How student loans keep some people trapped in debt
When Samuel Bonne received $15,000 in student grants to fund his studies, he wasn’t expecting to have to pay it back. But just two years later — in the middle of the pandemic — those grants were converted to loans.
At the end of his sophomore year at the University of Toronto, the Ontario Student Assistance Program (OSAP) asked Bonne, originally from Mauritius, for his parents’ financial documents, but they couldn’t provide them.
“My dad works in Kenya and my mom doesn’t work,” said Bonne. “So I ended up having $15,000 in loans that I did not know about.”
Bonne,…
Canadian forest fires are the latest costly climate disaster that public accounts fail to capture
You don’t have to tell the people of Calgary and other Canadian communities breathing orange air that forest fires have a cost.
And while repeated studies draw a direct line between an increase in costly forest fires and climate change, economists and accountants right up to Canada’s Parliamentary Budget Officer say the benefits of stopping climate change and thus reducing the many harms it creates is simply impossible to measure for public accounting purposes.
It is an interesting conundrum and the thousands of people displaced from their homes or breathing smoke from the current spate of forest fires are caught…
