I thank the hon. member for his compliments. In terms of tuition fees, just to deal with it from my perspective, in Ontario they went up, because as we know, tuition fees are a provincial jurisdiction. Even though we give provinces transfer payments, they decide how much they want to give to their universities and how much they decide to allow the universities to raise their tuition fees by. Unfortunately, even in the 1990s when there was an NDP government, tuition fees almost doubled, which created a great burden on the students. Many of them were not able to afford the tuition fees and they unfortunately were left with big debts because of that.
If I had my way, I would have zero tuition fees, if the member wants to know the truth, because I believe that in the end higher learning is a right, an opportunity for students to go to university, to learn and to continue to improve the standard of living for all of us in the future.
Unfortunately we have to deal with jurisdictions and provincial governments and we have to compete for dollars in this process. What we have done is created the framework in such a way as to at least allow low income Canadians to have a better opportunity in the future. With the tools available to them, they will be able to learn. That is why we have reduced their interest payments and have given them a longer time to pay. Less will be incumbent on the parents to give, so that students would still be eligible for Canada student loans. We will continue to work toward that to ensure that any student who wants to learn has that right and that opportunity. Cooperatively with other levels of government, we will work toward that because unfortunately tuition fees are set by the universities which are directly responsible to the provincial governments.
We have to continue to work toward this so that we relieve these problems. One way to do this has been that in our jurisdiction in post-secondary education we have increased our funding in research and development through the foundations, the graduate programs and the millennium scholarship fund. All of these things have been geared toward ensuring that there is more money available in the university system to continue allowing students to be paid while they are going through their graduate studies. In effect, they will be able to continue with and complete their post-secondary degrees. There is a great deal of work still to be done but together I think we can achieve it.