A mid-sized crowd showed up for a town hall meeting on issues regarding the future of Athabasca University that eventually boiled down to asking a pair of election candidates what they would do for AU.
The event was hosted by the Athabasca University Faculty Association (AUFA) and was billed as an opportunity to voice ideas on how to keep AU financially sustainable and remain in Athabasca. It comes on the heels of an email from AU’s president earlier this month that laid out suggestions that have been put forth to a sustainability task force that has been set up to look at options to deal with the financial cuts dealt to AU in the last provincial budget.
And in light of the province being in the midst of an election, all of the candidates running in this riding were invited to sit and listen to the ideas.
Two of the three candidates – Travis Olson from the Wildrose and the NDP’s Colin Piquette – were there, but due to a commitment made prior to the meeting being arranged, Jeff Johnson of the Progressive Conservatives was not able to attend.
In the end, both Olson and Piquette were quizzed by some of those in attendance about their thoughts – making it seem more like a political forum than a gathering to talk about ideas and maintaining AU as a sustainable institution.
Both candidates did express their opinions to the crowd about what they would like to see done if they were elected and their party formed government.
Olson focused on changes that need to be made to the way post-secondary institutions, especially AU, are funded in the province and that his party would cap the cost of tuition, only adding onto it at the rate of inflation. He didn’t provide any details on just how the funding model would be changed.
Piquette on the other hand spoke about reversing the funding cuts announced in the last budget and that the NDP would move toward improving university funding in order to lower, or even completely remove, student tuition.
While Johnson wasn’t able to make it, he stated in an interview earlier Monday that a continued, strong AU presence in Athabasca is something he has fought for – even talking directly to the Premier prior to the election call – and that having someone with a voice at the government table when this issues arise is important, especially when the concerns have been constant since he was first elected.
