Madam Speaker, over the last few months, I have been visiting university campuses and talking to young people across this country. I was at Carleton earlier this week. I spent some time there talking to students and debating against the member for Winnipeg North. We had a great time. I certainly did, anyway.
The question I have been asking students is whether they are better or worse off than their parents' generation. I have had lots of great conversations with young people about how they perceive their present reality, present challenges and the opportunities they are going to face in the future. Overwhelmingly, young people tell me that they feel they are worse off than their parents' generation. When we talk about why, the areas that they focus on are job opportunities and the inaccessibility of home ownership, as well as the price of rent. This week at Carleton as well, I heard a bit about food prices as a contributing factor to the challenges they are facing: the cost of food, the cost of homes and how difficult it is to find a job.
In this context, combined with the anecdotal evidence I am hearing from students, we see in the job numbers how youth unemployment continues to be very high. It continues to be at recession levels. In the fall, the youth employment rate dropped to its lowest level in over 25 years, and the reasons for this are clear. This issue has been studied at the human resources committee. Various experts have identified the government's failure to support economic growth and economic development, its failure to effectively manage an immigration system in line with Canada's economic interests and its failure to support good training policies, as well as challenges in terms of geography and regions where there is lower versus higher unemployment. Because of this, we have seen high youth unemployment.
Conservatives have been constructive on this. We have put forward the Conservative youth jobs plan. We put this forward in the fall as well, and the Liberals have yet to act on it. Our plan proposes specific initiatives to unleash the economy, to fix immigration, to fix training and to build homes where the jobs are. It is interesting that they have not implemented any of these constructive ideas we have put forward. It is also interesting that in the context of training, Liberals are moving in the wrong direction.
In fact, they announced in the budget that it is their intention to no longer fund student grants for students who are going to private institutions. This means that those who go to a private career college will no longer be eligible for these student grants, but if they take any program at any university, they will be. That is unfair. Penalizing career colleges that are providing practical vocational skills at a time when we have serious skills mismatches in our economy is clearly a big mistake.
Today, the Minister of Jobs and Families was before the human resources committee. I asked her if this was still the government's policy, if it still intended to defund students who were trying to get an education at a career college, and she could not answer. She spent about three minutes refusing to answer the question. I had to go to the deputy minister, who confirmed that it is, in fact, still the government's policy, sadly, even though it is not in the budget implementation act.
Why is the government attacking youth who want to study these vocational programs and why does it not fix the problem?