was deciding where to locate the university, Cornwall, a city just an hour away from Ottawa, put a pitch to become the home for the new French-language university.
“Eastern Ontario has a significant number of francophones,” says Bernadette Clement, the mayor of Cornwall.
“We wanted to make sure that the provincial and federal government understood that we would also welcome either the university, or a campus of that university because the population we have here would greatly benefit and support a francophone university.”
The issue is not about why Toronto should not be the university’s home, but rather about making sure the benefits that come with the post-secondary investment is spread across the province, in order to represent the “significant pockets of francophone people that live outside of Toronto,” said Clement.
“It is cheaper for infrastructure to be set up here, it is cheaper for students to live in smaller centres, so this is part of an economic argument and justifies our pitch for locating the university, or part of the university, here in Cornwall,” said Clement.
According to StatsCan, the median monthly housing costs for rented tenants in Cornwall is $758, as opposed to Toronto’s median monthly cost of $1,205.
Although the city is more affordable, Adams said locating the university in Cornwall did not make sense.
“The access to the university education in French is a lot more diverse in the eastern part of the province than in it is Toronto,” she said. “Cornwall is close enough to the University of Ottawa, which is a bilingual university.”
Étude en Francais
First-year criminology student Leonie Wolbert, attends the University of Ottawa (U of O).
She is originally from Aurora, a town just outside of Toronto, and came to the U of O to study her program entirely in French. With French being her first language, she said it influenced her to continue her education in a full French-language institution.
“I decided to continue learning in French because having all my previous education in French, I thought it would be easier for me,” said Wolbert.
Wolbert said she would have considered attending UFO, in hopes of working for the government one day, but she wanted to complete her post-secondary education in a bilingual city like Ottawa.
“I think it’s a really good opportunity to have something close by for those who are in need for a full French-language school.”
Although the U of O offers French immersion and extended French programs, the university is bilingual and not fully in French. It is one of the few bilingual universities the province has to offer. The University of Sudbury, Laurentian University and Glendon College–a bilingual campus of York University–are the others.
Pierre Anctil, a professor who has been teaching at the U of O for 15 years, said Ottawa has become more bilingual in the last couple of decades and the city has become more interesting because of it.
“You have to offer the services where the population is. If you offer services to all of Ontario’s Francophones in Ottawa, it creates a distance for most who don’t live in the Ottawa region.”
Trop cher pour les étudiants
Anctil says the cost of living for students who attend post-secondary institutions is not something “unique” to Toronto and that almost all students have financial problems, regardless of where they study.
“It’s very rare that students will consider the cost of living as the major issue to be dealt with when obtaining a higher education. They will rather look at the quality of the program and the university, as well as the value of the degree they will be getting,” he said.
But renting costs will continue to rise, according to an RBC Economics report. Strong demand for rental housing has pushed rental vacancy rates to historically low levels.
This is despite the projected number of renter-households increasing by an average of 22,200 per year in Toronto, due to the high costs of owning a home. Since the population is increasing beyond the availability of housing, the houses that do remain available will be at the city’s highest costs, according to the report.
A second-year Ryerson student, Madeline Smith, from Scarborough, Ont., commuted more than an hour each way to attend classes.
“I wanted to live on campus to make friends outside of my program and build connections, which I couldn’t do if I stayed home,” she said.
Because she was on the waitlist for Ryerson’s residence, Smith says she applied to live in an independent residence building downtown. She stayed at Parkside Student Residence, which cost her $1,455 a month and $2,500 for a meal plan per semester.
“I literally begged my parents and told them I would pay them back down the road. I literally pulled out my grandparents inheritance money in which they saved up for me for my fourth year,” Smith says.
She says she knew she could not afford to live there again for her second year and applied to live in a different residence building the following year.
“The building, Neill Wycik Hotel, only lets 110 people in every year, because it is so high in demand, not many people leave and they continue to live within the building,” she said.
A l’avenir
Two years after the project was confirmed to run, the provincial government stopped its funding for the French-language university. As the Ford government claimed Ontario was highly in debt, the project was put on pause in 2018.
“It’s a project that has been delayed for generations. You know this is not a new project that I started three years ago, there were a lot of other studies, committees that contributed to the project, it was decades of work,” said Adams.
NDP francophone affairs critic, Guy Bourgouin, said a French university is a constitutional right, especially for students who want to continue their education in French beyond the high school level.
“Even though there’s universities that do offer some courses in French, they usually get cut if there are not enough enrollment for those courses,” he said.
Being an Ontario francophone himself, Bourgouin says it is a part of his culture to advocate Francophone rights and defend French communities in the province.
“It’s easier to work in your native tongue, to express yourself in French. When you’re a French-speaking person, when you have studied your whole life in French, of course it’s going to be a lot easier to continue your education in French,” he said.
The project was resurrected in September 2019, when the federal and provincial governments agreed to split the $126-million funding for the university equally.
“We want to ensure students can receive a high quality, modern, French-language postsecondary education that is aligned with labour market needs,” said Colleges and Universities Minister Ross Romano in an email statement.
Featured image by Spencer Colby.
