A Nova Scotia court has ruled that a former university student does not have to pay back tens of thousands of dollars he borrowed from a bank.
Alfredo Abdo won his case in bankruptcy court this week, with the court concluding that the Royal Bank of Canada was at least partly responsible for what happened.
“I question whether advancing all that money at one time was prudent banking on the part of RBC,” registrar Richard Cregan said in a written decision.
Abdo was a promising engineering student at Dalhousie University in September 2004. He had good grades, a scholarship and lived at home with this family.
In his second year, at the age of 19, he borrowed $20,000 from RBC though a student line of credit. He made bad investments online, according to court documents, and he accepted an offer from the bank for another loan of $30,000 to solve his problem.
Abdo started having dizzy spells. Finding his engineering program very stressful, he switched to commerce. But he dropped out of university in his third year.
The dizziness and social anxiety never went away, Abdo said, and therefore he couldn’t work or pay back the bank loans. He filed for bankruptcy last November.
The Canadian court probably thinks that they are compassionate, good people sticking it to the corporations. But actually what they’ve done is caused the banks to think a second time about making loans to borderline cases, so that the poorest students will now be refused student loans. If the courts refuse to enforce contracts signed by both parties, then the banks just won’t enter in to those contracts.
Thousands of people with student loans are defaulting on payments, leaving the Government to chase hundreds of millions of dollars.
More than one in five borrowers – or 114,000 people – have overdue payments and thousands of students are leaving tertiary education with no qualification and big bills.
The Education Ministry’s student loan scheme annual report shows that $306 million in payments is overdue, a $100m increase from a year ago.
The substantial growth includes a big rise in the level of payments owed by people now living overseas, more than doubling to $114m.
New Zealand University Students Association co-president Sophia Blair said it was not surprising that students with loans were heading overseas and letting the bills mount. “You can earn higher wages [overseas].”
[…]Total student loan debt had reached $10.2 billion and is predicted to grow by an average of $875m a year to more than $20b by 2022.
The report also showed about 39 per cent of students who left tertiary education with a loan did so without achieving a qualification.
About 8000 students with loans who left study in 2005 had nothing to show for it by 2007.
New Zealand, if I understand correctly is a fairly left-wing country, which probably subsidizes tuition and taxes income. So, students would be incentivized to game the system by taking out loans backed by the government, and then leaving to work abroad in more capitalist economies. Socialism encourages people to game the system and avoid taking responsibility for their own decisions.
It’s old news, it has been the same way for years and years and that story comes out every year but as always it is interesting.
Your assessment is pretty spot on. In New Zealand student loans are pretty much available to anyone who applies for one. Acceptance at University or an alternative tertiary institution is not difficult, especially once you are over 20 as the institutions want your money – they get more funding the more students they have. Student loans are interest free and you do not have to begin repayments until you finish study. The state funds something like 75% of the tuition fees directly anyway so the loan is only for 25% of the actual cost. There are benefits available for living costs and if you don’t qualify for them you can borrow living costs and have them added to your student loan. So it is set up to make it easy to get into debt.
Being a fairly left-wing country there is a lot of regulation in the market place so of course you can pretty much always earn more overseas and once overseas the state cannot garnish your wages to get your student loan repayment.
The system has some fairly bad holes in it. For example, people who are being funded for Uni by they employer, like I was pre-accident, to study can take the cash for tuition fees from their employer, invest it and then take out an interest free student loan to pay their tuition fees. At the completion of study they then pay off the loan with the invested funds and pocket the interest – compliments of the taxpayer. Only students with cash coming from somewhere can do that as your student loan gets paid straight to the education provider apparently a lot of students with wealthy parents do this too.
As if this situation were not bad enough, organizations like New Zealand University Students Association (NZUSA), quoted below whinging about the level of pay rates in New Zealand , typically also whinge that education is not “free” anymore like it used to be when the politicians went to Uni! They argue that being educated to tertiary level benefits society so therefore society should pay for all of it (and have much higher wages).
Pervez Masih, a 40-year-old Christian worker, saved scores of lives at the double-storey cafeteria, where around 400 female students were present at the time of the attack.
“There would have been dozens of deaths had the suicide bomber not been blocked by Pervez Masih,” said Saifur Rehman, a senior security official of the IIU.
The other hero, Mohammad Shaukat, survived the attack but he is fighting for his life on a bed in the surgical ward of Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences, as a shot fired by the suicide bomber hit him in lower abdomen.
Narrating the scene of the suicide attack on the cafeteria for women, Shaukat told Dawn that: “The attacker clad in a black burka was heading towards the cafeteria for female students at a time when they were having their lunch. I felt something wrong as no girl student, even one who observes veil, wears a head-to-toe burka on the women campus. I intercepted the bomber, who shot me, and I fell down but Pervez, who witnessed the scene, understood the designs of suicide bomber and held him at the entrance of the dining hall where the blast took place.”
Where could this Christian man have learned that self-sacrifice was morally good, and even prudent, in the long run? Where did he get the idea that death was not the end, and that his decisions about right and wrong have ultimate significance, even after his death?
Christ gave his life as an atoning sacrifice to save humanity, even when they were still in rebellion against him. So Christians, following Christ’s example, are obligated to give their lives to save others who are still in rebellion against Christ. This is action consistent with Christianity. Self-sacrifice like this is not rationally grounded by any other worldview. It is especially not rationally grounded by atheism, which is all about moral relativism and hedonism.
If you click through to Answering Muslims, they’ve also got a video on the story from CNN.
The United States Supreme Court has refused to hear the case of a high school valedictorian whose microphone was turned off by school officials after she began speaking about the part her Christian beliefs played in her success in life.
Attorneys for The Rutherford Institute asked the Supreme Court to hear the case of Brittany McComb, charging that school officials violated McComb’s free speech rights and engaged in viewpoint discrimination when they censored her speech because of its Christian content.
[…]McComb is a Christian and a top student, who graduated with a 4.7 grade point average from Foothill High in Henderson, Nevada. She knew that her valedictorian address would probably be cut short, but was determined to go ahead and mention her faith anyway.
School officials had previously edited her speech to remove Biblical references and one mention of the name of Jesus Christ, warning her she would be interrupted if she deviated from the approved text.
“I went through four years of school at Foothill and they taught me logic and they taught me freedom of speech,” McComb stated. “God’s the biggest part of my life. Just like other valedictorians thank their parents, I wanted to thank my lord and savior.”
The 400 plus graduates and guests who had gathered at a Las Vegas casino for the commencement ceremony, booed and jeered after McComb’s speech was cut short, chanting “Let her speak!”
If this young lady were gay or a Muslim or anything else, she would have been allowed to speak about that, and Christians would have remained silent and respectful. Only Christians are suppressed, and that should tell you something about our government-run, unionized public schools today.
Video of her speech:
Video of her on Fox News:
Props to Alan Colmes for taking her side against the anti-Christian school administrators.
A lot of non-Christians and fake “Christians” on the secular left think that they are doing a good thing by silencing authentic Christians in the public square. They have decided that it is better to hurt the feelings of Christians by forcing them to keep silent and act like non-Christians, than to hurt the feelings of non-Christians. The problem with this is that ultimately, if Christianity is true, it only matters how each of us makes Jesus Christ feel. And if you hurt the feelings of Christians who are busy following Christ, then you are really hurting Christ.
1At that time the disciples came to Jesus and asked, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?”
2He called a little child and had him stand among them.
3And he said: “I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.
4Therefore, whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.
5“And whoever welcomes a little child like this in my name welcomes me.
6But if anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a large millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.
7“Woe to the world because of the things that cause people to sin! Such things must come, but woe to the man through whom they come!
8If your hand or your foot causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life maimed or crippled than to have two hands or two feet and be thrown into eternal fire.
9And if your eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into the fire of hell.
10“See that you do not look down on one of these little ones. For I tell you that their angels in heaven always see the face of my Father in heaven.
This story is in Mark, Matthew and Luke: it’s early and multiply attested, and is therefore authentic.
This cannot be any more clear. If you discourage people from following Christ then you are in big trouble. I think that this suppression of Christians is worse than murder. Jesus is threatening people who discourage Christians with the eternal fires of Hell. Christians are morally obligated to talk about Jesus in public, and particularly to give thanks to him in public. When you tell Christians not to act like like Christians, then you are really forcing your religion onto them, and expecting them to act as if you are more authoritative than Jesus Christ.
The purpose of life, on Christianity, is not to hide your commitment to Christ in order to make non-Christians feel comfortable about their rejection of Christianity. The purpose of life, on Christianity, is to publicly acknowledge God in everything that you do and to have a relationship with God, as revealed by Christ’s life and teachings. The most important relationship is the vertical relationship – with God, not the horizontal relationship – with people. It is a non-Christian viewpoint that faith should be kept private and hidden.
Remember that the first commandment is not “Thou shalt avoid offending people who are in rebellion against God” nor is it “Thou shalt hide your faith from non-Christians so that they don’t feel badly about rejecting God”. There’s a temptation to pick moral rules like “don’t murder” and “don’t commit adultery” – things we don’t do, and then to say that those things are the really bad things. And since we don’t do those bad things, that makes us good. But what does God consider to be the really bad thing?
The first commandment, according to Jesus, is found in Matthew 22:34-38:
34Hearing that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, the Pharisees got together.
35One of them, an expert in the law, tested him with this question:
36“Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”
37Jesus replied: ” ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’
38This is the first and greatest commandment.
This story is in Mark, Matthew and Luke: it’s early and multiply attested, and is therefore authentic.
13“You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled by men.
14“You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden.
15Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house.
16In the same way, let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven.
This story is in Mark, Matthew and Luke: it’s early and multiply attested, and is therefore authentic.
(This is one of my favorite verses in the Bible. I always feel sad when I think of it because I think of it when dealing with laziness, ignorance and cowardice from fake Christians – which is often!)
26“So do not be afraid of them. There is nothing concealed that will not be disclosed, or hidden that will not be made known.
27What I tell you in the dark, speak in the daylight; what is whispered in your ear, proclaim from the roofs.
28Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell.
29Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from the will of your Father.
30And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered.
31So don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.
32“Whoever acknowledges me before men, I will also acknowledge him before my Father in heaven.
33But whoever disowns me before men, I will disown him before my Father in heaven.
This story is also in Luke, so it is part of the Q source shared by Matthew and Luke, which is very early and likely to be authentic.
One has to remember that for this young woman, her relationship with Christ is as real to her as her relationship with her parents – and she wants to honor him in her moment of celebration. It is striking that school administrators encourage other politically correct groups to express themselves in public. Only Christians are singled out for persecution and suppression. Christians can’t speak freely, but non-Christian school officials can call all pro-lifers murderers and Democrats can force Christians to pay for abortions.
People today seem to think that God, if he exists, would be loving. And what they mean by love is “making people feel happy regardless of what they believe about God’s existence and character”. People imagine what God is like for them using emotions and intuitions, instead of looking at the life of Jesus historically, and asking whether God really stepped into history to show us what he is really like. Biblical Christians don’t comport with this intuitive/emotional understanding of love, so that is why they are persecuted by non-Christians and fake Christians.
This bias against Christians sharing their faith is common in most non-Christian religions who would prefer to silence Christians rather than debate them with arguments and evidence. Countries like the UK and Canada punish Christians for speaking about Christianity, India and Israel consider passing anti-conversion laws, and in the atheistic North Korea or Muslim Iran they just imprison or kill Christians outright. When non-Christians persecute Christians for behaving like Christians, they really are aggrieving Christ himself.
My advice for non-Christians
If you are a non-Christian or an emotional/intuitive “Christian”, you want to avoid denying authentic Christians the rights of free speech and freedom of religious expression. Feel free to spend your lives on Earth seeking pleasure and avoiding a relationship with the God who is there. Even God won’t reveal himself overtly to you to compel you into a love relationship with him. But don’t make it harder on yourself in the after-life by persecuting Christians here and now for behaving like authentic Christians.
Some people think that by suppressing Christians, they actually are doing what God wants because God’s goal for us is to have happy feelings. But if your method of discovering God’s existence and character is by using your emotions and intuitions, then you should be careful about inventing a God in your own image. My advice is to conduct a genuine investigation of whether God exists, and what he is like, using arguments and evidence, not emotions and intuitions. If God is real, then he already has a personality. He isn’t YOU.
Related posts
Here is a series of posts I did on why people go to Hell.
WINTERY KNIGHT 