Category: History Lesson

For the first thirty or so years of its existence, the CSLP changed little, and was rarely the subject of any political attention.  The annual loan maxima drifted gradually upwards from its initial $1,000 per year, but the only real innovations were the introduction of interest relief (the nucleus of today’s Repayment Assistance Program) in 1984, and a short-lived, ill-advised experiment in administrative cost-recovery in 1990 – during which the government levied a 3% fee on loans to pay for overhead,

Pearson’s election manifestoes of 1958, 1962, and 1963 (mostly written by Englishman and former Winnipeg Free Press editor, Tom Kent) all contained proposals for both a loan scheme and a system of scholarships.  But upon coming to power in the last of those three elections, loans weren’t the new government’s first priority.  In fact, Pearson’s team quickly became bogged down in a completely different policy arena: namely, pensions.  The Liberals had promised a national contributory pension system, but were having

The Progressive Conservative Party under John Diefenbaker won a crushing majority in 1958, and his platform hadn’t contained anything with respect to education or universities.  Though he was known for his “Vision for Canada”, universities weren’t really a part of that vision.  He retained the Saint Laurent policy of paying money directly (via the AUCC) to individual universities on a more-or-less per capita basis.  The only change he made was to agree to a deal with the Duplessis government (which

The Canada Student Loans Program, which over the years has helped upwards of 3 million Canadians obtain a post-secondary education, turns 50 this year.  And since the Government of Canada seems to be either too shy or too partisan (it was a Liberal creation after all) to celebrate this anniversary, I thought I’d do it here, by spending a few days giving you a bit of history about how the program came about. (Why now?  Why not August 1st, the