Mr. Speaker, I wish to thank the hon. member for Peterborough for the question. I know that he has long been interested in post-secondary education, but I think where we differ significantly is that the $42 billion he refers to which had to be taken away was taken away on the backs of students. It was taken away on the backs of the lowest-income people in the country. The fact is, the government had a choice. It had a choice about creating a fair taxation system which would have ensured that all social safety nets still existed. Right now they barely exist.
We are facing the lowest level of federal funding in post-secondary education in 30 years. Tuition has gone up about 130% in the last 10 years while inflation has gone up only 20%. One cannot escape these facts, because they show what has happened to post-secondary education as a result of the federal government moving away from its responsibility.
Yes, I agree that the delivery of education, like health care, is a provincial responsibility, but it has to be based on some sort of national sense of purpose about what it is that we believe is accessible to young people in this country. When that does not exist, and it does not, then we begin to see the reality that is emerging today, that is, enrolment in post-secondary education by young people with low and moderate incomes is declining because they simply cannot afford the tuition. They cannot afford a 100%-plus increase. This is what we have seen in B.C. in recent months.
This could have been averted if the federal government had taken a strong position on creating some national standards based on accessibility. The member and I are well aware of this because it has come up at the committee that we were part of. There were choices and the government chose to make choices that took away these programs for people and basically lined the pockets of corporations, businesses and wealthy Canadians that had a lot of lining there already.