3 REASONS WHY CANADA’S STUDENTS & YOUTH NEED ATTENTION?

OUR VIEWPOINT: By Partap Dua

THE 3 REASONS ARE PLAIN AND SIMPLE

1. STUDENTS AND YOUTH ARE IN DEEP CRISIS
2. IT IS DOABLE AND OUR PARTY HAS THE WILL TO DO IT
3. IT WILL ELEVATE OUR STATE OF HAPPINESS AS A NATION

Canada’s Fourth Front (CFF) considers Students & Youth crisis as the MOST important issue facing Canada as a society and the most important election issue which other parties have not grasped in past 20 years, be it the Liberals, Conservatives or the NDP.

Roughly 16% of Canada’s population comprises of youth aged 15-30. This prime age group comprises of the Millennial and the later generation, which seems to be disengaged with the political landscape of our nation.

It is not their fault as we will explain.

The younger generation seems bewildered and confused and are engaged in the intense struggle to succeed in today’s modern technological world where they are unable keep up the pace with rapid advancements. In fact, they seem to have become overburdened and have tremendous parental and peer pressure to prove themselves.

Our politicians have never cared to focus on development of our youth, who are not only the future of Canada but they are also the future leaders of our country. In fact it won’t be wrong to say they can be today’s leaders in the parliament if they have a passion to participate in the federal elections.

We will discuss the issue under two main heads:

A. STUDENTS AND TUITION FEES

Ms Nour Alideeb, the Chairperson of Canadian Federation of Students -Ontario, had made a constructive suggestion to make first year of post-secondary education free for all students.

We will build on this comment and prove that Canada’s Fourth Front as a party are in a position to make post-secondary education totally free in Canada. We will still attribute our initiative to Canadian Federation of Students (CFS) leadership and thousands of students who have participated in so many rallies against the federal and provincial governments.

The biggest worry a poor Canadian family has got is the cost of post-secondary education. The tuition fees have become so high and so has the cost of living. The professional degrees are out of reach of most students as their yearly tuition fees run in tens of thousands dollars. Why did the governments allow this to happen in Canada is not understood? We commercialized our educational institutions and started treating them as corporate entities. We opened up floodgates to foreign students and the institutions expanded so much in size that they cannot function today without the high domestic and foreign fees. This has also brought down the overall standard of education in Canada. Today any ‘below average’ foreign student can get a study visa for Canada but it is so hard to get a visitor visa. We don’t ever talk about students as part of total yearly immigrants entering Canada. There are at least 300,000 foreign students entering Canada each year (with 125,000 from India alone), which shows dependency of our academic institutions on foreign fees. So the combined immigration inflow to Canada is almost 700,000 foreign individuals per year. This is an ‘alarming figure’ for a country with population of around 37 million and is sure to distort the composition of Canadian society.

So the past federal governments and their inept advisors have brought us to this doomsday that there is no way the academic institutions can lower their tuition fees, except by cutting back on staff, facilities and student enrollment. Bigger the institution, bigger their operating costs.

The Canadian students graduate with huge debt on their shoulders. Half of them don’t even realize the negative fallout of debt on their lives as they think their parents will bear the brunt. The poor and middle class parents will have to borrow to relieve their kids of their financial burden, which is not always possible, with their income. In most cases student loan gets transferred to parent loan. Today an average undergraduate student graduates with around $25,000-30,000 student debt and an average professional degree student graduates with $60,000-$130,000 student debt excluding the medical students. However hard a student may try, one cannot pay off the debt in less than 6-10 years. The professional degree graduates can never, ever, pay off their complete student loans even in 15 years because of the high taxation on salaries in Canada.

The negative impacts of student loan are multi-dimensional. First, the students are unable to make any major purchase of an apartment or a house UNTIL they have paid off their student debt, which could take many years of continuous employment. Their youth is wasted in doing so.  Second, it affects their personal lives. They cannot settle down and start a family until they are debt free. This is ONE BIG REASON that today’s youth are marrying late in their 30s and will produce children very late in their lives. This will not only increase the ratio of baby boomers and seniors but also make it difficult to support our seniors forcing us to further increase immigration from other countries to sustain our economy.

The biggest surprise is that the Federal Government makes a spread income of  5-6% on the student loans, which even banks don’t make on loans & mortgages. Provinces make 4-5% income. But this is not the point.

We have total outstanding student debt of around $28-30B (give or take), which includes $17-18B for federal portion and $11-12B for all provinces combined except Quebec, Nunavut and NWT. The federal Government provides around $4B a year through CSLP to about 500,000 of the 1.2M students ($3B in loans and $1B in grants). The Federal Government makes around $600-700M in interest income from student loans portfolio per year, and spends around $2.8B per year in the form of grants ($1B), Repayment assistance Plan interest, Interest subsidy, loan forgiveness & bad debt, and Annual payments of around $450M to Quebec, Nunavut and NWT. So their present NET COST per year (Revenue-Expense) is only around $2.2B for a student population of around 500,000. The Provincial Governments bear rest of the cost. This is so because the actual loans are given from existing pool of money in CSLP portfolio borrowed from Bank of Canada at around 1% rate, and not by the Government itself. Their net cost in absence of interest revenue would be $2.8B a year including the free grants. If the portfolio were to be packed up today, the Federal government would have to cough out an extra $1.5-2.0B.

The solution is simple here. We have a post secondary student population of around 1.2M including college and part time students. Their tuition needs are around $6-7B. The federal government need to pack up the Canada Student Loan (CSLP) Program and provide around 3.5-4B in free tuition fees to the students rather than funding the yearly shortfall of $2.2B. The only yearly additional expense to federal government would be $1.5-2.0B. That is not even 0.5% of $300B Annual federal budget. We believe the Federal Government should be spending at least 5% or $15B of its budget on the most important segment of our population. Similarly all provincial governments combined would have to pour an extra $1B only, which is not much.

We as a party are perplexed that our federal government does not want to invest an extra $1.5-2.0B a year on its students and make post-secondary education tuition free. The federal government has been spending over $1B a year since last 3 years on Syrian refugees’ settlement, has been helping First nations with an extra $2-3B a year and has decided to spend over $12B on Defence equipment purchase in 2019. They distribute and spend lots of billions here and there. Why not on students so as to relieve the Canadian students and their parents from worries of post-secondary education??? It will not only help the parents & students, but will provide them with an additional disposal income of $8,000-10,000 a year or $700-900 a month to put back in the economy.  That is a lot of after-tax cash for a poor family that is struggling to put food on the table. We are certain that if federal government can do it, the provincial governments should have no difficulty in following suit to pay for $1-1.5B per year because education is primary responsibility of provincial governments. Our party will help the provincial governments with initial federal help of $1B a year for few years. Federal Government is already providing over $400M a year to Quebec.

Our party will not only provide free post-secondary education in Canada (including QUEBEC), we will also waive off all existing student debt. One way is to take on all of $20B as an outstanding debt of federal government against 2020 budget & GDP. If federal governments could have past yearly deficits of $10-15B on budget, why can’t they have an additional one time deficit of $20B added on? After all Liberals were running much-much higher deficits than $20B. We can also have one time tax on rich and mega corporations to wipe off this deficit and free the students once and for all. We can also have an alternate strategy of waiving off the whole debt if a student pays off at least 50% of outstanding debt within 1 year. That way we have recovery of around $15B. But we still feel the first alternative is better and we leave this to student discussion.

We will also provide relief to students who have already paid off their entire debt in last 2-3 years, although they were victims of past Liberal and Conservative Governments, who never listened to their woes.

The other thing we would implement is to ask educational institutions to cut back their student numbers and not depend heavily on student fees from foreign students. If they do want to increase their size they should do it organically with their donations and endowments. This will raise the quality of education back to where it was before the educational institutions became commercialized.

We would also lower the professional degree fees to affordable levels for programs like BBA and MBA, so that the poor are NOT disadvantaged. It is possible to do an MBA degree in Quebec for under $8,000 (Concordia Montreal $6,172; HEC Montreal $8,400), while it costs $70,000-120,000 in Ontario. DOES IT MAKE ANY SENSE? And HEC is ranked as 3^rd Best Business School in Canada by Canadian Business magazine and 17^th in the World Ranking according to Forbes magazine. Why 80% of Canadian students are disadvantaged to pursue professional degrees? Especially a poor kid having the same aspirations as other kids his age??

CFF as a party intends to change all that.

B. HELPING OUR YOUTH

Our party believes that if we are ready to devote 5% or $15B of our federal budget on education and growth of 15-30 age group, we would be able to make Canadian youth the most enabled and most happy in the whole world. It would affect the parents too. We would start with $5B in year 1 and gradually increase in successive years. In addition to free post-secondary education, We would provide the following for our youth development:

a. SPORTS: Sports bring communities and religions together. We would provide at least $1B in annual grants for building 3,000-5,000 free OUTDOOR sports fields every year for soccer, basketball, tennis, volley ball and other games. This would provide free after school engagement venues to the youth and children, especially those from poor families. This would also help Canada to produce world class players. At present, metro cities like Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Calgary, Winnipeg and others do not have sufficient outdoor sports fields to engage youth. We would also devote money towards development of our young Olympic athletes who are being neglected by the governments.

b. SUMMER JOBS: At present the Federal Government spends only around $339M over 3 YEARS or $113M a year for summer student jobs, which is NOT sufficient. This speaks how low the youth are on government’s priority list. We would provide 10-15 times or $1-2.0 Billion yearly funding for summer jobs. This funding would provide ‘guaranteed’ jobs to almost 100% of our needy student population, leading to zero frustration among students. This would not only give students experience and exposure to real world but will enable high school students to save towards their post-secondary education. The program would enable post secondary students to make $8,000-10,000 during summer which they could use towards their rent and living expenses. This would add to the economic output.

c. TRADE EDUCATION: We would provide funding for 1 month of compulsory trade education to all graduating high school students to enable them to become self-confident in future lives and also act as an incentive to pursue well paying jobs in construction industry, which is critically short of brick layers, concrete workers and other trades.

d. FREE VIA RAIL TRAVEL: We would provide unlimited free Via Rail travel privilege to all full time students. In addition, we would also provide free Via Rail travel to all youth aged 16-29 during summer, irrespective of their student status, so that our youth can explore Canada. Our young population never gets a chance to travel across Canada, especially children of poor parents.

e. POST COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY JOBS: We would provide incentives to employers hiring post-secondary students, who graduated high school from Canadian schools. At present, Canadian born students are finding it hard to compete with foreign students who are employed by employers at far-far lower starting salaries.