I thank the member for Lévis for the question. We serve together on the human resources committee and I have found his interventions to be always thoughtful.
It is a difficult problem. The member puts his finger exactly on the problem that has confronted students up to this point. We say it is a loan but there is an element of grant here because we pay the interest on those loans for the three, four, five years, up until the time that people begin repayment, and then we pay a subsidy up to a certain amount.
At the same time we know that if we allow people to successfully complete their education, the economy is still performing relatively well for people at that end of the scale. The question is that until this bill we have not allowed them any options, any opportunities to repay. If they get stuck, if they cannot find a job, we have not provided for them or given ourselves the opportunity to provide any way in which they can repay their loan. This bill begins to speak to that. It begins to offer some opportunities, whether it becomes income contingent repayment or some form of community service as an alternative to work.
We know that if you graduate university right now, job creation for university students, depending on the region of the country, is somewhere between 11 and 17 per cent. That is pretty healthy. It provides a lot of options, a lot of opportunities for work, a lot of options for people to access employment and repay these loans.
The bigger question is, are we allowing people to have an adequate educational experience or are we just simply putting them into a no-win situation in which they perform poorly because they have to work so hard to get by day to day that they are less competitive in the marketplace when they get out?