I was going to write another editorial about the worsening situation in Ukraine this week. But I’m pretty sure you’re already all depressed out of your minds reading about how Putin’s forces are targeting civilians by bombing maternity hospitals, killing mothers and their children who are trying to flee on a known evacuation route, and forcing the disabled and elderly to cross makeshift bridges made of pallets over rushing water because the city’s bridges have been blown up. I’m sure you don’t want to hear more about a war that neither Russian soldiers nor Ukrainian civilians want to fight, but are forced to because of a psychopathic fascist’s cruel regime.
Let’s talk, instead, about another injustice, one that’s happening right here at UFV: why students are still paying for parking. The other day, as I was leaving campus, I noticed a familiar blue ticket under my windshield wiper. In a parking lot that was barely one-third full, I was slapped with a $31.50 parking violation if I paid within seven days, $63.00 if it took me any longer. The absolute gall of UFV to continue to charge students for parking astounds me.
Parking at UFV has been a contested topic amongst all vehicle-owning students ever since I first started my degree here back in 2018. Students pay a dollar an hour, even after struggling to find a parking spot. If you arrive on campus on a weekday after 9:00 a.m. or while there is an event at Abbotsford Centre, you can expect to drive around for up to thirty minutes, circling every lot, until you finally find a spot in the corner of the pothole-infested gravel parking lot or end up in the overflow parking and have to walk a mile to get to your class.
Since The Cascade office is in Building S, I often park outside the Student Union building — a building, I might add, I pay $35.00 a semester for. Not to mention the $36.50 I pay each semester for SUS membership fees, $27.23 for an inter-campus shuttle I have never once used, and $61.56 for ancillary fees that are supposed to fund “activities, athletics, library and technical services, student software, and student spaces.” How about making one of those “activities” parking and one of those “student spaces” the parking lot? Since “all revenue made from UFV pay parking goes back to UFV classrooms,” where is my tuition and all of the provincial grant funding going? Where is the tuition going from the international students who are paying four times as much as me? According to the 2020/2021 consolidated budget plan, campus parking made $170,000 in revenues that went to the “parking lot capital repayment.”
UFV does an incredible job at practicing its core values of integrity, inclusivity, community, and excellence by charging students $160 a semester just to park on campus. Bravo UFV. Let me throw some numbers at you, in case any higher-ups who make six figures a year are reading and apparently don’t understand why paying for parking is an injustice: 40 per cent of students cannot afford groceries; students are paying $2.00 a liter to put gas in their old, barely-running cars; a dismal 1.3 per cent of students are offered affordable on-campus housing; and on-campus employment pays students just $15.20 an hour, well under living wage. Even working for The Cascade pays below minimum wage, because we are a non-profit funded by students who pay just $6.36 a semester out of their student fees for.
So, my fellow students, I invite you to join me in a parking strike. Stop paying for parking. What is UFV going to do? Tow all of us? Guess what I’m going to do about the little blue slip I got under my windshield wiper? Absolutely nothing. Let me fill you in on a little secret: nothing happens if you don’t pay it, so stop paying your parking tickets too. And UFV, show your students the smallest bit of compassion and stop charging them for a service that should be rightfully theirs in the first place.
Andrea Sadowski is working towards her BA in Global Development Studies, with a minor in anthropology and Mennonite studies. When she's not sitting in front of her computer, Andrea enjoys climbing mountains, sleeping outside, cooking delicious plant-based food, talking to animals, and dismantling the patriarchy.