Mr. Speaker, I thank the member. I respectfully differ with him in terms of government involvement in our education vis-à-vis what it is now.
If I am not mistaken, I believe the involvement of the government directly in education then was about in the same proportion as it is now. Somewhere between one-half and one-third of the costs were borne by the students through tuition and the other part was subsidized. It depended again on what kind of study was pursued. If you went to medical school or some of the highly technical oriented places where the lab and shop equipment was very expensive then of course the government involvement was higher.
However I do not quibble with that. As a taxpayer and as a citizen I think we are very, very wise to invest in education. That is one of the things government should be doing. It is not something that should be left to go by itself. The government has a legitimate role to play. However in the actual practice of it, to introduce a degree of competition by vouchers, to introduce a degree of accountability by that I think can only improve our educational system.
The member asked whether I would be supporting this bill. If the choice is between the status quo and what this bill provides as an improvement, I think I will have to support it because it is an improvement. It is better than what we have, but it is not going far enough and it is going in the wrong direction.
I still have to study the bill some more to see the details. Hopefully the committee will come up with some good amendments. Maybe we will be able to introduce more elements into it which will reward those who are diligent, who work and come out the other end without the debts instead of penalizing them at the expense of those who incur a debt.
One of the features of this bill is that if you happen to run up a really huge debt you can get part of it forgiven. However if you are astute and you live on potatoes and rice because there are those times when you have to be really frugal-as some of us did, and you can see I had my share-the fact is the frugal individual is the one who forgoes the benefits. In a way he is penalized.
In education, as in all areas of life, we need to reward the actions and activities we want. We should somehow be punishing those we do not want, instead of vice versa.