Thank you very much for this very important question.
Yes, Budget 2008 has $350 million, which is in fact the amount of money that was available in the millennium scholarship fund, which ended this year. So in fact the net new investment in five years—because 2012-13 is when you get up to the $423 million figure—is a net new investment of $123 million.
The total federal budget is roughly $250 billion. The amount of surplus available this year was almost $18 billion. The student loans program that you described this grants and loans money as going to serves 425,000 students. There are 1.3 million students studying in post-secondary education full-time. Tuitions have tripled in the past 20 years. Student loans have exploded.
This is not enough money. Most of those students are women. I appreciate that it is a minor increase—$123 million over a five-year horizon is an increase—but $350 million of that money was there already. There was an additional $50 million given to post-graduate students. If memory serves me properly, it is something like 200 students who will get a benefit out of that.
Again I remind you, there are 1.3 million students. Yes, some students are going to do better, but it is not nearly enough to address the fact, Madam Grewal, that students are coming out of school today with student debt loads that are staggering, that are taking them 10 or 15 years to pay off. They are delaying family formation; they are unable to get their own housing. There's surely more we can do to limit the rise in tuitions or actually provide more grants.
May I also say that we are coming, within the next decade, to a sea change in the labour market. We are completely unprepared in this country for what is going to happen.
The fact is, we don't have enough doctors and nurses today. What is going to happen in five to ten years, given that about a third of doctors and half of nurses are poised to retire in the next five years? We have no plan for how to replace them.
We should be expanding the grants program dramatically to help people actually train to be doctors, nurses, and other health professionals to meet this huge issue that is facing us straight in the face and to make sure that we don't run out of people and that we stop importing them, poaching other jurisdictions that are using their scarce public resources to train people—and then they lose them to places such as Alberta, which can set up job fairs in hotel lobbies throughout Africa.
I think there are ethical considerations, justice considerations, and just plain smart governance, good planning, and forward-looking considerations that would mean you could spend more money on expanding that pool of grants.