Students launch class-action lawsuit against Ontario colleges

WILLIAM WOLFE-WYLIE CUP NATIONAL BUREAU CHIEF

TORONTO (CUP) — College students in Ontario are being represented by two of their own in a $200-million class-action lawsuit involving 24 colleges and more than 150,000 students.

Amanda Hassum and Daniel Roffey are alleging that the ancillary fees charged to Ontario’s college students were illegal and violated the directives of Ontario’s tuition freeze, which ran from 2004 to 2006.

Under the directives established in the Ontario tuition freeze, according to court documents served to the defendants on June 5, “colleges are not to establish additional fees for items considered to be covered by tuition fees.”

The suit demands that all tuition-related ancillary fees collected by Ontario’s colleges since 2004 be refunded to students and that the Ontario government step in to enforce the existing regulations.

None of the allegations have been proven in court.

The students are represented by Doug Elliott of the firm Roy Elliott Kim O’Connor (REKO). REKO became a well-known law firm in Canada after acting as counsel for the plaintiffs in the tainted blood scandal and in the class action suit that resulted from the second outbreak of SARS in Toronto.

Elliott said that the increases in ancillary fees were a backhanded way of boosting revenue for the colleges during the tuition fee freeze.

“What they were not able to do through the front door, they were able to do through the back door,” Elliott said.

Elliott also condemned the provincial government for not ensuring that Ontario’s colleges followed the rules of the tuition fee freeze.

“If the government will not enforce the rules,” he said, “we intend to do it for them.”

The Province of Ontario will also be named in the suit in two months time. Because there is a mandatory 60-day notice required before the province may be served with a claim, the second part of the claim cannot be filed until early August.

“The Province will be named in the suit because legally the colleges are considered to be their agents,” said Elliott. “We’re trying to get this thing fully functional by the time September rolls around.”

From here, the suit is largely in the hands of the lawyers. The two students, Roffey and Hassum, will assume roles that focus primarily on public relations and will only provide input on major decisions.

The Canadian Federation of Students (CFS), a national lobby group representing more than 500,000 students across Canada, is also lending their support to the suit.

Jesse Greener, the Ontario chairperson of the CFS, was onhand during the announcement. He described the increases in ancillary fees as a “backdoor mechanism to illegitimately increase tuition fees.”

The CFS is not helping to finance the lawsuit, but is instead helping the representative plaintiffs with background research and media relations. That being said, though, both representative plaintiffs said that it was through the CFS that they were introduced to one another and presented with options to move forward.