I thank the committee for the opportunity to make the voice of students in Canada heard here today.
The Canadian Federation of Students represents more than half a million students from colleges and universities across Canada and is Canada's largest and oldest national students' union.
I come before this committee with a simple request: make post-secondary education a right in Canada. Everyone in Canada, regardless of socio-economic circumstances, should be able to access a college or university education. Our economy now demands that workers have a diploma or degree in hand in order to effectively compete in the labour market. The fact is that 70% of new jobs require some form of post-secondary education. However, skyrocketing tuition fees, in addition to putting post-secondary education out of reach for many Canadians, have saddled those who have attended our institutions with collectively over $15 billion in federal student debt.
Inadequate post-secondary education funding has also resulted in tuition fee increases of over 230% since 1992. Those who receive government assistance or private bank loans face average debt loads of $28,000, with many debts over twice that figure. The result is an increasingly cost-prohibitive and elitist system, with a greater number of Canadians left behind each year.
A lack of federal leadership to address increasing tuition fees results in significant lost opportunity costs to our country. For every Canadian shut out of post-secondary education, the costs of health care, employment insurance, social assistance, and public safety increase, while the tax base is reduced at the same time. The OECD estimates that the economic return on investing in post-secondary education is $1.63 for every dollar the federal government spends. Simply put, our government cannot afford to continue to underfund our post-secondary education system.
The Canadian student movement has made four recommendations to move towards making a post-secondary education a right for everyone.
The first recommendation is to adequately fund the system and create a dedicated post-secondary education transfer to the provinces through a federal framework. We need to achieve greater collaboration and avoid the abuse of federal transfers such as was shown in the actions of the British Columbia government in 2008, when funding was increased by $110 million while at the same time $50 million was cut to the university sector.
The 2007 federal budget announced the largest increase to core transfer payments for post-secondary education in 15 years. But when accounting for inflation and population growth, we're still roughly one billion dollars behind where we were in 1992.
As well, the current government program of funding education-related tax credits is a poor instrument to improve access or reduce student debt. They are not available when students are required to pay tuition fees or living expenses; however, the federal government still spends over $1.4 billion on this program each year alone. When tax credits are combined with savings schemes, the amount spent on these untargeted programs comes out at over $2.5 billion.
A better use of this money would be to shift all funding from back-ended tax credits and savings schemes to the front end in the form of needs-based grants. Moving this to the front end in the form of grants would increase the value and number of Canada's student grants and would be a completely cost-neutral measure to the federal government. This would all but eliminate the need for students to borrow from the Canada student loans program until roughly 2025.
Although federal and provincial governments spend billions of dollars each year on universities and colleges, adequate information to fully analyze the impact of that spending is not collected. The education indicators report by the OECD this year again noted that Canada could not provide data for 57 of 96 indicators used to compare each country's post-secondary education systems. Further, the future of a vital post-secondary education data collection mechanism, the youth in transition survey, is uncertain. We're recommending that the federal government adequately fund Statistics Canada with an additional $10 million to collect data on post-secondary education's impact on the economy and save the youth in transition survey.
Lastly, in 1996 funding increases to the provinces for the post-secondary student support program for aboriginal students were capped at 2% per annum, regardless of the increased costs to post-secondary education and the demographic growth of the aboriginal population. The number of students funded by the PSSSP fell from 27,000 in 1995 to just about 22,000 in 2006, and it's estimated that over 19,000 students have been denied funding since the cap was introduced in 1996. By lifting the cap on the PSSSP and clearing the backlog of students previously denied funding, the federal government would move closer to fulfilling its treaty obligations to first nations and Inuit peoples.
Again, I thank you for the opportunity to make this presentation, and l look forward to any questions the committee members might have.
Thank you.