Antonio Páez 🇲🇽🇨🇦
There is an upcoming provincial #election in #Ontario.
Doug Ford, our current Conservative premier, thought to capitalize from the chaos of the Trump administration, and called an early election, presenting himself as the man who will protect the province from tariffs.
This is rich.
Ford wants to protect Ontario from Trump just so that he can continue to destroy the province all by his own Ford self.
1/n
Antonio Páez 🇲🇽🇨🇦
This provincial election is an opportunity to save our higher education system, not to mention our public education more generally, and our health care system, among many other things that Conservatives will gleefully break because they don't know how to build, they just know how to destroy what better people than them have created.
13/n
Antonio Páez 🇲🇽🇨🇦
So I urge you, if you care about public education, about higher education, about health care in Ontario, do not sit this election out.
Make sure that you are registered to vote:
https://www.elections.on.ca/en.html
Registering to vote by mail takes a few minutes. Vote by mail, vote in advance, vote on election day, but vote.
Do not let others decide what kind of province you will have to live in.
The end/n
Antonio Páez 🇲🇽🇨🇦
All these points have been identified as critical by the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations (OCUFA) if we want to reverse course and stop the deliberate erosion of our universities, killing them with a thousand paper cuts of stinginess.
OCUFA has created a template for writing to party leaders demanding to know their position with respect to these items. You can find it here:
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/its-time-to-strengthen-ontarios-public-universities?source=email
12/n
Antonio Páez 🇲🇽🇨🇦
With the upcoming provincial election, it is important to call on our political elites to stop the manufactured fiscal crises that the province has pushed on our universities, and instead strengthen higher education in Ontario.
8/n
Antonio Páez 🇲🇽🇨🇦
This should involve:
• Strengthening funding for universities by 11.75% annually for a five-year period to bring Ontario close to the Canadian average in per-domestic student funding.
• Creating resilient, affordable communities by investing in strong, affordable university education that can lead to good paying jobs, allowing our graduates to get a faster start in life, and contribute to their communities.
9/n
Antonio Páez 🇲🇽🇨🇦
• Committing to long-term investments in Northern Ontario which requires, doubling and making permanent the Northern Ontario Grant for Universities.
• Championing domestic student enrolment by updating the university fund model so it doesn’t penalize universities for enrolling domestic students.
10/n
Antonio Páez 🇲🇽🇨🇦
• Stopping the gigification of teaching, and restoring secure academic jobs by reforming Employment Standards Act (ESA) language so that contract faculty are paid fairly and committing to long-term funding for our universities.
• Converting loans into grants to provide incentives for prospective students from Ontario to ensure we don’t lose our best and brightest talent.
• Encouraging universities to reclaim their independence from foreign technology companies.
11/n
Antonio Páez 🇲🇽🇨🇦
Compare that to Ontario. With a gross provincial product of USD 0.83 trillion, the province used to have two universities in the top 100 (McMaster and Toronto).
Dollar for dollar, Ontario used to beat California in terms of highly ranked universities.
Not any more, now that McMaster dropped to 116th place in 2025.
5/n
Antonio Páez 🇲🇽🇨🇦
Creating and maintaining a system of higher education that includes such institutions is not an easy task.
It has been the effort, the work, and the investment of countless generations of Ontarians.
It is heartbreaking to see how such effort can be squandered in a few short years by a provincial government bent on manufacturing financial crises in the public sector.
6/n
Antonio Páez 🇲🇽🇨🇦
Instead of treating our public university system, and its crown jewels, as an incredible treasure, and an important element of Ontario's economic, cultural, scientific, and technological strategy, the province has persisted in treating universities worse than it has developers hungry for chunks of Ontario's Green Belt.
7/n
Antonio Páez 🇲🇽🇨🇦
But on top of all this, there is an issue that is dear to me: higher education.
Higher education used to be a source of pride for me as an Ontarian and a professor at one of Ontario's public universities. With an excellent system of universities, and two world-class institutions, UofT and McMaster, higher education has long been an example of the best Ontario has to offer to the world. Not so much anymore.
3/n
Antonio Páez 🇲🇽🇨🇦
Let us compare, for example, the largest economy to the south, California. With a gross state product of USD 4.080 trillion, California boasts seven public universities in the top 100 of the world according to the 2025 Times Higher Education World Ranks.
4/n
Antonio Páez 🇲🇽🇨🇦
There are many ways in which Ford has been terrible for Ontario.
There is all the stench of corruption, the starving of our health care system, the attempt to sell the Green Belt to developers, the usurpation of powers with legislation to rip bike lanes, and the sheer idiocy of proposing an underground highway, Elon Musk-style, as a way to address congestion.
Any one of these failures would be enough for me to wish that the province would replace him as our premier.
2/n
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