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 actual anniversary of the start of the program?  Patience grasshoppers.  There is a relevant anniversary coming up, but I don’t want to ruin the story).

The federal government was providing student assistance as early as 1919, when they offered loans of up to $500 to WWI veterans who were returning to complete their studies (the offer was only for those who had been enrolled prior to enlisting… everyone else was out of luck).  After that, the Government of Canada stayed out of the field until the late 1930s.  In 1937, they started a matching grant program with the provinces to develop facilities for vocational training; in 1939, they expanded that to a cost-sharing program for student aid, called the Dominion-Provincial Student Assistance Program (DPSAP).  PEI and the Western provinces joined in 1940 – everyone else was in by 1944 (Newfoundland joined the program shortly after entering confederation, Quebec withdrew for all the usual reasons in 1954).  Additional loan and scholarship programs  to support Science and Engineering students for the war effort began in 1941, but ended when the war did, in 1945.

DPSAP wasn’t in any sense a federal program – basically, the feds would match whatever the provinces were doing, subject to some fairly minor conditions.  Certainly, there were no national rules; basically, each province did their own thing and got some federal money to go along with it.  One or two provinces had loans, most provinces had “scholarships” (at the time English was like French, and didn’t have words to distinguish between need-and merit-based awards).  But they didn’t spend much – this matching program only cost the feds $5 million over 25 years, and rarely provided aid to more than about 4000 students in any given year.

After the war, both the Massey (1951) and Gordon (1957) commissions made it clear that they thought greater federal assistance to higher education was needed.  In short order, this led to St. Laurent’s efforts to give grants directly to Canadian universities (a move correctly and mercilessly ridiculed by Pierre Trudeau in his 1957 essay, Federal Grants to Universities); student aid wasn’t immediately forthcoming, but the main student group of the time, the National Federation of Canadian University Students (NFCUS) began pushing for a “national system of scholarships”.  In the United States, the examples of the GI Bill and the National Defense Education Act (1958) provided reformers in Canada with lots of ideas about how student aid might be run.  But by then, Canada was led by John Diefenbaker’s Tories, who had precious little interest in education as a policy field.  Nevertheless, what they ended up doing in higher education would have a huge long-run impact on higher education finance.

More tomorrow.