Madam Speaker, I am pleased to participate in this debate today. I would like to begin my remarks by thanking the hon. member for Fundy--Royal for bringing forward the motion. It is actually a rare occasion to have a debate in parliament about post-secondary education and why it is so important. I have certainly tried to bring forward this debate and have had motions in the past. It sometimes comes up during the budget debate, but it is rare to actually have a debate on it. We will have three hours of debate on this motion and that is very good.
I have listened very carefully to the debate. I think there are some things we all agree on. There is probably one thing we agree on. Everybody is aware that with respect to the future labour market and how it is evolving it is critical to have post-secondary education. The federal labour department has done a study on this and has predicted that by the year 2004, 72% of all jobs will require three years of post-secondary education. This is one reality that I think we can see and certainly it is one that young people know about.
There is also another reality that is facing young Canadians in particular. We are facing the greatest barriers that I believe we have ever had in this country with respect to accessibility for post-secondary education. One only has to look at the facts. Since 1990-91, tuition has risen 126%, six times faster than the rate of inflation. This is an enormous cost that individual Canadians and families are taking on. From 1990 to 2000, the debt load has quadrupled from $8,000 to $25,000.
No one has really addressed the question of why we have this crisis in post-secondary education. When I listened to the Liberal member who spoke to the motion, I did not know whether to cry or laugh when I heard the excuses and the suggestion that somehow most graduate students are managing their debts quite well. I can assure everyone that most graduate students are reluctant to even leave school because the thought of facing the debt wall they have and graduating into poverty is pretty overwhelming.
The reason we are facing this crisis is that the federal government made a conscious decision to cut $7 billion from federal transfers. As a result, we have real per capita funding for post-secondary education that is now 17% lower than it was 10 years ago. Another fact is that federal support for post-secondary education has now dropped to 34%, the lowest level in 30 years. That is a fact. That is what is now causing the crisis in post-secondary education.
The impact of that decision by the Liberal government to erode accessibility in the retreat of public funding is that tuition fees have been forced up. As we know, higher tuition fees mean lower participation for low and moderate income students. There is just no escaping that fact. In fact, even Statistics Canada documented this in its report of December 2001. It showed that as far as student participation rates in 1998 were concerned, students from high income families were two and a half times more likely to attend college or university than those from low income families.
Canadians know this themselves. They do not need the info from Statistics Canada. A poll in October 2000 asked Canadians why they did not pursue post-secondary education if they were not already involved in it. The overwhelming response was that the main reason was the lack of financial accessibility, so I really have to protest the information that we have heard today from the Liberal government, the little bits of tinkering and pieces that have been put forward.
If the government had truly addressed the crisis facing us and students in the country, first, we would not be here debating this motion today and, second, we would not be facing the most severe limits on accessibility that we have ever seen. What is happening in the country is that high tuition is now discriminating against low and moderate income students.
In fact we also know that the converse is true. We have evidence that tells us that where there are lower tuition fees enrolment increases, particularly for low and moderate income students. We only have to look at British Columbia, where we had a tuition fees freeze in effect for five years and the enrolment in B.C. increased while in the rest of the country it actually decreased. Only two provinces, B.C. and Quebec, have really taken this on and frozen tuition fees and really tried to compensate for the retreat of public funding from the federal government. I am sad to report that now in B.C. the farm team of the federal Liberals, the provincial Liberals, has chucked out the tuition fees freeze. Tuition fees in B.C. now are going up by as much as 300%. Again, that will severely impact the accessibility for low income and moderate income students.
The current situation is clearly intolerable and it is simply not sustainable. We in the NDP believe that education must be a national priority, with the federal government playing a critical and decisive role. We require stable, long term federal funding. We require a national grant program, which has been advocated for by groups like the Canadian Federation of Students for many, many years. We do not need a millennium fund based on scholarship, but a national grants program. We are the only industrialized country that does not have a national grants program.
We also need to have a tuition fees freeze. We need to have a rollback so that students have some capability and some chance of getting through their post-secondary education without graduating into poverty.
We also need to have the bankruptcy law repealed. The government brought about changes to the bankruptcy law that discriminated against students simply on the basis that they were students and basically raised the number of years after which they could declare bankruptcy to 10 years, virtually eliminating the idea that they could at any point declare bankruptcy.
Finally I want to say that probably one of the most important things for post-secondary education is to have some sense of national standards around accessibility. In fact, the Canadian Association of University Teachers has put forward a Canada post-secondary education act modelled on the Canada Health Act to provide not for profit, comprehensive, affordable, universally accessible and publicly administered post-secondary education across Canada.
Until we deal with those fundamental issues, I would suggest that we will still be facing a crisis.
I want to conclude my remarks by saying that I actually seconded the motion before us today because I saw it as one small step that could be taken to provide some relief, but I also believe that mitigating a disaster after it has happened really does not get us very far.What we really have to do is deal with the disaster before us. We have to recognize that the fundamental decision made by the Liberals in 1993 to cut the transfers and to decrease the amount of money going into post-secondary education, which forced tuition fees up and almost eliminated accessibility for low income students, is what we are really facing.
While the motion provides some relief, and again I am very glad that the member has brought it forward, I still believe that we have to deal with the fundamental issue and recognize in this country whether we believe education is a right for all Canadians to enjoy or simply a privilege for those who can afford it because they are affluent enough.
We in the NDP believe in the former. We believe that education is a right and that the federal government has a responsibility to show leadership on funding and for national standards in that regard.