On March 10, 2026, the U of T Graduate Students’ Union held a Town Hall meeting to discuss the changes being made to the Ontario Student Assistance Program (OSAP) by the Doug Ford government. The evening consisted of a presentation made by UTGSU and CFS (Canadian Federation of Students) representatives, a breakout discussion with the audience in small groups, an open forum, and then a presentation by MPP Jessica Bell. Essentially, their goal was to strategize on what we as students can do and how these changes will affect the student body.

The OSAP changes have been a hot topic on social media as students and families objected to the sudden and drastic shift of OSAP assistance from 85% grants/15% loans to 25% grants/75% loans. This will mean students who rely on OSAP will have exponentially greater student debt when entering a job market with record-breaking highs for unemployment, especially for young people. All these changes are happening while tuition continues to be raised yearly, and after the Ford government already removed the six-month grace period, where provincial student loans did not accumulate interest. Although this issue did provoke pushback, resulting in many protests, including two here in Toronto at Queen’s Park, it feels like the energy of the student body hasn’t shifted.

There are approximately 70,000 students at the UTSG campus, and I would estimate that in the room, combined with attendees online, there were about 150 attendees. That is 0.002% of the student body. Even when considering that a large percentage of students don’t rely on OSAP, it is fair to say that’s a low turnout. 

But I also don’t blame anyone – the students or organizers. If I wasn’t supposed to write this article, I don’t know if I would’ve attended, and I rely on OSAP payments. It feels cliché to talk about the difficulties of focus ‘in the current state of the world,’ but it is also true. It is sometimes hard to feel something about your student loans being hiked when you see cities being destroyed and children dying every day. To me at least, it felt like a very small drop in a very large bucket.

Yet, once I dragged myself at 6 p.m. to a lecture hall in Sidney Smith, preparing to sit for a two-hour-long town hall, I was able to make myself care again. In my small breakout group, a few attendees talked about how the push from many people in the room for a student strike felt futile at an institution like the University of Toronto. Every U of T student knows how isolating a school can be. It is too large and too spread out for community to be built easily. It is also one of the oldest and most prestigious universities in the country and thus carries a conservative, if not tradition-heavy, focus. 

Since the student body is so fractured, it is hard to overcome those looming feelings of futility. Yet it is this kind of reservation that the provincial government relies on in students to get away with making outrageous policy changes with no remorse or consultation. Just talking to a few peers and hearing some people who are passionate speak, I found I was able to actually engage and get upset. 

This is a problem that directly affects us; we should care. One of the strategies highlighted by the UTGSU was to map our connections. There are pockets of upset people who want to act but just don’t know how. There are even more people who would get upset if they knew what was going on. 

The student body is what funds the university; we hold a lot more sway than we think, especially as the student body of one of, if not the most influential institution in the country. If U of T began pushing back against these OSAP changes, other universities would follow suit. If we can get through the barrage of terror that Instagram sends at us everyday and find groups on campus who are upset and willing to act so we can make one of those terrors a little less bad, we will be able to continue to build those connections within the U of T community and show that the student body is not going to sit and take it. 

The numbness that many of us feel towards the injustice we face is a kind of subjugating force that we have to try to fight. Talk to your peers, get upset. At the town hall, they provided us with a simple two-word mantra on how to build support for opposing Ford’s OSAP changes. It could be applied to any injustice, and I think it is what you should take with you from this article: Educate, Agitate.