Mr. Speaker, I am delighted to have an opportunity to participate in the debate on the private member's bill pertaining to Canada access grants for post-secondary education.
As you can tell, Mr. Speaker, for our caucus this is a very important issue, probably one of the most critical issues facing our country today as we look to the future and as we plan for a full employment economy in an era of new technologies and new ventures.
It is our obligation as members of Parliament to ensure that all of our young people have access to post-secondary education if they so choose. We know, from the lineups at community colleges and from the demands we are hearing at universities, that the young people of this nation are prepared to make a commitment to the future of this country, to do their best to further our values as Canadians, and to pursue the very best in all of us. However, they are facing huge difficulties.
The obstacles to post-secondary education are incredible. The cost for students in this day and age are enormous and many families are finding huge difficulties in creating those opportunities for their young people. As we know, many families will do anything to help their children pursue their life's dreams. We know that some families make this their top priority. They will mortgage their homes. They will go into debt. They will ensure that they scrimp and save on many things in order to be able to afford the ever increasing education costs and rising tuition that young people are faced with today. Anything we can do as a Parliament to ease the way to make it possible to access post-secondary education is absolutely imperative.
I believe that this should be the number one issue for the federal Conservative government as it approaches both its economic update this Thursday and its budget in the spring or late winter. For years we have devoted time in the House to the urgent priority of health care. We set that aside as a number one issue. Canadians believe it is a number one issue and we have done a great deal. We may not have conquered that frontier yet, and there is still much more work to be done. However, we also know that it is imperative for us to invest now in education. It is imperative that we ensure that the government provides increased cash payments to provinces for education.
The proposal we have before us today is one small piece of a big puzzle, one small part of a solution, and one answer to a big problem facing students today, when we think about the fact that the cost of tuition for entering first year university is probably getting close to $5,000. In my day and age, when I went to university some 35 years ago, tuition was less than $1,000. It was probably about $500 a year and we were able to access very reasonable student loans and grants. Today, that is gone. Students have not got that same access to low tuition and they have not got the same access to decent loans and grants. We do not have a comprehensive universal program to ensure that all students, no matter what their income, are able to access post-secondary education.
We have a band-aid of programs. We have the millennium scholarship. We have the RESPs. We have the tax credit for text books. We have a little bit here and a little bit there, but not the universal program that we need. The bill before us is another piece that helps improve the overall situation and that is why we support it, but it is not sufficient.
What is truly required here is for the government to say that this is the number one challenge we face as a country. Let us ensure that our share of money going to the provinces gets back up to at least 25% on an annual basis. We know that we are now looking at single digit numbers. In fact, the federal share of education is below 10%. In other words, the vast majority of the cost for the system is coming out of provincial coffers and individuals, and that has to change.
If we truly believe in creating a bright future for this country, if we truly believe in developing a civil society, in being a leader around the world and being a star on the global horizon, then surely we have to make this our number one priority do everything we can to reverse the present trend.
We saw with the Liberals serious ongoing cuts to education over the last 13 years. We still have not recovered from 1995 when the Liberal government took a huge bite out of transfer payments, $6 billion altogether in terms of health, education and social assistance, the biggest bite out of social programs in the history of this country. We have not recovered from that point. We were not able to convince the Liberals in the past to restore cash payments and to put in place a formula that would ensure money growth according to population and according to GNP.
We are now at the crossroads, where the Liberals neglected to address this issue for over a decade and now the Conservatives have come with some more tinkering. The last year's budget change, a credit for textbooks, is a little bit of a help, but hardly a replacement for the serious erosion that occurred under the Liberals. We have two governments that have basically put education at the low end of the list of priorities for this country. We must raise that here and now in this Parliament.
This bill helps us to focus our attention on this issue, helps us to move a little closer toward a more complete system of assistance for students.
However, let us be clear. Until the government makes this a priority, and until it actually decides to return to a system of serious partnership with the provinces, we are in deep trouble as a country. We will not be able to train and educate our young people to meet the challenges of the future. We will be lost on the global front because we failed to actually equip our students with both the specific tools of the new trades of the future and because we did not create a lifelong learning process where we understand and encourage the notion that education is about learning how to be good citizens, how to participate in a full, meaningful way and create the fundamental building blocks of civil society.
I urge members to support this bill, but I urge them to do more than that, to go beyond this band-aid approach and to start putting pressure on the government. The government itself must start looking inward and make this our new frontier. Education is about who we are as a nation, how we treat our young people, and how prepared we are for the future.