Mr. Speaker, as the education critic for the NDP I am very pleased to speak in the House to Bill C-36, an act to amend certain provisions of the budget tabled on February 24. I would like to focus my comments on the budget and how it impacts or whether it alleviates the crisis facing post-secondary education in Canada.
The millennium fund illustrates very well the government's failure to recognize the crisis facing post-secondary education. If we talk to students and to student organizations like the Canadian Federation of Students, which has done a lot of analysis and evaluation of what is the reality and the situation facing students today, we find out that the average debt for students graduating this spring will be $25,000. In fact, worse than that, approximately 130,000 student loans are in default.
There have been reports of a 700% increase in student loan bankruptcies from 1989 to 1997. What is a very shocking fact and statistic is that now 25% of all bankruptcies are as a result of student loans in 1997. This means that at the end of 1997 there was something like 37,000 bankrupt graduates. This is a very dismal state of affairs. It illustrates very graphically the crisis facing post-secondary education where student are graduating into poverty and where more and more students are declaring bankruptcy. In the recent budget the number of graduate bankruptcies was projected to be 216,000 by the year 2003.
Liberal members and the government have stated that the new budget, the showpiece of which was the millennium fund in education, is something that will address this crisis. Many members in the oppositions parties and in my party have exposed the fact that the millennium fund would not even come close to compensating for the years of cuts that have taken place in post-secondary education as a result of policies of the Liberal government.
The millennium fund will provide a fund in the budget of $2.5 billion. That sounds like a lot of money, but the fund will not even begin until the year 2000, which means that students will still be left with virtually no help or resources until the year 2000.
Even in the year 2000 when this fund begins we will be looking at a contribution from the fund of $250 million per year over a 10 year period. When this is put in the context of the funds that have been taken out of post-secondary education by the federal government, the real picture begins to emerge. By the time the fund starts in the year 2000 we will have lost over $3 billion from post-secondary education as a result of federal government policies and cutting back on education and transfers to provincial governments.
It is a very serious situation caused by the Liberal government that is now offering, with all the spin, rhetoric and talk about the legacy for the year 2000, the millennium fund. When the surface of that fund is scratched and examined we see that it offers very little assistance to students. It will only help an estimated 7% of students. It will provide—we are not sure whether it will be grants or scholarships—assistance to only about 7% of students who are actually in need. That puts the picture in perspective as to whether or not the millennium fund will actually address the needs before us.
Another very troubling factor about the millennium fund is that it takes us down the slippery slope toward privatization and the corporatization of post-secondary education. A lot of concern has been expressed by student organizations and by people in the educational field. Certainly the research we have done in the NDP suggests the course of action the government chose in setting up the fund was to set up in effect a private foundation. There was a named chair representing a very large corporate interest in Canada. This does not bode well for the future of post-secondary education.
Very important to the country is the notion and the principle of publicly funded post-secondary education. What we will see with the millennium fund is a private board being set up that will have the ability to set criteria as to how grants or scholarships will be administered, taking it out of the public realm.
In Ontario a lot of concern has been expressed about ongoing privatization. At the University of Toronto a fund to assist students in need was turned into a scholarship fund after the intervention of the president of the Bank of Montreal who sits on the board of governors. There are the same kinds of concern about the millennium fund because of the uncertainty about who will qualify for assistance or the level of assistance, whether it is a scholarship program and whether or not there will be creeping corporate influence in terms of setting criteria as to who will receive scholarships or loans. We have not yet received information from the federal government.
They are very disturbing facts about the millennium fund. The first is the lack of real financial support it will provide, given the level of cutbacks that we have had. The second is the fact that it is taking us down a road of privatization and corporatization of post-secondary education.
Another issue I would deal with around the millennium fund has to do with how it was set up. We heard in the House yesterday concerns expressed about the situation in Quebec. I understand the concerns that have been put forward by members of the Bloc Quebecois about the lack of consultation around the establishment of the millennium fund. However, let us be very clear. It was not just Quebec that was left out of the picture. It was all other provinces as well that are still waiting for a phone call from the Prime Minister or someone representing the government to inform them about what their role will be in the millennium fund and in setting up the criteria.
It is another indication of unilateral action being taken by the federal government. I would like to ask government members whether or not they think this is their new kind of federalism: unilateral action and no consultation with provincial government even though post-secondary education is a provincial jurisdiction and responsibility.
We in the NDP think this is an absolutely incorrect way to go about implementing the millennium fund. We believe there should be co-operation and discussion involving the setting up of a national grants program using the funds from the millennium fund as the beginning of a national grants program.
The last point I will make is that one of the things that was discovered in the budget was that buried in some of the background material were plans to change the bankruptcy laws. It was a most cynical ploy by the government. On the one hand we were told that the budget would help students, that the millennium fund would help students. On the other hand the finance minister was very quietly laying plans to change the bankruptcy laws which will make it much more difficult for students to file for bankruptcy and will extend the deadline from two years to ten years. This is a most cynical ploy by the federal government and illustrates why the millennium fund will not do what needs to be done in terms of providing federal funding for post-secondary education.
I conclude my remarks by saying that there is growing opposition and concern about the fund as people begin to realize that it is not doing what it is purported to do by the government. There has simply been a lot of political rhetoric about the fund, but the stark reality is that it will not help the students in need in Canada today.