It's municipal election season in four of Canada's provinces. Voters in Alberta were the first and cast their ballots yesterday, followed by Ontario on October 25, Manitoba on October 27, and Prince Edward Island on November 1.

Municipal government is the level of government that most affects the daily lives of citizens, students included.

While the issues may not seems as big as provincial issues (tuition, for example), the impact of the winning candidates can be profound.

Nowhere is the impact of municipal government upon students more visible than in Oshawa, in my home province.

The city has acted aggressively against students during the last three years. The most infamous incident being the search warrant raids against student homes in which the city searched for lease agreements and records of rent payments in October, 2007.

The city eventually passed a bylaw which restricts the number of students who can live near the university (though it is not being actively enforced).

The student association at University of Ontario Institute of Technology, which also represents students at Durham College and Trent University's Oshawa campus (all three institutions share the same campus), has been using this issue to mobilize students to vote next Monday.

One of their main promotional posters asks "Do you want to be evicted?" implying that if students do not vote, the City of Oshawa will start enforcing its bylaws and removing students from near the campus.

Students in Oshawa have clear reason to vote, but what about elsewhere? Why should students bother to vote?

It comes down to influence: Politicians pay attention to the issues of voters.

I now live in an area of Hamilton with a large population of seniors and baby boomers. I enjoy better bus service than the student area where I used to live. My local buses rarely transport more than a dozen people at a time, but we receive the same frequency of service on weekends as the bus routes serving McMaster University.

Why? Simply put, the people that ride my bus vote.

This is one of the reasons student unions across the country are trying to mobilize their voting blocs and are often using public transit issues as the centerpiece of their campaigns.

Students can exercise their voices in both provincial and federal elections, but are rarely able to swing the overall result. University campuses tend to be located in urban areas, often in "safe" ridings and the student population is either too small or diffuse to be the deciding factor in the race.

In municipal votes, students can make the difference. The political boundaries are smaller and voter turnout is insignificant, hovering in the low-to-mid 30-per-cent range. These factors combined make even a small concentration of students capable of swinging a race.

It does not take much, maybe only a thousand votes, to decide a municipal ward race. In some cities, students can also swing a mayoral race. More importantly, higher levels of government will take notice of a local race which is decided by students and tailor their party's electoral platform in an attempt to capture that voting bloc for their candidate.

Mobilizing voters for a mundane municipal race can have a greater return on investment than dropping a couple of thousand students waving placards on the front lawn of Parliament Hill.

Update: Political scientists will spend the next few months analyzing how an unknown candidate like  Naheed Nenshi could win the mayoral chair in Calgary. What is known at this point is that voter turnout and the youth vote were both key elements of his victory. Proof indeed that voting works.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper took to YouTube last night to answer questions from Canadians. At 31:29 in his online interview, Harper received a post-secondary education question.

"University students are expected to pay back so much money, plus interest, after furthering there [sic] education when most do not start getting a livable salary right after schol. [sic] Why is there not more assistance when it comes to student loans?" crazy4u79 asked Mr. Harper.

Mr. Harper spent the next minute and 15 seconds speaking in generalities and did not really answer the question.

"One of the things that is obviously a big concern to us over the past years, we know that younger people and new graduates have been particularly hard hit in the recession," he stated to begin his response to the question. "That's why we've introduced a number of specific programs in the last couple of years."

I went to Ottawa and covered the 2008 Federal Budget for Maclean's. The government did introduce changes to student loans, but they were administrative in nature and didn't provide any substantive relief to student loan payees. The student loan system was broke both administratively and financially.

The government addressed a lot of the administrative problems and Mr. Harper's administrative changes have helped make the student loan repayment process easier, but his government did nothing to address the overwhelming financial problems with the Canada Student Loans Program that destroys the lives of so many recent graduates.

Mr. Harper has refused to lower student loan interest, refused to increase the grace period for students to find jobs, and did nothing in the last budget to truly address the issues facing recent graduates.

To add insult to injury, one of the programs he cited in response has nothing to do with the question. The Prime Minister cited Pathways to Education as one of his government's "specific programs." The problem is that Pathways to Education does not assist recent graduates. The word "pathways" should have been a hint to the Prime Minister.

Mr. Harper's record on the student loan file is weak and he couldn't defend it. To use Internet lingo, his answer was a "HARPER FAIL."

Michael Ignatieff is on a cross-country tour this week and the Conservatives are howling "Ignatieff Prorogues Himself.” Ignatieff’s absence from Parliament is of little interest to students, but what he’s saying during his latest cross-country tour is.

Ignatieff told a group of high school students in Newfoundland that he will be proposing changes to the Canada Student Loans Program during the next election. He says he will lower the interest rate on federal student loans and will propose a loan-forgiveness program for graduates working in the public service.

CSLP is in serious need of reform, especially the interest costs placed on students in repayment. The federal government charges a 2.5 per cent above the prime interest rate for student loans. Most provinces charge 1 per cent above prime with a few charging only the prime rate.

A lot of borrowers who are in collection are there as the result of a punishing payment schedule that fails to account for the economic situation facing recent graduates.

Ignatieff states that the federal government needs to take a leadership role in post secondary education by creating a dedicated transfer payment for post secondary education.

To encourage universities to recruit, enroll, and graduate students from lower socio-economic backgrounds, Ignatieff proposes the federal government create financial incentives for schools.

These ideas represent good public policy. For many years, post secondary education policy has been driven by political desires to funnel money into schemes that will deliver votes from upper-middle to upper class families.

During the 2008 federal election campaign, the Liberals proposed replacing current federal tax credits with in-study grants, to provide significant relief for student loan borrowers in their repayment phase, to create more needs-based grants, and to guarantee every student a loan of $5,000.

Ignatieff’s appears to be making post secondary education a major part of his pre-campaign speeches. If he continues, Canada may finally have a serious debate about higher education.

It's agreed that universities are in the business of teaching, taking young people and transforming them into the adult leaders of society. 

It is accepted that as part of their teaching missions, universities can require students to expose their minds to ideas, no matter how offensive or disagreeable those ideas may be to the student.

However, once the university decides to teach the body, the howls of protest are heard around the world.

Lincoln University in the United States discovered this when they dared enforce a requirement that  obese students take a mandatory healthy living course which involves physical exercise and lessons in healthy eating. Students with a BMI (body mass index) above 30 and a waist measurement greater than 35 inches for women and 40 inches for men were required to take the course "Fitness for Life" prior to graduation. Much like academic requirements requiring students to diversify their electives among different subjects, students who refused to take the course could not graduate regardless of their overall academic performance.

The requirement was implemented in 2006 and so this is the first year with a large number of potential graduates who need to fulfill the requirement.  Naturally, some of these students are rebelling against the course, saying it is their choice what they do with their body. 

Judging by media coverage of the controversy domestically and even overseas, there is a large segment of the population who agree with them: the university has no place telling students what to do with their bodies.

This is wrong: the university has every right to set the curriculum and students have every right to attend another university if they do not agree with it.

What started with separate news and opinion pieces in the campus newspaper The Lincolnian quickly spread into a world-wide media circus with newspaper headlines screaming about fat students not being allowed to graduate.

It is no secret that North American society faces an obesity problem. 

Generally speaking, universities are one of the worst offenders in contributing to this problem. One only needs to visit campus food services to see why our society has a problem; be it gravy soaked fries, deep fried chicken, or super-sized fountain drinks, higher education does not promote healthy eating habits. (To say nothing of the Red Bull-fuelled all-night study sessions)

It is worth noting the unusual nature of Lincoln University. The historically black institution was founded with the name Ashmun Institute in 1854, when it was the first university in the world providing higher education for black people, a lower class living in a racist society. The university did not exist solely to educate the elites and maintain the status quo. Founded to better the lives of black people, the university has been activist since its founding.

It was a noble ambition for the faculty at Lincoln University to address the obesity issue head-on by implementing an academic requirement that students who are obese take the Fitness for Life course as one of their electives to graduate. But the university should have gone further and made the course mandatory for all students.

The failure to extend this requirement to all students is a partial reason for its downfall. Following the world-wide media firestorm, the Lincoln University faculty met earlier this month and cancelled the BMI requirement completely. The university will continue to offer the "Fitness for Life" course as an optional elective and address obesity health risk topics in its mandatory "Dimensions of Wellness" course, which is a required course for all Lincoln students.

Canadian universities could learn from Lincoln's example. While they implemented the idea poorly, they are right: universities need to address the problem of obesity. Not by targeting the obese, but by targeting the real problem: poor lifestyles and eating habits. Many universities have implemented mandatory writing courses for first-year students to address the epidemic of poor writing. It's time for mandatory lifestyle courses to address the medical epidemic that's a ticking time bomb for my generation.

Mens sana in corpore sano.

[GlobeCampus editor: Vote in a poll on this topic.]