Inside Politics

UPDATED: IgnatieffWatch: Public vs. private ... education, not health care, for a change

by Kady O'Malley Posted: July 29, 2010 9:34 AM Last Updated: July 29, 2010 12:43 PM
It's fair to say that an eyebrow or two may have arched skyward when the Liberal leader lauded the "publicly funded education that gave [him] his start." 

As the Globe and Mail's Norm Spector points out, "It's a well-known fact that, from the age of 11, Mr. Ignatieff attended Upper Canada College" -- which, he notes, "is about as elite an education as you can get in our country." How, Spector wonders, could Ignatieff have thought for one moment that he could get away with a line like that, given his exhaustively chronicled personal history?

Well, apparently, he didn't -- think he could get away with describing UCC as a "publicly funded education," that is. According to an OLO spokesperson, Ignatieff was actually referring to "one of the greatest publicly funded institutions in the world: the University of Toronto," which he attended "on a scholarship". So, no, he wasn't talking about UCC -- or, worse still, the taxpayer-funded education provided to the children of diplomats abroad, which Spector also raises as a possibility. Case closed? Over to you, commenters. 

UPDATE - Here's a little more from OLO on Ignatieff's schooling, and specifically the suggestion that his UCC education might have been subsidized by Canadian taxpayers: 

 Mr. Ignatieff attended UCC on a combination of scholarship and his parents' own money - not with the 'taxpayers picking up the tab.'   His parents - who were being posted abroad - strongly felt that he should have a Canadian education, that's why they sent him to a Canadian boarding school.




 

Tags: blackberry jungle, ignatieffwatch, it depends what you mean by "publicly". and "funded"., it's all about the interpretation, upper canada college