Mr. Speaker, I find it disappointing in the extreme that if no government member was prepared to enter the debate further and time was available that they would not be willing to allow some questions and comments.
The question I would have asked the member from Kenora who just presented his comments is why he insists upon viewing the problem that our students face, with crippling debt and skyrocketing tuitions, as a problem that should be characterized, as he did, as students who borrow from the taxpayer and then do not adequately honour their debts.
That absolutely sums up what is so utterly and totally bankrupt, both financially and morally, about the Liberal government's approach to post-secondary education funding, in particular to supporting students and making it possible for them to pay their tuition.
Any modern industrial society that does not understand that post-secondary education is an investment in the future is doomed to be a society that lives up to its potential, never mind being able to compete with all the other industrial nations that do invest. In fact most OECD countries have tuition free post-secondary education systems because they understand the value. They understand the difference between a loan from the taxpayers and an investment.
I want to thank all members who participated in the debate. I do not have time to review all of the comments but I want to thank my colleagues, the member for Skeena and the member for Windsor West who, I think, are the two youngest members of our caucus, but am not sure about that. They understand perhaps better than some of us who have been around a little longer how really serious this problem is for their generation and the students coming along behind. They are at that stage in their life when they are busy getting on with it and when they see others coming along behind them who find that they are crippled with debt, they understand what it means.
Students are forced to drop out of school or are not able to attend a college and university in the first place. If they do get there, the quality of their educational experience is eroded because they have to struggle with part time jobs in order to put food on the table. In this day and age, imagine what a commentary this is on how pathetic the government's commitment is to post-secondary education funding when students have to spend time organizing food banks on college and university campuses these days.
It was disappointing, after listening carefully, to hear the comments made by government members.
Before I get into that, I also appreciate the fact that both of the other opposition parties definitely understood the severity and the magnitude of the problem that faces today's post-secondary education students. I welcomed their indication that they were prepared to vote to see that this bill goes before committee.
I want to use my final moment to plead with government members to say that this is not a bill that pretends to solve all the problems. It does not propose a comprehensive solution to what has been 13 years of problems created by the government by the systematic erosion of funding and the failure, even in the most recent budget, to return post-secondary core funding to the level that it was in 1993 when the Liberals came to office.
Of course the bill would not solve all the problems. It deals with a very narrow particular problem, a problem of last resort for students who say that they do not know what else to do but to declare bankruptcy under the terrible financial circumstances they find themselves in.
They turn to that and find they are actively and aggressively discriminated against by a perverse change in the law introduced by the government in 1998 because it said that students were going bankrupt left, right and centre. Would one not think that would have been the canary in the mine syndrome to tell the government it should stop heaping the debt on students, which causes them to have to contemplate bankruptcy.
I know my time is up, but I plead with government members to send this to committee so we can improve upon it. It is not cast in stone. We have indicated that we are prepared to look at some flexibility, not to say it is absolutely two years or nothing. We can look--