Thank you for that question.
I think that, again, budgets are about priorities. There is an opportunity for a federal government with the power and the resources to fully fund a universal system of post-secondary education to do just that. When we talk about education and training, skills development, and development of an entire generation, we're talking about giving young people the same opportunities that were afforded to generations before us to be able to adequately achieve the degrees we need to be competitive in today's labour market.
We've talked about some of the stats around the requirements for a university or college-level degree, just to be successful in today's society, but when we think of us in the long term, with the compounding impacts of not being able to find stable, non-precarious, and long-term employment—as a generation of young people that have often been forced to take on short-term contracts and a lot of unpaid internships, non-remunerated work—and the expectation and standard that has been set by employers, young people are not going to have access to the same entry-level positions that afforded stability to a generation before us.
The long-term impacts of that can look like young people going back to live at home, taking longer to be able to think about starting a family, not buying a home, and not being innovative and thinking about starting their own business because they have too much debt to be able to think about investing in their own ideas.
I think there are very long-term impacts that inhibit the success of this generation, if the governments continue to refuse to provide the investments that our public post-secondary education needs to provide young people with the opportunities, skills, and training that they deserve for a better future.