Mr. Speaker, it is with some pleasure that I join in this debate today.
I am the member for Winnipeg South and the University of Manitoba is in my riding. I was post-secondary education critic for our party when I served in the Manitoba legislature. I have taken a great interest in the situation as it affects students in my province at the university in my area and certainly in all of this country.
I am one of those, and I expect it is shared by most members in this House, who believes that education is a public good. I note a member opposite who serves with me on the human resources committee. We listened to submissions on employability on that committee.
One of the things which was noted very quickly is that the job creation rate for people with a university education, college training, or a profession is something in excess of 10 per cent a year. However, the job creation rate for those without post-secondary education, for those with less than high school education, is minus some 17 per cent and declining. It is a very, very serious situation.
We all benefit, all of us. Not just the person being trained but all of us who live in this country benefit by having a populace that is well educated, well trained, productive, et cetera.
The question is what do we do in support and in pursuit of that public policy? That is what this bill is attempting lay out a framework for. It does not answer all of the questions but it does make some very innovative changes to the current legislation which provide for some fairly major improvements in the way we as a community support those people who are able to achieve a standing at a university or college.
I want to deal briefly with one piece of information which was mentioned just before I stood up to speak. That is the question of the level of support which is currently provided for students versus what was provided.
While there is some variation between smaller colleges and universities and the more major institutions, students do not pay one-third to one-half of their education. At large universities they paid 15 or 16 per cent. This has slowly ratcheted up over the last few years as a result of, I believe it was the Smith commission report which looked at the share that students should pay.
At the University of Manitoba it is around 19 per cent right now that the student revenue is comprised of total expenditures at the school. There is a covert, if not an overt, policy in place to bring that up to 25 per cent, which I think was the level recommended by Dr. Smith, believing that gave students more power and a little more clout in their negotiations with universities.
The dilemma is that despite the fact we give lip service and stand up to make statements about the importance of education and we examine the value of an education and understand this is something which is a major improvement to life in our communities, as a country we have not provided very significant support to students, particularly in this last eight years.
One of the things we did right away in 1984 as a country-it was done by the former government, but it was done in this Chamber-was we froze the amount of money a student could borrow or could claim for cost of living. From 1984 until this year the amount of money they could claim for food and housing was frozen. That put students in a very difficult position. The cost of living did not stop going up. People still had to pay for their apartments and their meals.
What we did part way through the last eight years is we changed the regulations relative to work. I think the previous government felt what should be done was to allow them to work more part time but still consider them full time students. By doing this it would somehow allow them to shoulder more of the costs and therefore pay for their own education and not be a drag on the public purse.
Unfortunately that put students under enormous pressure. People began working at those part time jobs. They had to in order to pay for their living accommodations and to feed themselves. As someone who has had the proverbial potatoes and rice also, I can assure you students are not eating a whole lot better now. It forced them to take time away from their studies. It took time away from the pursuit of excellence in their education. It put them in the position of having to work continually to sustain themselves and at the same time trying to get that education.
You could get by if you were a student from a family that was intact and you could live at home, or your family lived close to a university and you could live at home and commute. If your family lived in the rural area or in the northern parts of the province and you had to live in residence, or you were a student who for any one of a number of reasons came from a home that was either too impoverished or too disparate to offer any support, you were in a very difficult financial situation.
Almost from the time the government changed the regulations we saw a very gradual but significant increase statistically in the number of part time students at universities and a decrease in the number of full time students. That was even factoring out the influx of older students who pick up the odd course.
That was because students found they could not do both things. They could not go to university full time and work what they had to in order to sustain themselves. All of a sudden three year degrees were taking four or four and a half years. Those students who, had they been able to concentrate and work full time on their studies, would have come out with degrees and excellent averages in good preparation for graduate school were unable to do that because they were forced to spend so much time just sustaining themselves.
What did the government do just prior to the last election? It announced an increase in student loan limits. Looking at that increase and at the regulations which support that increase, the government also changed the identification of what were personal contributions. This was done to the point whereby even though it was seen that more money could be borrowed, it did nothing to alter the underlying ability to assign greater cost to the cost of living.
The government changed the regulations. Instead of basing accommodation on two people sharing an apartment, it based it on three people sharing an apartment. It took things out of the basket of goods students were deemed to need in order to survive at university. The result was that students were put under more and not less financial pressure.
There is another element to the provision of student aid which needs to be talked about because we are the federal government and we deliver these services for the most part through a relationship with provincial governments.
What was happening in my province was that the federal government was providing about $3,500 in total support. If a student required more support than that, another $3,500 could be obtained from the provincial government. A very small number of special needs students could access another chunk of money through the provincial government.
One of the concerns we had was that when one was tied to that provincial assessment and delivery of support, as the federal government increased its ability or willingness to subsidize the interest on certain loans, the provincial government rather than also increasing its support would simply decrease its involvement.
I am sorry to report to this Chamber but that is exactly what has happened in my province. I do not know what has occurred in some of the other provinces, but in the province of Manitoba as the federal government has moved to increase the loan limit, the provincial government has withdrawn certain support.
All we have done in one aspect of this program is to transfer an expense on to the back of the federal government. That has to open the door for a discussion about the federal role in funding, the federal involvement with provincial agencies in the assessment and delivery of support. Perhaps we need to look at some new vehicles for delivering support to students. I think you will find that the possibility of that is contained within this bill.
My concern since I first began to work with this is that over the last eight years we were successively constraining the support given to universities through established programs financing. We were holding back on the support that we in pursuit of a public policy took on to the public purse to the point where in some cases the annual increases universities were getting were in the negative numbers.
That certainly happened in Manitoba and in some other provinces. Even when they were getting positive increases they were increases of a point, a point and a half, or two points versus the total cost of living, inflation, et cetera which was at the three or four point range back in the late 1980s.
This caused the universities to look to that 18 or 19 per cent of revenue coming from students in order to make up for the shortfalls in their revenues. We were seeing student fee increases of 15 and 20 per cent year over year. Student fees at the University of Manitoba increased over 100 per cent during the last eight years.
In our pursuit of that policy we were taking something that had been deemed to be a public good, that had been funded by the community, by the government in pursuit of a well-educated, productive population, and we were transferring responsibility of that from the government on to students. It has created some very difficult situations.
We gave the students no options on the repayment. We gave them no way out of the hole that we were forcing them to dig for themselves.
I have been given the high sign by the Speaker so I will draw this to a close now and perhaps I can go a little further in response to a question.
I support the bill because it does many things. It enables us to provide some repayment options for students, it opens the door to link good performance to some opportunities in community service, it allows people to deal with their debt management, it provides more badly needed support to students, and it allows us to assess a reasonable level for the cost of living that is also regionally sensitive. These are very profound and long overdue changes which I hope we will pass quickly and get into play.