These days, students may have cause to voice gratitude for the stressful midterms they are writing. Or, more specifically, for the professors and instructors you have giving the exams. With tuition fees at a towering altitude and instructor wages at embarrassing lows, there now is literally no incentive to teach anything anymore other than for love of the art.

Recently, MLAs received a pay increase, and Jean Chretien decided to give himself and his fellow MPs a pay increase. Less recently, Alberta teachers received a pay increase, or, to be precise, they recovered the payrate that they had lost in an earlier five percent rollback ("rollback" is a diplomatic euphemism for pay cut).

At 5 a.m. on Wednesday the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees won a contract settlement for pay hikes of nine to fifteen percent. Earlier this year, Alberta nurses received a pay hike of seventeen to twenty-two percent. Alberta's 32,000 teachers have been offered a six percent pay increase.

It is clear that our government holds the United States in high esteem and considers that country to be an excellent role model when it comes to education. After all, most Canadians enjoy the pastime of discussing the tremendous amount of knowledge Americans seem to have gathered concerning their large neighbour to the north. There must be no better way to reflect our respect for education and the desire to progress--or even just keep up--than by raising tuition {and} keeping teacher wages low.

In the wake of the September eleventh attack, airline companies are complaining that they are suffering very badly in terms of finances. The new, tighter security measures are not cheap, and with ticket purchases declining sharply, they have had to lay off employees. So the airlines have beseeched the government for fiscal aid, and the government has been happy to comply. This must be a different government than the one which has been telling teachers that there is not enough money in the public purse to pay them what they are worth. A different government than the one raising tuition. This government must be the one that is giving its highest paid politicians large raises.

Canada is lucky to have people who can design and implement better airport security plans and equipment, who can operate airports and aircraft safely, and who can afford to fly to where they want to go. Without education, we soon will have no people like that, and we will have to hire educated people from other countries to do things that we can't afford to learn. Also, those of us who can afford to learn valuable skills will likely move to other countries to be paid more.

Without education, the CBC will become CNN, and then no one in our country will be well informed. (A former colleague of mine has informed me that in the literature class she teaches, the students who have tuned in to CBC know the most about the September eleventh attack and the aftermath; those informed by CNN know the least.) We will gradually have less and less information about the outside world, about our history, and even about other Canadians. We will become ignorant, and because humans fear what they do not understand, ignorance breeds belligerence.

If our populace slides into uneducation, we will end up with poor health care, clumsy diplomats, outdated infrastructure. Still, we will remain too poor to stick our heads and hands into the affairs of other countries, which is fortunate, because there are people in this world who really, really hate bullies.