Student organization tours university campuses across Ontario and Quebec
The Canadian Taxpayers Federation (CTF) made a stop at Branion Plaza on Wed, Sept. 14 to shine a light on the issue of debt incurred by students from the federal government. The student debt awareness campaign, marketed as “Generation Screwed,” has been touring 13 different university campuses across Ontario and Quebec to physically show post-secondary students the amount of federal debt that each Canadian will owe.
The centrepiece of the Generation Screwed media campaign is the Debt Clock, a trailer sized, portable digital counter showing the rising debt for Canadians in real time.
Aaron Gunn, the executive director of Generation Screwed, explained the importance of the Debt Clock in an interview with The Ontarion: “It’s the biggest part of our initiative and it’s to raise awareness on the amount of debt being left to students by the federal government.”
Generation Screwed is primarily an awareness-based campaign. “We’re here to get students’ support, and to sign the petition, and we’re here to empower them to fight back,” said Gunn.
As Canada’s largest non-partisan student movement that advocates on fiscal responsibility, Generation Screwed has coordinators on 27 post-secondary campuses across the country, including the University of Guelph, and these local chapters arrange events within their own communities. Dave Paquette, the campus coordinator for the University of Guelph, arranges tabling, speaker events, and social events to get students involved and aware about the fiscal issues that concern, not only their education, but their financial futures as well.
Gunn also outlined plans made by Generation Screwed to bring together different campuses across Ontario for regional conferences in larger city centres like Toronto. These conferences usually have a few hundred individuals looking to find out more on what they can do at their own university communities raise awareness about the climbing federal debt.
One of the boons of student action groups in the digital age has been the proliferation of social media and the ability for awareness-based groups to reach out and spread their message to a larger audience than what was originally thought possible.
“The people that follow us tend to be younger than other political movements, especially on our side of the political spectrum” Gunn explained. “We have over 12,000 followers on Facebook, and we’re a smaller organization, […] which is similar to larger ones with hundreds of millions of dollars.”
One of the current projects from Generation Screwed is a petition to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau regarding the amount of debt incurred by individuals in post-secondary institutions. According to Gunn, the intent of the petition is to show the need for a balanced budget, “Not just out of good fiscal responsibility, but [they] owe it to [us], so [we] won’t be saddled with it for the future.”
Photo courtesy of Aaron Gunn.