Mr. Speaker, today's concurrence motion is about more than just student grants. It is about whether this country still respects the kind of work that actually keeps the country running.
Buried in budget 2025 is a decision that says if a young Canadian chooses a public institution, such as UBC, McGill or U of T, they can receive a federal student grant, but if they choose one of many provincially regulated career colleges where they train to become welders, electricians, health care aides, mechanics or practical nurses, they will be cut off. It is the same taxpayer, same ambition and same hard work, but different treatment. That reveals something bigger than a budget line. It reveals a bias that says some education is respectable and some is not, and somehow the path that leads to a tool belt is worth less than a path that leads to a desk. That thinking could not be more dangerous right now.
Canada has lost 95,000 jobs this year. Youth have lost over 50,000 jobs. We have one of the highest unemployment rates in the G7, yet the government has chosen to make skills training harder to afford. Think of how upside down that is. We say we need more homes, but we make it harder to train the people who build them. We say we need more workers in health care, but we make it harder for students to train for practical care professions. We talk about growth, but we put roadblocks in front of the very people who know how to make, fix, build, repair and create.
Behind it all is a deeper cultural problem. We have spent too many years pretending that the only education that matters comes wrapped in prestige, as though a polished degree is inherently more valuable than a practical skill, or as though an Oxford education is the gold standard and everything else is a consolation prize. Well, with respect, the Prime Minister would be very wrong about that, because we cannot build a country with consultants alone. Somebody has to wire the house. Somebody has to pour the concrete. Somebody has to repair the truck. Somebody has to keep the systems working.
Skilled work is not second-class work. It is part of the foundation of civilized life. If we start treating the people who do that work as somehow less worthy of support, we are not just making a mistake in policy, but we are teaching a whole generation to undervalue the very work we desperately need to rebuild this country.
One of the strangest contradictions in Canada right now is that we have an entire country talking about housing shortages, an infrastructure deficit, labour shortages in the trades and a generation of young people looking for a foothold in the economy. Somehow, the government can still manage to make it harder for those same young people to train for the very jobs we claim we desperately need them to fill. There is something almost comical about that, if it were not so serious.
We complain that homes are too expensive, but seem oddly reluctant to talk about the carpenters, electricians, pipefitters and heavy equipment operators without whom no home has ever been built. We talk about building the country as though a policy announcement will get it done, when, in fact, countries are built the way they have always been built, which is by skilled people who know how to turn raw material into something useful.
Here is why this policy becomes so baffling. At the very moment when we need more skilled workers, more apprentices, more young Canadians learning practical, employable, in-demand skills, the government proposes to pull grants away from students attending career colleges that are doing exactly that training. It is like standing in front of a labour shortage, staring directly at it and deciding the sensible response is to make it harder for the next generation to learn these skills. Do we really want to sabotage the system? Canadians trying to hire skilled people right now need policies that will produce more skilled people, not fewer.
There is another myth we have been telling for far too long, which is the notion that the surest path to prosperity is always the most expensive education, the longest credential and the most polished title on a business card. We have repeated that so often, it has taken on the status of common sense, even though the evidence is piling up against it. Out in the real world, there are countless skilled tradespeople making excellent incomes, raising families, buying homes, building businesses and doing it often with less debt, less delay and, frankly, more certainty than many young people who have been sold the promise that a degree alone is the ticket to security.
There is something off about the way we have celebrated one kind of work while undervaluing another. Many of the people we are talking about, such as welders, electricians, millwrights, mechanics and heavy-duty technicians, are not merely getting by. Many are earning incomes that would surprise the very people who tend to look down on the trades. Why should that surprise anyone? Skill has value. Competence has value. Being able to do something difficult, useful and necessary has always had value. It always will.
Somewhere along the way, we got something backward. We made kids borrow heavily to push them toward jobs that, by the time they have their degree, may or may not exist, while neglecting millions of jobs that exist, pay well and are sitting open because too few people have been encouraged to pursue the skills required to do them. That is not just a mismatch, but a cultural failure, and now this policy threatens to compound that mistake, because when the government says students pursuing vocational paths should no longer receive the same grant support as others, it is doing more than changing an eligibility rule. It is reinforcing the old prejudice that some forms of learning lead to real opportunity while others do not, yet anyone who has looked at the pay stub of a successful tradesperson or has tried to hire one lately knows how ridiculous that is.
In many parts of the country, a skilled trade is not merely a path to a good living. It may be one of the best paths available. At a time when young Canadians are struggling to see a future they can afford, it takes a special kind of blindness to put obstacles in front of one of the clearest paths to financial independence that we have.
Perhaps the biggest thing we have gotten wrong is that people still talk about the trades as though they lead to only a job, when very often, they lead to something much bigger. This is because a skilled trade is not simply a paycheque. It can be the first rung on a ladder that leads to ownership, independence and entrepreneurship. A young person starts as an apprentice, learns a craft, gains experience, builds a reputation, takes on contracts, buys a truck and hires a helper and then a crew. Before long, what began as learning a skill has become a small business. If that sounds ordinary, it is only because people have been building this country that way for so long that we have forgotten how remarkable it really is.
We should not take it for granted, because there is something profoundly hopeful on that path. It is one of the few paths where a person can begin with almost nothing but a willingness to work and over time build something of their own. They do not inherit it, but build it. Many of the people doing what the culture calls dirty jobs are, in fact, examples of what self-reliance can produce. Many are entrepreneurs, many are employing others and many are creating opportunities, not just for themselves, but for the next young person looking for a start.
This is not some footnote in the economy. This is the economy, yet in a strange twist, we celebrate the idea of small business while undermining the institutions helping people acquire the very skills that lead to starting one. This makes no sense, because the electrician who starts a company, the welder who opens a fabrication shop, the contractor who builds a crew and the mechanic who opens a service centre are the people taking risks, creating jobs, paying taxes, training others and strengthening communities.
This is how wealth is created in the real world, which is why this policy strikes me as so short-sighted. Discouraging students from attending career colleges does not just affect individual students, but the future businesses they might have built, the apprentices they might have trained, the workers they may have hired and the opportunities they might have created for others. It narrows not just a training pathway, but an ownership pathway. In a country worried about stagnant growth, weak productivity and too few young people believing they can get ahead, it seems to me that the last thing the government should do is make it harder for young people to enter one of the clearest roads to becoming their own boss.
If we want to make work cool again and if we want to rebuild respect for hard work, skill and enterprise in this country, we should start by passing this motion and stop punishing the very students preparing to do the work at hand.
