moved:
Motion No. 3
That Bill C-28, in Clause 14, be amended by deleting lines 27 to 41, on page 12.
Mr. Speaker, proceedings in the House do not always reflect exactly what goes on in committee. I have said that, as the Official Opposition, we have tried to do our job the best way we could, to a point where, at the committee stage, we even moved amendments with which we were not comfortable. For example, we proposed that the minister be at least required to consult the provinces before designating the appropriate authorities.
You can certainly understand that it was difficult for us to do that, but we thought that we had to move such an amendment in order to force the minister to hold consultations. Of course, our amendment was defeated.
Now, Mr. Speaker, I want to talk about the clause that concerns Quebec the most. The committee sat for many hours, but that subject came up only during the last half hour. The clause that we want to delete affects the right of the provinces and territories to opt out. I have to tell everybody who is listening to us today that the right to opt out has been part of this legislation since it was first adopted in 1964, but there was no condition attached to it.
The province that chose to opt out received its share of what was spent elsewhere, depending on its population and the amount of money spent. They were saying: "There are two situations: either you take part in the national program or you opt out and, in that case, inasmuch as you have a provincial program, we will redistribute to you the equivalent of what has been distributed to other provinces".
We have to realize that in the context of the old struggles under Duplessis and later of the first arrangements under Pearson, before centralizing federalists took over the Liberal Party and formed the Liberal government, the right to opt out was not subject to any conditions. The first program, enacted in 1964, has been changed. The current act too, under which we have been operating since 1984, provides a right to opt out, this time subject to two conditions I would describe as light and formulated as objectives to be achieved.
The concern was that the provincial program should have provisions that had essentially the same effects as far as part-time students and exemptions from interest payments were concerned. Those then were provisions related to accessibility. They did not jeopardize the whole program, the whole approach of the program. There was a recognition that a province opting out from the program had its own approaches, its own objectives, its own criteria and its own administration, but on the other hand they were saying: "Make sure that part-time students enjoy the same rights and that in some cases there can be exemptions from interest payments".
But this new measure is quite another story. This bill turns the conditions into bothersome requirements affecting program administration with seemingly very little concern for objectives. Besides, it is not that we would want the program to be different, because Quebec did not wait for the central government to show the way to set up a loan and grant program.
Quebec did not wait for the central government of Canada to invest more in education, even more than the wealthiest province. I want to come back to those figures.
It is important to know that university funding has been largely provided-when I say largely, it should be pointed out that provincial efforts vary, and I shall refer to Quebec's effort-by the federal government; this is money from the provinces redistributed on the basis of demographic criteria. From 1977 to 1985-86, according to the most recent study I was able to find, which was published in 1992, that effort declined considerably.
General financing for the entire education system is not provided through student loans but through a program of transfer payments covering both health and education. The provinces have all chosen to give preference to health over education, resulting in a considerable proportionate decline in funds devoted to education. As to the provincial contribution offsetting the lower level of federal spending, Quebec has made a remarkable effort. From 1977 to 1986, Quebec invested 2.3 percent of its gross domestic product in education. This has since declined to 2.1 per cent, which means that 0.2 per cent went over to health. We do not have the time to go deeper into this.
By comparison Ontario-which is far richer than Quebec in terms of individual and overall wealth, for well-known historical reasons-invested 1.4 per cent of its GDP in 1977, and only 1.1 per cent in 1986-87. This means that Quebec, a poorer province, spent twice as much of its GDP on education. Concerning student loans, the figures submitted by the department indicate that Quebec contributed the same amount in 1992-93, even though the number of students was proportionately lower because Quebec has only 70 per cent of Ontario's population.
Under these conditions, it is a shameful, indecent and unacceptable situation when one is told in a federal bill that Quebec has to respect eight points, that it has to report-and that is why I will be sending additional documentation to the Quebec minister of education-and that most of these points relate to program administration; in particular, it indicates the direction of these reforms. This reform of student aid shows what is in store with the reform of social programs: centralization, meddling in provincial jurisdiction and a right to opt out with national standards that apply even to administration.