Mr. Speaker, it is a strange ritual that goes on with questions and answers when the parliamentary secretary spends the first half of his time seeking clarification as to whether we are supporting Bill C-24. As I said in my speech, yes, we are.
Secondly, he wanted to know whether we favoured the new formula that is contained within the bill. Yes, we do, which is why we are supporting it. However we can turn around a lot of figures, and to every single household, especially low and modest income households, it sounds like a pile of money to say that as a result of this new formula that Nova Scotia will get $151 million extra dollars. That is a large amount of money but it absolutely pales in comparison to the massive blows, and we are not just talking cutting and slashing, but almost death blows that have been dealt to a good many basic services that had to be cut back or eliminated in Nova Scotia over the last number of years.
I will cite one example. While I was in my riding on Friday, I met with a tremendous young woman who heads up an organization that works on behalf of persons living with disabilities. It is devastating what has happened to persons living with disabilities on their own and to the families working to support family members living with disabilities as a result of the combined impact of the cuts to education funding, the cuts to health care funding and the cuts to public transit. For persons living with disabilities to get to a doctor's appointment with three weeks' notice on accessible transportation is challenge enough, never mind the persons living with disabilities who are ready, willing, able and qualified to fill jobs in the community but cannot fill those jobs because they have no way to get to work.
If that does not demonstrate how pathetically short-sighted, never mind mean-spirited, the hacking and slashing has been over the last eight years, I do not know what else does. Yes, $151 million more into Nova Scotia's coffers will be welcomed, but they will not come close to repairing the damage.
I could cite a lot of other statistics about the size of the student debt load. The average debt load for a student graduating in Nova Scotia the year before last was $25,000, and we know that has been growing significantly. It is a disaster at the undergraduate level and an even bigger disaster at the graduate level.
I had representations over the last while from people in the health care field who said that high tuitions have made it virtually impossible for young people from low and modest income families to seek professional training and then to go back to the communities where they are desperately needed, communities ethnically and geographically, returning to rural areas where there is severe underrepresentation of trained health care personnel. The reason for that is that graduating students with debt loads are compelled to go to the bigger and more prosperous centres to try to get that debt load off their back but they end up not returning.
The tuition for students going into medicine rose 16.7% last year and for law it rose 19.4%, which is on top of previous massive increases. This simply means that we will not have representation on our health care professional teams from those lower income areas, from ethnic minority communities and from rural communities, because they simply cannot leap that gap. Nothing in the short term, even with the $151 million extra that would go to Nova Scotia under this new equalization formula, will begin to clear away those obstacles to accessibility that had been erected by the government's reckless short-sighted decisions over the last eight years.