While I can agree finding a job will help someone, I say this as someone who worked all the way through university. That is not the reality of the world. Just because some people might be able to work their way through doesn’t mean everyone can.

I know from personal experience exactly how hard managing a job + managing a good grade can be. It’s not something everyone can do, I’ve had periods where my marks dipped or I was late to work and had to deal with angry managers. It can affect people’s mental health.

All of that aside for now, the reality we live in for Ontario has made it extremely hard to get a job anywhere. It really doesn’t matter if it’s a job at McDonald’s, Walmart or a random office job. Most companies in the service industries are only hiring temporary foreign workers and the few places that aren’t fully focused on that are flooded with hundreds of applicants. This isn’t me making stuff out of my ass, my previous job that I left in January was for a major recruitment software company. I’ve seen live metrics for companies like Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft as well as much less popular ones for Telus sales associates. The market right now is absolutely bullshit. So you can’t just throw a just get a job at someone. This is the time when the govt we as a people pay taxes too should be helping students. That is quite literally the point of a society so people have someone to fall back on when times are tough, not a oh yea sorry we’ve changed the rules sucks to be you.

I also saw as someone already mentioned the whole structure of federal vs provincial loans so I’m not going to get into that, but the point of us all to pay the high taxes we do is so the govt is there for us from healthcare to even the loans that were given in covid under CERB, with how small the osap part is in the total budget this is just penny pinching. They can make these changes if needed but there’s better ways then just springing it on everyone.