Mr. Speaker, when COVID hit, university students started saying that their future was in peril. Suddenly, their work disappeared, and their student debts are massive. We see that the federal government has actually started telling students who they normally hire for research that it is not hiring them this year because of COVID, and so the federal government is not stepping up, yet a 15-year-old who made $5,000 last year would be eligible for $2,000 a month. For a full-time post-secondary student who is now unable to work, he or she would get $1,250 a month. That makes no sense, and it speaks, I believe, to an attitude about university students that they are somehow there for a lark. When so many of them have had to go back to school, and so many of them have massive levels of debt already, to say that $1,250 is enough to get by just does not make sense.
How does the government justify this two-tier standard in response to emergency measures, given that for other people the government has recognized that a bottom line of $2,000 a month is the minimum that one needs?