Mr. Speaker, I listened to the hon. member talking about how wonderful the student loan program is. I would like to inform him that as a fourth term member of Parliament I have run into a lot of problems that young constituents have had with that program, two that I would like to share with him and ask him for comments on.
One problem is students who find themselves coming out of our education system, expensive as it is, with tremendous debt and then finding it very difficult to get a job. Consequently they have great difficulty in making the payments. As soon as they miss a payment, they go into default and they start getting hounded for payments. It actually was so bad in the case of a mentally disturbed person in my riding who received funding that it ended up being a contributing factor in her suicide.
What we have suggested is that loans should be income contingent. In other words, they should be repaid according to the salary the students are making. If they get a high salary, they pay it a little faster. If they have a very low salary, they pay a lower amount that is affordable. If they find themselves out of work for a period of time, payments and the clock under the loan basically should be stopped.
The second problem is that we have many students who have difficulty getting the loans. One of the impediments in their way is the means test for the parents. If the parents make over a certain income, students cannot get a loan from this program even though the parents may have no ability or no intention to provide funding for their children. Why should the children be penalized because of that? We would like to see the program change so that it is not contingent on the parental income, that is, so that it is based on the student needs. I would be interested in hearing the comments of the hon. member on those two items.