Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for Burnaby—Douglas for his strenuous advocacy on behalf of students in his own riding and elsewhere. What the students in all 308 of the ridings need is a serious commitment from the federal government to post-secondary education.
The government should be humiliated that students at Simon Fraser University felt compelled to go to the United Nations to plead their case that Canada was failing to live up to its 1976 obligation to ensure students would receive adequate education. As a Canadian I feel humiliated but I applaud their efforts.
Students have every reason to call their elders hypocrites, and that includes all of us, if we keep saying that it is essential for them to have a post-secondary education and then fail to provide the means for them to obtain it. I hope I am correct in the number, although it may have varied by one or two in recent times, but I think there are something like 18 OECD countries that actually have a tuition free post-secondary education system.
People may wonder how we could afford more generous student aid, as if we have a generous student aid program, which we absolutely do not. I agree that in order to be fiscally responsible we cannot do this overnight, but we not only need to lower tuition fees but we need to be on path to move toward a tuition free post-secondary education system.
When we are done with tuition, we still need to recognize that students need resources to live. They need to eat, they need shelter and they need transportation. In many cases they have families. We know that increasingly, with workers being thrown out of jobs, often without any adequate transition measures or opportunities for retraining and so on, they are going back to school with grown families in order to obtain the education they want. However what we are doing is making it virtually inaccessible for a great number of students.
The reason that this bill becomes necessary is that on the one hand we are driving students into bankruptcy and on the other hand, because of the discriminatory provisions in our insolvency system, they are not even given the opportunity to declare bankruptcy on a basis equal with other Canadians. The bill simply asks that students be given equal, not discriminatory, treatment with respect to their ability to be considered eligible for bankruptcy.