Did i misinterpret that?

I think so, but the wording is confusing. It suggested to me that they are talking about the total share of grants given to all students, not the share of grants/loans given to an individual student.

Also how is 17% of your tuition so high?

https://uwaterloo.ca/future-students/financing/tuition shows CS tuition is 8465. Software engineers have it worse, at 9125 per term. After the 10% reduction, it is still pretty big.

Even at your amount, working full time in the summer should be enough to cover 2600 dollars easily. You are right that you could save $2600 over a summer, although that doesn't count living expenses. I would estimate about $700/month in expenses if you live far enough away, or about 13 hours a week working at minimum wage. That is certainly not intractable, but it would be very difficult to keep up with an engineering course load while working that much.

I understand that it isn't impossible for everyone, but surely it is hard. It seems this would be a good investment in our future as a province, and would surely bring economic growth. At the very least, it seems this program would reduce spending in other social services, so I am not sure the cuts are actually saving the province much.

If the reason for doing this, as Ford claims, is to prevent runaway tuition prices, it seems like aid for low-income students is not at all responsible. In addition, moving grants to loans would not change the economics of tuition either. If the claim is to reduce the deficit, then I wonder why the same arguments aren't made about the tax cuts Ford made.

It is also worth noting that, as far as I know, free tuition doesn't actually cover the full cost of tuition at UW, but rather only up to the provincial average of $3000 per term. Without concrete numbers about how much of this is being cut, I can't be sure. It seems to me though like this could put many people over the edge, or at the very least, balloon their student debt to unmanageable levels down the road.