Mr. Speaker, I listened with great interest to my hon. colleague talking on and on about the budget. He brought up several items that I thought were quite interesting. However, there is one part that I would like to talk to him about.
I have a background as an educator. I taught at a post-secondary level for five years. I have been a graduate of three post-secondary institutions with eight or nine years of post-secondary education behind me. Not once did I ever receive a tax credit or a tax write-off for my books. There was always money announced for education and so on, but not once did I get a tax credit for my books.
Another thing is, I applied for bursaries and for student loans, and a lot of this was under a Liberal government. I would apply for this money in the form of a student loan and I would get a little bit of money. Then I would go out and realize it was not enough to actually live on in Edmonton, or various other communities where I was living, to go to school. I would go to work and earn a little extra money for myself, so that I could help reduce the burden on the government. I would try to make it on my own, so that I would not be a burden on taxpayers because they were already generously paying 70% of my post-secondary costs to begin with on top of the fact that I was getting these student loans. The money was always clawed back .
So, in this budget which we see here, we are going to actually put money back into the hands of students. If we put money into education, a lot of it just gets swallowed by the system. As soon as organizations hear about more money coming in, there is always a rallying cry for more money to pay salaries and so on, but none of that money actually trickles down and benefits the students who are actually going there.
I would like to ask the hon. member if he is going to support this implementation which would put money back into the hands and the pockets of students to ensure that they will not have their bursaries and their scholarships clawed back when they have some extra cash for the hard work that they have done. Is he going to support that or is he going to reject this generous offer to students in Canada?