This website is a testimony to the problems Canadian Student Loan borrowers experienced from approximately 1996 to 2008 and until their loans were paid off.

The privatization of the Student Loans system by the Chretien and Martin Liberal governments broke the system and defaulted thousands of borrowers who were trying to pay their loans. There were even stories of suicide due to the harassment of borrowers.

Read the report that I prepared back in 2007 here. Canada Student Loans-The Need for Change Fortunately the new Conservative government at the time revamped the program and fixed the system for new borrowers, but borrowers under the previous program were left with ruined credit and continued harassment from debt collectors.

I call on the Canadian Government to apologize to the borrowers affected by this fiasco and make amends.

Unfortunately the Liberal government is again clobbering the Education system with their upcoming changes to International Student Visas. Yes, there's a problem, but instead of a well thought out plan, they have pulled the emergency brake on the train causing a derailment. This has introduced unprecedented instability for both private and public education institutions who serve both international and local students.

Universities can't plan. I've heard of courses being cut because the government has no process in place for universities to send the newly required acceptance letters to the government.

This means that students who have been accepted can not attend courses that start in the summer 2024 semester. With cut sections, current Canadian students will have trouble getting courses, and may have to switch to part-time which changes their enrollment status and might trigger repayment of their loans or ineligibility for funding. I've seen this before. It wreaks havoc on the student loan borrowers.

Again, the Liberal government has messed up the education environment. Will the new system needed in a rush for the acceptance letters be the new Arrivecan scandal?

I call on the government to implement a slower phased in approach and delay the requirement of the acceptance letters until a process is in place to submit these letters.


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Forum Locked10 years of hotdogs and ramen

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Spinney View Drop Down
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    Posted: 23/October/2005 at 7:42am
I'm pretty sure that's all my food budget will have room for.

I started my computer science degree in 1998, and graduated in 2004 with the BCS and a BA. Because of my massive loan debt I got a $4000 millenium bursary when I graduated, which was immediately applied against my NB loans bringing my total debt down to around $50,000. I moved to Halifax since there wasn't any IT work in NB, and spent about 18 months there looking for work.

When my interest free period ran out I was approved for interest relief, and during that period I finally found some work...at a call centre. It was the only place I could find that would even interview me, everywhere else I was either over or underqualified. It's very hard to find work in IT when you don't have experience, especially in the maritimes, since the BCS degrees don't go into specific technology buzzwords. Everywhere else people looked at me like I had 2 heads when I applied. I actually had a restaurant manager ask me, "What makes you think you're qualified?", when I brought in my resume. Anyway I managed to hang on at the call centre for 2 months, which is amazing considering how mismanaged the place was. Apparently my whole training class including the trainer had quit by the month after I left.

So finding myself underqualified for meaningful work I decided to go to a private college to get the buzzwords I needed...at a price of $14,000. I knew it would probably make my debt near unmanageable, but at that point it was either that or welfare for the rest of my life heh. I quickly found out that the college was a scam (CDI College), $14000 for an education worth closer to $100. This past summer I decided to quit that diploma, sell the few remaining things I owned, like my computer, and move to Vancouver. I've been here about 9 weeks and I'm starting to get a lot of interviews but now I'm seriously wondering if I can afford to actually live. With rent as high as it is in Vancouver I'm starting to think that the only way to bring the payments down to a manageable level is to extend the repayment terms so far that the debt will never be repaid.

On the normal 10 year term my payments will be over $720 a month, so it seems I can qualify for debt reduction as long as I'm not making more than $40,000. The problem is that in order to qualify for debt reduction you have to exhaust interest relief, and I'm reasonably sure you can't get IR while making that much. I'm worried that my payments will become so high that I won't be able to pay rent, at which point I become homless and lose whatever job it is I've found. It just seems that the whole student loan repayment process is designed to shoot itself in the foot...maliciously remove the student's ability to repay and then suck interest payments out of them for the rest of their lives.

I used to think that I'd never want to leave Canada and refused to even consider moving to the US, but there's no way with my work experience I can command a high enough salary in Canada to actually pay rent, student loans and still eat.
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote Spinney Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 23/October/2005 at 8:01am
Oh yeah, I forgot this interesting little tidbit. In 1998 one of my loans was with National Bank, and has never been rolled over into the NSLSC loans. When I returned to school and got new loans I apparently owed an interest payment of $30.99, except they never told me this. When I called them to let them know I was returning to school they mentioned something about a payment, but no amount was ever specified. Of course this didn't make much sense to me, taking a payment out of someone's student loan to pay down a student loan.

Anyway time went by and I never received anything in the mail from them. I did get a couple of completely incomprehenisble phone messages. The French accent was so thick that none of us could understand who was calling, why they were calling, or what their phone number was. I finally got a message I could barely understand a few weeks ago, and discovered I was about to be passed off to a collections agency over $31! It seemed completely unethical but I sent them a cheque anyway, even though I can't afford it right now. I've spent the last 8 years getting an excellent credit rating with my credit cards, and I'm getting the feeling that these student loans are going to kill it for me.

Banks are really starting to piss me off. My dad had an issue with his mortage through TD, where for 20 years they didn't put any money towards his principle. Add on top of that the fact that the banks now charge you an arm and a leg for the priviledge of letting them use your money to make more money. It's an industry that has turned from helping to build the country to feeding off it like a parasite.
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