Mr. Speaker, I thank my honourable colleague for his question. It will give me the opportunity to clarify some things that were said during Oral Question Period which came very close to being something other than truthful.
It is true that tuition fees in Quebec are very close to half what they are in many other provinces, while Quebec is not the richest of the provinces. Why is this so? Because there is a political desire to foster accessibility.
There was a time when there was a wide gap between those who could afford to go to university and those who could not. My generation wanted everyone to be able to attend, which is why Quebec CEGEPs, which anyone can attend, are the equivalent of first year university in the other provinces. They are free of charge. University itself often costs half what it does elsewhere, because we want many people to be able to attend.
This is a policy choice, and it seems to me that any discrimination there might be is not negative discrimination. It would be a kind of positive discrimination.
It costs a lot of money to train a physician. If medical students choose to come to Quebec because they pay half as much, is it not normal that there be an attempt to negotiate a kind of equity with the government? If our students go to Ontario, they are going to pay twice what they would in Quebec.
American medical students had been coming to Quebec for ages before people started to say “Just a minute now. They are coming to study here, costing us X thousand dollars a year, and then going back home”.
So this is not a matter of being petty, but an approach based on looking at what things cost. We are making a collective effort to encourage education. We want Quebec to benefit from it as much as possible. We have nothing against young people from elsewhere coming here to study, but there must be agreements with the governments on this. That seems to me to be far from discriminatory.
When the statement is made that these funds must be administered in the same way, that strikes me as common sense. Where scholarships are concerned, a system is already in place. It is so hard to be fair in this area, to decide whether this person or that person deserves a scholarship, so such a system cannot be left in the hands of just anybody. We know that universities are recognized as having different strengths in different disciplines. One cannot improvise with nothing.
The Quebec loans and grants program meets students' needs. McGill University students are very happy with it and they do not want another program. The program is fair to all students. Negotiations can take place with students' associations. The program provides not only loans but also scholarships. And more and more scholarships become available as the education level gets higher, because costs also go up.
We want that money to go to the existing program, instead of being used to create another infrastructure, with administrators designing national application forms for all Canadian students and deciding who should be awarded the scholarships. If the scholarships are based on merit, then they are not awarded haphazardly, which implies that a real system is in place. Incidentally, what kind of control do we have over this?
I hope I am convincing people. The general idea may sound appealing, but if you take a closer look, it does not make sense. It is costly. It provides no guarantee whatsoever that young people are the ones who will benefit and, more importantly, that the process will be fair or efficient. It also requires that we put a lot of emphasis at first on the infrastructure.
It is a waste. It seems to go against the idea that, from now on, the government will no longer spend in a senseless way. It will not benefit education, it will not prepare us for the year 2000, and it is not for students.