Mr. Speaker, as someone who has spent the best years of his professional career working as a teacher, guidance counsellor and school principal at the secondary level, I welcome this opportunity to take part in the debate on motion M-291, introduced by the Reform Party. The purpose of this motion is, basically, to amend the Canada Student Financial Assistance Act to include a loan repayment system that would take into account the employment income of students after they have finished their education.
At first glance, we might think this measure would be to the students' advantage. It seems reasonable to adjust the terms of repayment to the income of the person who contracted the loan. However, when we look at what the Reform Party has in mind with this motion, our support for this proposal quickly disappears as it becomes clear there is no benefit in this for students. The objective is clear:
reduce the cost to taxpayers of financing post-secondary education by reducing the number and dollar amounts of loans defaulted upon, by charging accumulated interest, rather than simple interest on default loans, and by reducing the number and dollar amounts of collection fees for defaulted loans.
The Reform Party's first objective seems to be based on the false premise that former students do not repay their loans because they do not feel like it. There is a tendency here to forget the economic problems facing young people today. Even for those with a university degree, the unemployment rate is close to 15 per cent. And there is also the troubling fact that many university and college graduates are underemployed and, as a result, underpaid.
In addition to the Reform Party's failure to realize that such situations exist, it is clear that if we want to reduce the cost of education for the taxpayer, someone will have to pick up the slack and pay the bill, and obviously, that onus will now be on the students.
This point of view is short-sighted on several accounts. First, it ignores the social situation of a great number of students. Second, it does not take into account the significant changes in lifestyle of every class of society. Today's students are the product of what is known as the consumer society which, as a social model, constitutes the basis of our western economies. How could we confine our young people to a ghetto and believe that they will take part in mass consumption only when they graduate?
A recent survey conducted in Quebec shows that high school students spend one billion dollars a year. This means that half the students in their last year of high school are working part-time. Nobody will deny the impact of this new reality on school results, but we must accommodate these new needs. We created them from scratch and ubiquitous advertising fuels them.
Transferring greater financial responsibilities to post-secondary students will only increase the tendency of students to go to school and hold a paid job at the same time. Faced with increased tuition fees resulting from the government's so-called social program reform, and the Reform Party's intentions, as described in motion M-291, students will react quite normally by trying to increase the number of hours they spend on the labour market, in order to limit as much as possible the need to borrow money. The consequences will be disastrous: time spent studying will diminish, the failure rate will go up, courses and even whole years will have to be repeated, resulting in increased costs for the governments subsidizing education. Basically, it is a vicious circle.
Transferring heavier financial responsibilities to students in such a manner is short-sighted for another reason. It ignores the fact that with the globalization of the economy, the quality of human resources is the key to competitiveness. It is by taking advantage of knowledge, research and development that Canadian and Quebec businesses will be able to penetrate a trade arena with no borders and maybe no rules.
Any increase in the financial burden of post-secondary students flies in the face of this universal reality. Instead of limiting access to higher education, as the Liberals and the Reformers are planning to do, we should do the exact opposite. That is a major reason for not supporting Motion M-291, a motion which, by its objectives, is anachronistic.
The third objective of the Reform motion also reveals the fallacious nature of their project. It reads as follows: "ensure that post-secondary institutions in Canada receive the funding necessary to maintain the high quality of services they presently provide".
This is not very subtle! This objective acknowledges that students, by bearing a larger part of the cost of their education, will contribute to generate resources for universities and colleges. Moving in that direction is refusing to recognize that knowledge and know-how are the keys to any modern economy. In this regard we should stress the vision of the Quebec Premier who announced last week, in his speech from the Throne, that he was freezing university tuition fees and removing the failure tax at college level. This is the direction to follow if we want to be able to compete with our trading partners under NAFTA and the Uruguay Round.
We sense that the government as well as Reformers are doing their best to gradually withdraw from the area of education. We, of the Bloc Quebecois, believe that the federal government must withdraw entirely from that area of provincial jurisdiction, an area that it invaded not to serve the interests of the people, but to enslave, to dominate and to impose its national standards on the provinces. By withdrawing from that field, the federal government could transfer tax points to the provinces. They would then be in a better position to deliver to their people education services geared to their needs and realities.
In so doing, the federal government would go beyond speeches and do something concrete to reduce the duplication of services delivered by both levels of government. However, to act in that direction would require great discernment and common sense.
These ingredients do not seem to be on sale in the federalist supermarket. To conclude, I urge all members who still care about the future to vote against motion M-291, a dangerous and anachronistic motion because of the objectives its seeks to achieve.