Question Period Note: Post-Secondary Education Affordability

What is the Government of Canada doing to make post-secondary education more affordable?

• The Government is committed to ensuring that post-secondary education is affordable and student debt is manageable even as the costs of education continue to rise.
• We have already increased the amount of Canada Student Grants by 50 per cent and have made more students eligible for the them. We have reduced the interest rate on Canada Student Loans and made them interest-free for the six-month non-repayment period. We have also increased the minimum income a borrower has to make before they need to repay their loan to $25,000 per year.

• More than 1.5 million Canadians are already benefiting from these measures.

• Our platform commitments will go even further to help low- and middle-income Canadians afford the growing costs of post-secondary education.

• The Canada Student Loans Program provides targeted grants and needs-based loans to help students access post-secondary education and offers the Repayment Assistance Plan (RAP) to borrowers with financial difficulty.

• As a result of investments made in recent years, in 2017-18, over 450,000 students from low- and middle-income families received up to $3,000 in grants. As well, 326,000 borrowers benefited from the RAP, and majority of them were not required to make any payments at all.

• Through Budget 2019, the Government of Canada made the six-month non-repayment period interest free and lowered interest rates on Canada Student Loans to prime, from prime plus 2.5 percent, as of November 1, 2019.

• Through Budget 2019, the Government of Canada also introduced a number of measures to help borrowers in long-term financial difficulty, students with disabilities, and borrowers who have to take temporary leave from their studies for medical or parental reasons.

• In the 2019 election campaign, the Liberal Party committed to making education more affordable by:
o Increasing full- and part-time grants by 40 per cent to provide students with up to $1,200 more per year.
o Extending the non-repayment period from six months to two years after graduation, to help borrowers get started in their career before paying back federal student loans.
o Changing the minimum annual individual income required to repay loans to $35,000, to help borrowers with lower incomes.
o Introducing an interest-free pause on student loan repayments for new parents, until their youngest child turns five years old.

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