Madam Speaker, my original question dealt with the increasing disparity in access to higher education in Canada, based on a Parliamentary Budget Officer's report from May 5, 2016, entitled, “Federal Spending on Postsecondary Education”.
Before getting into the details of that report, I would first like to set the stage with a broader view of where Canadian post-secondary education funding has been and where it is going.
Twenty years ago government funding for post-secondary education accounted for 77% of university and college operating expenses. After years of the federal government's downloading of costs onto the provincial governments, and provincial governments' downloading of those costs onto universities and colleges, it now covers less than half of the costs.
Universities and colleges have been forced to download those costs onto students. As a result, over the same time period, tuition fees have risen by more than 137%. The students are shouldering a rapidly increasing portion of the load when it comes to funding post-secondary education.
Increasingly, many students are shouldering that load with crushing personal debt. The average student debt at graduation is now about $28,000, about half of which is in the form of federal student loans. That is the average. As they start their careers, many graduates have debts of over $40,000, and that debt is rising every year.
Getting back to the Parliamentary Budget Officer's report, it stated that students from wealthy families are much more likely to attend colleges and universities and that this disproportionate ratio is growing. Right now, 60% of students come from families with the top 40% of incomes. The report also states that the government programs to help students also disproportionately help those wealthy students more than students from lower-income families. These benefits come in the form of tuition tax credits and RESP savings grants.
The new measures in this year's budget were supposed to help lower-income students, but the PBO found that “These measures will not, however, significantly change the distribution of total federal spending on postsecondary education”. Giving lower-income students $1,000 more in grants per year does not really put a dent in debt when it costs $15,000 to $20,000 to attend university or college for a single year. In other words, students from wealthy families will continue to benefit disproportionately from government spending on post-secondary education and government programs that provide financial assistance for students.
The purported middle-class tax break will not help either, since it is targeted at these wealthy families that I am speaking of. Any student with parents who, individually, are making less than $45,000 per year will not get a cent from that tax cut, while those with parents making between $100,000 and $200,000 will benefit substantially.
I believe that a good post-secondary education is not a privilege in Canada but should be available to every capable and enthusiastic student who wishes to take that path. They should be able to complete that education without mortgaging their life before they even have a job, and before they even think of owning a home.
I think we have to look at the structural cause of this problem, the declining proportion of government funding to universities and colleges. While the federal government provides funding to the provinces in the form of a social transfer, post-secondary funding is not provided as a dedicated item. Provinces are free to spend that social transfer more or less how they choose.
They say that education is the great equalizer, but it is getting tougher in Canada to get a good education. Again I would like to ask the minister, what is—