Mr. Speaker, as my colleague and every member in the House knows, we are dealing, for better or for worse--and in some ways it is better and some ways it is worse--with a split jurisdiction. Tuition fees are definitely within the area of the provinces. The province of Quebec has the lowest tuition fees and, as the NDP member from Nova Scotia who spoke previously said, that province has the highest in the country.
Dependence on tuition fees varies from province to province. I wrote an article recently expressing concern about the dependence of our institutions on tuition fees. I noted that it had risen to between 20% and 30% from being in the teens only a relatively few years ago. This is a matter of great concern to me. I have a letter from a university in Nova Scotia indicating that it is 43% dependent on tuition.
Let me go back to my colleague's point. I understand the province that he is from. We cannot control the tuition fees. In fact, one of the things we are interested in doing in this legislation is making sure--and we have agreements from some provinces as we do on the RESPs--that the provinces will not in fact in some way claw back or simply increase the tuition when the federal government does something.
Millennium scholarships have been mentioned, in some ways disparagingly, but they do exist. For low income students, the Government of Canada is now implementing a $3,000 first year grant, which will begin very soon. There is a $3,000 grant for disabled students for every year of undergraduate, which is starting very soon. There are graduate student grants, which I mentioned in my speech, and those are federal grants. It is our hope that whenever we develop one of these programs the provinces do not draw it back and therefore put the burden back on students and their families.
My colleague's province is one of those that has not yet agreed to not count RESPs as income. I hope he will encourage his province to do so. I am pleased to say that Nova Scotia has already agreed. We are going to try to get agreement with all the provinces so that the moneys accumulated under this program will not in some way be clawed back by each jurisdiction.