Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
In the study on employability that we've begun, we've heard a lot about barriers that adults and youths face when they try to get the training they needed to find a job. I'd like to go back to the idea that I wanted to propose, that the bill be based on the needs of the student, rather than an arbitrary income threshold.
I believe at the moment the grant can go only to students from low-income families, as defined by the national child benefit supplement. So I think it would be important to extend that.
You wanted an explanation of what I meant by needs-based rather than income-based. It's in the same way that the Millennium Scholarship Fund has extended its grants to a needs base.
For example, if you take two young people, for the one who lives with his or her parents in a town where there is a university, the costs are going to be very different from those of the young person from northern Ontario who has to go to university. So you would assess those costs based on needs rather than on the income of the parents. Both of those students could come from families with the same income, but one would face considerably higher barriers to education.
I felt that by making it needs-based--as I believe the millennium fund has done--rather than income-based, it would eliminate one of those barriers.
Perhaps you could answer that.