Quote:
Originally Posted by manny_santos
It's interesting talking to some Queen's students from the Toronto area, who constantly complain about how "small" Kingston is and how much it lacks. Yes, we get it, Kingston doesn't have Toronto's clubs, it doesn't have Persian restaurants like Toronto, it doesn't have the theatre scene Toronto has. That's what you signed up for when you went to a university in a smaller city.
|
ARGH tell me about it.
I mean, we can't really complain about out-of-town Queen's students because they contribute vastly to our city. I mean our amazing downtown, punching-above-its-weight transit system, the fact that we have one of the highest numbers of restaurants and bars per-capita in the whole country--lots of this is because of the students. Kingston would be way, way, way, less of a city without the university.
But they can be irritating at times. I'm not talking about all the stupid NIMBY complaints about parties and stuff, it's just the way they interact with the city. Most students are very disdainful of Kingston. They form their own little bubble, very isolated from the city as a whole, having very few interactions with the downtown population--in fact, many students disparagingly call permanent downtown residents 'townies' and look on with quite a bit of disgust and elitism. Those aren't just stereotypes, the majority of the student body behaves that way. A lot of is class difference, Kingston's inner city is largely working class whereas these students are almost entirely upper-middle class suburban kids...
Of course, permanent residents often view students negatively too, often thinking of them as a giant mass of mindless Toronto elites who ruin our real-people city with Lululemon and Starbucks who live on daddy's credit card and give no shits about anything at all....
The town-gown wars can be quite fierce here. One very recent flare up was over whether or not 19,000 out-of-town students who StatsCan reports as not living in the city should be counted as part of the city's population for the purposes of drawing ward boundaries (most students have their official documents like drivers licenses, tax papers, etc. at their parents addresses). City Council voted against doing so, but the Queens student association appealed and the OMB ruled that they must be counted. It also ruled that the city's planning must factor in those 19,000 people as well... as such, from the perspective of Kingston's planning department, the city's population essentially increased from 123,000 to 142,000 in a single day (take that Calgary
).