Mr. Speaker, in its green book on social security reform the Liberal government told us we needed to give more Canadians access to higher education. In the same breath it proposed that the current generation of students would have to pay much higher tuition fees than their parents did.
This is like Walmart trying to win new customers by raising its prices. What the Liberals are really saying is that they want to turn Canadian universities and colleges into Holt Renfrews with most students reduced to fantasizing about what it would be like to actually be able to afford to go to such an elite institution.
The Liberals now like to parrot the Reform Party's slogan that we must cut the deficit so that we do not mortgage our children's future. However to ask today's students to pay dramatically higher tuition fees and at the same time as future taxpayers to pay off the debt accumulated by previous generations would have exactly the opposite effect.
The students who have to borrow to pay for the increased tuition fees will emerge with their own personal education mortgage before they even look at a house. They will still be paying off the mortgage of previous generations, the public debt.