Madam Speaker, tonight I am following up on a question I raised previously about the ongoing youth unemployment crisis in this country. Youth unemployment is persistently high, still well over 14%, more than a full percentage point higher than it was a year ago. Over 440,000 young Canadians between 15 and 25 are currently unemployed.
In this context, Conservatives put forward our Conservative youth jobs plan, calling on the government to unleash the economy, fix immigration, fix training and build homes where the jobs are, and we identified some very specific proposals for achieving that result. Unfortunately, with this budget, we are not seeing progress; we are seeing the government move backward.
I want to highlight tonight, in particular, some significant new problems created by this budget in the area of training.
We called on the government to fix training by offering relatively more support to students seeking in-demand skills. That is, if students are pursuing studies in a field where there is a desperate need in the labour market for people to do those kinds of jobs, we think it is reasonable for government-funded grants to magnify the market signal to help students see and understand that there will likely be more economic opportunities if they pursue studies in that field.
Liberals decided, effectively, to go in the opposite direction, because in the budget on page 217, the government proposed to eliminate student grants for students going to private institutions. In the post-secondary system, we have public, we have private not-for-profit and we have private for-profit, but the issue is that there are many vocational programs that are simply not available in public institutions.
For certain kinds of programs, someone who is interested in a particular career will, as a student, opt to go to a private institution, and there is obviously nothing wrong with that. These are good careers that are needed, and this reflects demand in the labour market. Telling students who are trying to access skills and in-demand professions that they can no longer access student grants because of the institution they are going to, but continuing to offer those same grants at the same level to students at universities, is not fair.
It does not seem reasonable to say this to a young person studying traditional Chinese medicine, to be a chiropractor, to work in the beauty industry or to work in other industries where the formation is generally not offered at universities. To say their field is not worthy of student grants, but that somebody who studies philosophy, public policy, as I did, or some other program at a university should have access to a full grant, seems to me like profession prejudice, like discrimination against students who are opting for careers that do not involve a university education.
We need to be honouring, dignifying and appreciating the careers that people work hard in, regardless of whether they involve studies at a university. However, the government is proposing a differential, discriminatory system with respect to training, which is that if someone studies in those critical, in-demand professions where the formation is only available at private institutions, they lose access to student grants, but if they are studying any kind of university program, regardless of how relevant it is to the labour market, they do get those grants.
Conservatives think this is unfair. We think this budget moves in the opposite direction and introduces more discrimination and unfairness in the training system. What is the government's response to why it put that discriminatory provision in the budget?