Dear Editor,

Education Minister Ronnie Thwaites has wisely suggested that students delinquent in loan repayments should not be allowed to leave the country before settling their debts. Who could possibly argue against a very simple, cost-efficient, practical way of recouping annually recurrent losses that must, by now, be well into the billions?

What is truly mindboggling is that Mr Thwaites’s other Cabinet colleagues have not similarly concluded that it mightn’t be such a bad idea to ensure that taxpayers are taxcompliant before being able to hop on a plane and sometimes never come back. It seems to me that the Private Sector Working Group on tax reform, so vocal about the parlous state of the nation’s finances and the chasm between the taxes owing and the taxes collected, have not come up with this idea either.

If memory serves me right, that used to be the case in colonial and even postcolonial times. Is this a case of wilful blindness or am I missing something?

Errol WA Townshend

Ontario, Canada

ewat@rogers.com