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
