Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, witnesses, for coming today.
I just have an initial comment to Bilan. I'm a person who formerly went to university. I have two degrees, so I know what it's like to live close to poverty, or at poverty. We had four children when I was in school, so we had a lot of Kraft Dinners. I've told this story many times to this committee, and they're getting bored with it now.
But I just wanted to give you a little bit of information. Federally, taxpayers spend $12.3 billion on education per year. That's federally alone. It looks closer to $35 billion if you include the provincial contributions to education. Our national debt is almost $1.2 trillion when you take into consideration the federal and provincial components. At $1.2 trillion, that's about $36,000 of debt per Canadian. It costs Canadians about 11.1% of every revenue dollar, so every tax dollar that people spend, it takes 11.1% of that dollar to service the debt, which adds up to $30 billion per year.
You mentioned the government was making a profit from student loans. I don't see it that way from those numbers. The federal government has to borrow that $12.3 billion, the money used to pay for that education, and there's a debt cost. If you look at a percentage in terms of interest, it's about 6% to 7%, but you could say it's an effective tax rate of 11%. You could look at it that way. It still costs government to borrow money to give to students to go to school. That's what I'm getting at, so it's not free.
I think the perception from your organization is that education should be free, but it's certainly not free. I guess what I'm concerned about is, as taxpayers, we talk about poverty reduction strategies. That's the focus of this study, but I'm concerned about Joe and Jane Taxpayer who are asked to contribute more and more every day so somebody else gets something for free. As a concern for poverty, what I'm concerned about with Joe and Jane Taxpayer is that we ask them for more and more every day, and pretty soon they're in poverty. These people who go to work every day, they go do their best for their families and for their kids, and we're asking them to bear more tax burden and debt burden every day.
That's just a comment to you, Bilan, to consider for your organization.
I want to talk about taxpayers, and I want to get to Mark and your presentation, because I think what you're doing is excellent, not to mention that you make great coffee. I have it regularly on weekends when I watch my daughter play hockey.
I want to ask you, in terms of poverty—you see a lot of people who work for you—what is the number one thing that you think is most important to getting somebody who's in poverty out of poverty?