Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I just wanted to state, and I have said this many times, I do appreciate and believe that we do have one of the most, if not the most, generous SFA programs probably in the country and probably around the world. I have certainly been a beneficiary of that and I don't think I could have gotten the post-secondary education that I was able to get and it would have been much more difficult to get that were it not for the program that we have.

So I know that we been increasing the budget over the years for eligible amounts for the students, but I think what is going on in the student tuition fees all across the country is just eating up all the gains we are making. When I went to university in '85-86, I think it was around $1,000 a year to go to university. When I went back another few years later, for a three-year program, I think the tuition fee was about $1,500 and within three years it went up to $5,000. Now I think we are looking at over $10,000. When the tuition fee was at $1,500, I think the maximum amount that I was able to borrow was $3,200. That's what I remember. So I think while we are quite generous in our program. I think there are some students who need to borrow even more than $46,000. I know that people I know who are in post-secondary education in other parts of the country, it's not unheard of to walk out of post-secondary education with a $100,000-plus loan. Of course, there are advantages to getting this education and they would have a better means of paying for that.

I was at that reception for the nursing grads I think the Minister mentioned yesterday. One of the students spoke to me about whether or not it was possible to increase their loan amount. So these are not grants. It's just that if you have to do bridge programming or take any other programming to get to the post-secondary education and by the time you finish three or four years of grad degree, it's easy to end up with more than $46,000. You are not able to have work that would give you any significant amount of income while you are at school. I would like to ask the Minister if there is any room to increase the loan amount or at least maybe have flexibility there where if a student is in their last year and if they establish that they need a bit of an increase to finish that program, could there be provisions to do that? I am talking about repayable loans. I am not talking about grants. I would like to ask the Minister if he would consider looking at that.