Well, I am not talking about anybody who is sitting right beside me, certainly.
However I do want to say that it has been known to happen. Very often parents quite wisely tell their children “We paid for one year and you blew it. Now it is up to you”. Unfortunately though, because that student has parents who have middle class incomes or better, it is not possible for that student to get a student loan as it stands today.
This type of proposal would really help those sorts of people, but it is not just those people. Many parents today say, on principle, that they will not pay for their children's education when they turn 18 or 19 because they feel it is time they fended for themselves.
There are many examples of people who fall between the cracks. I know someone who happens to be in a situation where the family has enough assets but not necessarily a large income, and because of that the person is not eligible for student loans. In order to get student loans, the family would have had to sell off property.
I think to a lot of people that would seem unreasonable. It makes some sense to treat these young people as adults. We are asking them to embark on an adult course, make mature decisions and now, by treating them as independents in the eyes of the government when it comes to getting student loans, we would be giving them the chance to prove that they are capable of taking that money and spending it wisely. Ultimately, of course, they do have to pay it back.
I know many people are concerned that this will increase government liability. There is no question that it would increase government liability but, on the other hand, now that the rules have been toughened so much with respect to making it very difficult for students to declare bankruptcy in order to escape their student loans, this is virtually something that is difficult to get out of. When a student enters into a contract with the government for a student loan, it is difficult to escape that today and leave taxpayers on the hook. Besides, the great majority of students do pay back their loans. They are very responsible and it is really not an issue.
It is very important that we find some way to accommodate all the young people today who, for whatever reason, are having trouble obtaining funding to finance their education.
As the member for Fundy—Royal pointed out, the criteria is actually quite low as it stands. He pointed out that a family of four earning $55,000 in Ontario would be expected to fund about $9,000, in after tax dollars, of their child's education. That is a tremendous amount of money for a family of four making $55,000. It seems to me that it is quite reasonable to come up with a way to free students so they can obtain loans and not be, in effect, trapped by the fact that their family earns a middle class income or better.
We must do much better than that. It is not enough just to give people student loans. We can do many other things. One thing we should be doing, which my friend and others did not talk about, is offer families ways to save more money to fund their children's education.
I want to point out, by the way, that if this motion were to come into effect I believe the great majority of parents, who are currently funding or planning to fund their children's education, would continue to do that because they do not want to see their children burdened with debt. As they have done their entire lives, they would find ways to sacrifice in order to fund their children's educations. It would be nice if we could make that more affordable.
In the 2000 election my party ran on a platform that included a universal child deduction of $3,000. For families with children up to the age of 16 and people earning middle class incomes in Ontario, for instance, it would be a saving of about $1,000 a year. If people were to put that into an RESP, or even if they were to set it aside over the course of the 16 years that child is eligible to receive it, it would be $16,000 uncompounded. Therefore, for the average family with two children, $32,000 could be set aside to go toward a university education.
If it went into an RESP, with the extra money that comes from the government, it would add up to a substantial amount of money that could be set aside. That is the other side of it that we have to start talking about, which is providing tax relief for families so they can afford things that are priorities to them. Clearly the education of their children is a priority. It is time the government started to wake up to some of the problems facing families in Canada today.
There are many other proposals, and we have talked about many of them in this place, with respect to ensuring that families have adequate means to sustain a university education for their children.
However, there is the other side of it. I have talked about young people coming out of a post-secondary institution of some kind. It is not just a university, by the way. We should not limit it to that. It is also technical and other private sector schools that provide specialized training. However, it is important that when students graduate they are able to find good jobs that pay great wages so they can pay back their loans more quickly than they can today.
During the recent boom in the United States we saw examples of how young people, both in the United States and Canada, were getting paid big signing bonuses to go to work for companies in the U.S. as a result of the hot economy in the United States in particular.
What we need to do as a country is have a vision for creating that kind of wealth, those high paying jobs that will ensure that young people will have the capacity to pay off these loans much more quickly than they currently are today. We have to start putting our minds to having that kind of economy again.
I would love to speak to this a lot longer but I see my time is up. I will wrap up by saying that we support the motion. I also want to point out that it is something we have been advocating for many years.