Reg Alcock

[Canada Student Financial Assistance Act, May 24th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, it is with some pleasure that I join in this debate today.

I am the member for Winnipeg South and the University of Manitoba is in my riding. I was post-secondary education critic for our party when I served in the Manitoba legislature. I have taken a great interest in the situation as it affects students in my province at the university in my area and certainly in all of this country.

I am one of those, and I expect it is shared by most members in this House, who believes that education is a public good. I note a member opposite who serves with me on the human resources committee. We listened to submissions on employability on that committee.

One of the things which was noted very quickly is that the job creation rate for people with a university education, college training, or a profession is something in excess of 10 per cent a year. However, the job creation rate for those without post-secondary education, for those with less than high school education, is minus some 17 per cent and declining. It is a very, very serious situation.

We all benefit, all of us. Not just the person being trained but all of us who live in this country benefit by having a populace that is well educated, well trained, productive, et cetera.

The question is what do we do in support and in pursuit of that public policy? That is what this bill is attempting lay out a framework for. It does not answer all of the questions but it does make some very innovative changes to the current legislation which provide for some fairly major improvements in the way we as a community support those people who are able to achieve a standing at a university or college.

I want to deal briefly with one piece of information which was mentioned just before I stood up to speak. That is the question of the level of support which is currently provided for students versus what was provided.

While there is some variation between smaller colleges and universities and the more major institutions, students do not pay one-third to one-half of their education. At large universities they paid 15 or 16 per cent. This has slowly ratcheted up over the last few years as a result of, I believe it was the Smith commission report which looked at the share that students should pay.

At the University of Manitoba it is around 19 per cent right now that the student revenue is comprised of total expenditures at the school. There is a covert, if not an overt, policy in place to bring that up to 25 per cent, which I think was the level recommended by Dr. Smith, believing that gave students more power and a little more clout in their negotiations with universities.

The dilemma is that despite the fact we give lip service and stand up to make statements about the importance of education and we examine the value of an education and understand this is something which is a major improvement to life in our communities, as a country we have not provided very significant support to students, particularly in this last eight years.

One of the things we did right away in 1984 as a country-it was done by the former government, but it was done in this Chamber-was we froze the amount of money a student could borrow or could claim for cost of living. From 1984 until this year the amount of money they could claim for food and housing was frozen. That put students in a very difficult position. The cost of living did not stop going up. People still had to pay for their apartments and their meals.

What we did part way through the last eight years is we changed the regulations relative to work. I think the previous government felt what should be done was to allow them to work more part time but still consider them full time students. By doing this it would somehow allow them to shoulder more of the costs and therefore pay for their own education and not be a drag on the public purse.

Unfortunately that put students under enormous pressure. People began working at those part time jobs. They had to in order to pay for their living accommodations and to feed themselves. As someone who has had the proverbial potatoes and rice also, I can assure you students are not eating a whole lot better now. It forced them to take time away from their studies. It took time away from the pursuit of excellence in their education. It put them in the position of having to work continually to sustain themselves and at the same time trying to get that education.

You could get by if you were a student from a family that was intact and you could live at home, or your family lived close to a university and you could live at home and commute. If your family lived in the rural area or in the northern parts of the province and you had to live in residence, or you were a student who for any one of a number of reasons came from a home that was either too impoverished or too disparate to offer any support, you were in a very difficult financial situation.

Almost from the time the government changed the regulations we saw a very gradual but significant increase statistically in the number of part time students at universities and a decrease in the number of full time students. That was even factoring out the influx of older students who pick up the odd course.

That was because students found they could not do both things. They could not go to university full time and work what they had to in order to sustain themselves. All of a sudden three year degrees were taking four or four and a half years. Those students who, had they been able to concentrate and work full time on their studies, would have come out with degrees and excellent averages in good preparation for graduate school were unable to do that because they were forced to spend so much time just sustaining themselves.

What did the government do just prior to the last election? It announced an increase in student loan limits. Looking at that increase and at the regulations which support that increase, the government also changed the identification of what were personal contributions. This was done to the point whereby even though it was seen that more money could be borrowed, it did nothing to alter the underlying ability to assign greater cost to the cost of living.

The government changed the regulations. Instead of basing accommodation on two people sharing an apartment, it based it on three people sharing an apartment. It took things out of the basket of goods students were deemed to need in order to survive at university. The result was that students were put under more and not less financial pressure.

There is another element to the provision of student aid which needs to be talked about because we are the federal government and we deliver these services for the most part through a relationship with provincial governments.

What was happening in my province was that the federal government was providing about $3,500 in total support. If a student required more support than that, another $3,500 could be obtained from the provincial government. A very small number of special needs students could access another chunk of money through the provincial government.

One of the concerns we had was that when one was tied to that provincial assessment and delivery of support, as the federal government increased its ability or willingness to subsidize the interest on certain loans, the provincial government rather than also increasing its support would simply decrease its involvement.

I am sorry to report to this Chamber but that is exactly what has happened in my province. I do not know what has occurred in some of the other provinces, but in the province of Manitoba as the federal government has moved to increase the loan limit, the provincial government has withdrawn certain support.

All we have done in one aspect of this program is to transfer an expense on to the back of the federal government. That has to open the door for a discussion about the federal role in funding, the federal involvement with provincial agencies in the assessment and delivery of support. Perhaps we need to look at some new vehicles for delivering support to students. I think you will find that the possibility of that is contained within this bill.

My concern since I first began to work with this is that over the last eight years we were successively constraining the support given to universities through established programs financing. We were holding back on the support that we in pursuit of a public policy took on to the public purse to the point where in some cases the annual increases universities were getting were in the negative numbers.

That certainly happened in Manitoba and in some other provinces. Even when they were getting positive increases they were increases of a point, a point and a half, or two points versus the total cost of living, inflation, et cetera which was at the three or four point range back in the late 1980s.

This caused the universities to look to that 18 or 19 per cent of revenue coming from students in order to make up for the shortfalls in their revenues. We were seeing student fee increases of 15 and 20 per cent year over year. Student fees at the University of Manitoba increased over 100 per cent during the last eight years.

In our pursuit of that policy we were taking something that had been deemed to be a public good, that had been funded by the community, by the government in pursuit of a well-educated, productive population, and we were transferring responsibility of that from the government on to students. It has created some very difficult situations.

We gave the students no options on the repayment. We gave them no way out of the hole that we were forcing them to dig for themselves.

I have been given the high sign by the Speaker so I will draw this to a close now and perhaps I can go a little further in response to a question.

I support the bill because it does many things. It enables us to provide some repayment options for students, it opens the door to link good performance to some opportunities in community service, it allows people to deal with their debt management, it provides more badly needed support to students, and it allows us to assess a reasonable level for the cost of living that is also regionally sensitive. These are very profound and long overdue changes which I hope we will pass quickly and get into play.

[Bosnia, May 5th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, last week I had an opportunity to attend an international meeting of parliamentarians concerned about the situation in Bosnia-Hercegovina.

I was proud as a Canadian of the work that Canada is doing there. I wish to commend the Minister of Foreign Affairs, the Minister of National Defence and the men and women who are on the ground in Bosnia-Hercegovina doing important work. I cannot help but wonder whether or not we can do more.

During World War II Canadians opened their hearts and their homes to the children who were caught in war zones. I would urge us to think about doing the same again to provide some relief for those people who are in such terrific danger and to get the children out of the way of the bullets.

[Immigration, February 15th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, I have a question for the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration.

Like many other members I have had an opportunity to meet with refugees from the former Yugoslavia. These people are in

terrible shape. They have family members scattered all across the former Yugoslavia or in the surrounding countries.

Can the Minister for Citizenship and Immigration tell us what impact the changes he announced recently will have on refugees in general, but in particular refugees from the former Yugoslavia?

[Social Security System, February 3rd, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. member for Lethbridge for his remarks. I am pleased to note that his book is also red and I could reference another red book that may expand on some of the points they raised so long ago.

I have a curiosity about part of what he presents.

On the one hand his party has spoken strongly against any expansion of taxes, any increase in taxes or anything to do with causing people to pay more. Yet on the other hand his party is quite willing to support user fees which by definition will cause people to pay more for services they receive. I wonder if he can reconcile this contradiction for me.

[Social Security System, February 2nd, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, I mentioned in my remarks empowerment and how we have tended through our programs to take power away from people. One way to empower people is to hold them responsible for things. In my province we brought in a very aggressive policy of enforcing child support payments. That is a policy that could be looked at nationally.

I do not think you let people off the hook and buy them a free lunch or any of that kind of stuff. You have to treat them like powerful individuals, provide them with some supports and let them get on with the management of their own lives. You have to be there for them at times.

[Social Security System, February 2nd, 1994]

I am listening.

[Social Security System, February 2nd, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, I look forward to an opportunity to debate this question at great length with the member for Beaver River and other members of her party in the House.

The problem is twofold. Frankly I hear very simplistic things coming out of the Reform Party. I hear this constant noise about this being like a business; that if we are going to run it like a business and we have no money, we should cut off things, fire employees or lay people off, downsize. That is a fallacious understanding of how the economy works.

In a business you do not set the interest rate. You do not set the exchange rate. You do not set the regulatory environment. You do not have a myriad of levers to pull or buttons to push in order to affect the lives of people. That kind of analogy is just a non starter for me.

The second thing is that it is a little like trying to change wheels on a moving car. You cannot abandon everybody who sits out there, everybody who receives support and help right now while you try to move to this brave new world. You have to move through some kind of transition.

There are tremendous opportunities to create efficiencies in the current system. The problem the member references in terms of the size of the economy and the size of the debt is a very serious one. Everybody in this House acknowledges that and it is one that must be confronted. I believe there are ways to find significant resources in the social policy envelope without harming a single individual.

If we step aside from some of the antiquated ways in which we have delivered services and move into the 1990s or if we even moved into the 1980s it would be an improvement. We could find some resources. There are other ways to find resources and they are in the management of this economy. They are in putting people back to work. They are in helping to revitalize the business community. Simply stepping back from the responsibility as a government is not good enough. It does not work.

[Social Security System, February 2nd, 1994]

Thank you, Mr. Speaker; I cannot even argue the rule at this point. When I see the minister stand in the House I see him making the same offer. He is not standing to put on record a whole bunch of Liberal Party rhetoric. He is making a very genuine request: "I ask members of the House and all Canadians to work with my government to develop an action plan".

Obviously this is an area that interests me, so I read very carefully what the Leader of the Official Opposition and the lead speaker of the Reform Party had to say. I must say I was a little disappointed in what I heard coming from the Official Opposition. When I meet with members of the Official Opposition, when I talk to members of the Official Opposition, I hear them saying some fairly progressive things about social policy. I think they have a fundamental understanding of the issue. However when I heard their leader speak he said something I have become accustomed to hearing from the New Democratic Party in my province: "Don't touch anything. Don't change anything. You dasn't muss a hair of this program". That is unfortunate because I think there is a great deal of wisdom to be shared with the House as we search for a solution to make the lives of Canadians better.

Frankly I do not know how to respond to the intervention by the Reform Party. I read it several times and made some notes on it because I was trying to figure it out. It seemed to say we have to cut everything today so we will have it tomorrow. There is a curiousness in the logic there that escapes me somewhat.

These are serious problems. They affect the lives of real people living in our communities. We have right now a tremendous opportunity. In the mid-1960s in Canada and the United States, at a time when government had huge revenues, we created the social safety net or the core of it. Some pieces were already in place. Canada has been a progressive country for a long time. We created a network of services that was the result of our best thinking at that time. We have had experience with it. We have learned over time that some of the things we did were good and that some were not so good.

We learned, for example, that a lot of the services that we provide tend not to empower people. They tend to remove their ability to function independently. We confronted that in the provision of services in a great many communities.

We have a fiscal crisis right now. If we want to look at the glass half full side of the fiscal crisis, maybe it is a good thing the crisis is forcing this debate. Maybe we will finally challenge some of our assumptions about how we provide help to people.

However let us do it from the perspective of providing some assistance.

I want to make a few quick suggestions to frame out some of the structural issues that I think confront us. Technology offers a tremendous opportunity right now. We now have the technological capacity to begin to understand what is happening out there and to look at the ways in which our services collide. Over the years we have built up a patchwork of services.

The classic case in the business of child welfare that I know best is when one calls for a consultation on a particular individual and 15 agencies show up. Obviously there is an abuse, a misuse or an inefficiency in the way in which we use the resources we have. Technology gives us some opportunities to identify that, to iron that out and to understand not the reality presented in the newspapers every day. If we read the newspapers every day we see terrible problems. In fact when we begin to look beneath the headlines at how people are doing we forget that the murder rate is going down, that people are getting healthier and that people are living longer. In fact we forget that we have succeeded enormously in the programs we have delivered.

We forget it was only a few decades ago when to be old meant to be poor, to be old meant to be living in substandard housing. Today they cannot rent out all the bachelor apartments in housing for the elderly. The elderly have now achieved, because of the programs we have created, a certain level of wealth that has allowed them to live independently. That is a good thing, not a bad thing. That is a thing to be proud of as a Canadian, not to be afraid of.

The Official Opposition presented some interesting issues about interjurisdictional areas.

The minister whom I cannot mention by name has made comment in the past that when he was a minister in a previous government between 1980 and 1984, he often spent more of his time debating interjurisdictional issues than he did debating problematic issues.

Maybe it is possible to look at the fact, for example, that the federal government delivers support to people directly. It does right now through unemployment insurance. We forget that we give support in many different ways through student aid, pensions and half the income security costs. Maybe we should look at providing a basic level of support, maybe a guaranteed annual income or a basic level of living support to people who require it. That may be a good idea. Maybe we should allow the provinces to look at the services that get added on to that to reflect local needs. It would be a very radical change. Maybe it is time we begin to think about it.

The last couple of Reform speakers mentioned the income tax system. That is an idea that is worth exploring. It is interesting there has long been a concept called negative income tax. It says that we make our tax system very progressive: when we earn money we contribute to the community, we contribute more as we earn more and when we do not have the capacity to earn for whatever reason we receive basic support. That support increases as we move further and further into difficulty. A proposal like that was put forward in the 1970s by Richard Nixon. It was very progressive. I see the member sort of struggling with it, but I think there are some aspects to it worth exploring.

I would genuinely like to see us sitting here struggling with how to make the lives of Canadians better, how to help them. The speaker before the last one said that we needed radical new ideas. I would like to hear a radical new idea from the Reform Party on how we help a million children living in poverty. I would like to hear an idea like that.

On the one hand we talk about a new form of debate, but on the other hand we have the same old kind of politics of just sitting and picking little holes in things. Let us get some radical ideas on the table. Let us make this a better country for the people.

[Social Security System, February 2nd, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, I noted the member for Surrey North indicated in her comments that the average height of a man was five feet, seven inches. I would be interested in what the average weight is at some point.

I have been sitting here trying to sort out exactly what it is that I want to say in only 10 minutes. This is an immense topic. I have spent most of my working life in what we are defining as the social services.

As a teenager I worked in the core area of my city in settlement houses. I have worked with handicapped people, the disabled and emotionally disturbed kids. I ended that portion of my career as the director of child welfare in my province. I have wrestled with some of these issues for some time.

It is interesting in a sense when I reflect on how I became involved in politics. It was in the mid-1970s. I received a call from a friend of mine who worked in an agency that was similar to the one I was directing at that point. He said that a politician wanted to speak to us, that he wanted to meet with a few people to talk about social policy.

I was a little unsure just what that meant because my view of politicians was like that of most people who are somewhat removed from the system, but I went. I was maybe a little in awe that somebody who we see on TV and who sits in a legislative chamber would want to talk to me. That night I met the hon. member for Winnipeg South Centre. We spent an entire evening just sitting on the couch with a few people talking about what was happening in social programs in the city of Winnipeg in 1975.

As we talked we sort of wrestled with what are the things that are helping people, what are the things that are supporting people, what are the things that are showing signs of success and what are the things that need change. Therefore when I see Lloyd stand in the House-

[Cruise Missile Testing Debate, January 27th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, I want to draw to the attention of the House a phone call I got last night from a young man in my riding, a Mr. Don Shay.

Don is apparently a fan of the parliamentary channel. He phoned last night to say that for the first time in all the times he has been watching that channel, he felt he learned something.

He asked me to congratulate the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition, the leader of the third party and all members of the House for a debate that was truly informative. He looks forward to more of them.