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According to Paul Allaire, Quebec's director of financial aid, all 6,000 full-time undergraduates who applied for bursaries for the summer term, "were affected to some degree or another" by processing delays. In plain language, thousands of students have yet to see their mid-summer cash.

A bursary application form called "Declaration of Actual Situation" (DAS), normally delivered in tandem with summer loans in May, was not even printed until this month. Quebec's financial aid office was busy developing a new online application process. According to Allaire, this year's DAS is being mailed out from July 16-29, and thus many students who opted to apply with hardcopy rather than on-line have yet to even receive it. He says it takes about three weeks between sending the properly completed form and receiving the bursary cash.

Sylvia Da Lola, a financial aid advisor at Concordia University, says the university's emergency loans services are holding up. But one student told the Mirror, "I now owe more in emergency loans to Concordia than I stand to receive in bursaries." Says Da Lola: "There has been a delay, normally the bursaries come in June, but once the Web site is fully operational things will be better." : --Noemi Lopinto

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