Thank you, Madam Speaker. I assure you that this is not rubbish. This is actually the Canada child tax benefit, which has lifted about 300,000 Canadian children out of poverty and helped reduce child poverty by 40% from 2013 to 2017. We should all work to continue to protect Canada's children and youth. One of our largest duties as parliamentarians is to ensure that future generations of Canadians have a safe and prosperous Canada to call their home.
This leads me to measures taken for our teens and young adults, which is my second point. Bill C-14 proposes amendments to the Canada Student Loans Act, Canada Student Financial Assistance Act and Apprentice Loans Act. It seeks to provide that, during the upcoming fiscal year, no interest is to be accrued or paid on existing student loans. The Parliamentary Budget Officer estimated that this would cost the government $315 million in unearned revenue for the 2021-22 fiscal year, and limit revenue generated to $5 million for the next fiscal year. Given how marginal this expense is compared with the extravagance of less responsible and more poorly planned programs, I must ask why the government would allow interest on student loans to resume accrual in the first place?
The Liberals had months to reassess and act on student loan interest measures and did nothing until it was too late. Now students have had months of unnecessary interest accrual due to what has become all too common: Liberal incompetence.
Student debt in Canada is a major burden for more than 50% of Canadian post-secondary students. The effects of student debt are well documented, and impact debt holders' fiscal, financial and mental well-being.
During the early days of the ongoing pandemic, national student loan repayments were paused, with instructions given that the loan repayments would restart in October 2020. In November, however, preplanned payments were not coming out of many accounts and many people were confused. When students checked their loan accounts, they were surprised to find that their payments were shown as being past due and highlighted in red. Automatic payments were fully set up, yet payments did not come out. By November, all student loan accounts were shown as being past due, and many people were worried that this would negatively affect their credit scores.
I heard at that time that few people were able to get through to the government hotline, frequently facing long hold times, transfers and mysteriously dropped calls. When someone actually got through to the hotline, there was a wait of around 98 minutes. To make matters worse for young Canadians, the government website for repayment had crashed. Students were informed that their payments would be coming out immediately; however, some borrowers who logged in and made their past-due payments had to worry about double payments. If the loan came out automatically later that day, it created a huge issue for people on a fixed income. While this situation is now resolved, it did not need to occur in the first place and it stands as a testimony to our government's lack of foresight.
Mismanagement again occurred through CERB payments going to dependent teens who normally would have earned less income working part-time than the handouts the government gave. Much like our vaccine rollout, which was promised to occur at a certain time and has had the goalposts moved, we have been met with consistent failures to deliver, as more and more money is thrown at our problems in half-hearted attempts to appear as if the government is doing something meaningful.
As we stand here today, Canadians go without vaccines and face uncertainty respecting the health and security of their families. It is inexcusable that the current Liberal government has failed Canadians on multiple fronts, that our nation now ranks 52nd in vaccine rollout and that the climbing national debt burden will still be felt by my great-grandchildren. Even if the government persists in ignoring this generation, it will have to answer to these future generations. If our government truly wishes to help Canadian students and youth, I would encourage it to consider working toward a balanced budget and not to bury future generations under insurmountable debt.
Because the members opposite are so fond of asking for solutions to help dig them out of their holes, I would encourage the government to do more.
The government could increase the scope of debt forgiveness on student loans and retroactively cancel interest that should not have accrued through the legislative gap of its own making. It could encourage employers to do more by offering an employer-sponsored student loan repayment assistance benefit. Those are options we have yet to see put on the table.
While I support Bill C-14 for doing something, I think we must all acknowledge it is too little, too late for Canadian students and youth.