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, who became a permanent resident in 2018 on humanitarian grounds, says there was no consideration for the fact that his parents were not Canadian citizens and didn't have the relevant documentation.

What's more, the interest on OSAP loans rose from 4.7 per cent when Bonne entered university in fall 2018 to 7.95 per cent this spring when he graduated with a degree in biological chemistry.

"That's when the interest starts taking over," Bonne said.

Bonne was grateful that he was able to find summer work and receive a research grant, which allowed him to get a head start on his payments.

"I'm just not comfortable with the idea of taking that [debt] for the rest of my life," he said.

But he isn't in the clear yet. Bonne enters medical school at McGill University in Montreal this fall — and, pending other scholarship funding, he's considering taking on a line of credit from a bank, which offers medical students loans of up to $350,000 to finance their medical education. 

Bonne isn't sure what area of medicine he wants to pursue yet. But he wants to serve immigrants and other marginalized groups in Quebec, recalling a time after his family first came to Canada in 2009 when his sister got sick and they didn't have a family doctor or a clinic they could go to.

"That's a problem many immigrants face today. I don't even have a family doctor; I'm still on a waitlist," he said, darkly noting that he might be a family physician before he has one himself.

Bonne says he'll take the funding he needs but no more, noting that he also doesn't have family support in Canada to fall back on in a crisis.

"One bedroom, one desk — that's really all I need."

Bonne is far from alone in his struggle with student debt; 1.9 million Canadians owed the federal government a total of $23.5 billion in student loans as of July 2022 — a number that only balloons further when including provincial loans and private debt. More than half of those who pursued professional programs such as medicine took on bank loans or lines of credit, according to a 2020 Statistics Canada report.