Mr. Speaker, I would like to begin by first informing the hon. members across the way that oftentimes the unions of students who come to this place to lobby do not speak for the students that they purport to represent. I say that as the youngest member of Parliament in Canada, I also am probably the most recent attendee at a Canadian university of anyone in this room.
There is tremendous frustration among students at the radicalism of some of the student organizations that find themselves here. Indeed, these organizations spend hard earned student dollars on radical causes and on protests that have no correspondence with the issues that matter to real, every day students.
I want to move on to an entirely different point. There is some area where we can find some agreement with the hon. member from the New Democratic Party.
As a recent student, I can point to one of the greatest costs that students face. It is beyond tuition and it is beyond just food and other traditional costs that one would expect. It is the enormous cost of books.
What a lot of non-students do not realize is our young people are paying in the neighbourhood of $1,500 to $2,000 a year on textbooks. This bill does not deal directly with it, but I want to take this opportunity to address what I believe is an injustice which students face every year.
These books could be far cheaper. We could get them for the price of maybe 10% of what we are paying now. The reason we cannot is because year after year the professors in the universities demand that a new edition of the textbook be purchased. Instead of allowing students to sell their used books to students who take over their seats in the class, the books collect dust in their basements for the next six or seven decades. New students then have to pay between $150 or $200 for the same textbook that they could have bought for a fraction of the price from the outgoing students.
I do not know exactly what the remedy is for this problem. It seems utterly insane that young people are spending exorbitant amounts of money, paying for books that they could acquire for a fraction of the price if only it were not for the need to buy the new edition every year.
It is very clever for the publishing companies. They change a few pages and alter a bit of the content. The reality is, substantively the book is the same. They run year after year profits on the backs of students.
Would the hon. member offer some solutions to this problem?