Tag: Ontario

Is Queen’s Running Out of Money?

Earlier this month, the Queen’s student newspaper, The Queen’s Journal, reported on what seems to have been an extraordinary outburst by the university’s Provost, Matthew Evans, during a campus Town Hall to discuss cutbacks in early December. During this meeting, the Provost is alleged to have said “I’m concerned about the survival of this institution. Unless we sort this out, we will go under.” The story was picked up by a number of outlets across the country, including CTV and

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What’s in Ontario’s Blue Ribbon Panel Report?

The province decided to release the report of its Blue Ribbon Panel on Post-Secondary Education Financial Sustainability last Wednesday.  Remember, this was a report commissioned by the provincial government in response to a pair of reports from the Auditor-General, one on Laurentian University and another on other smaller institutions in November 2022.  It’s not what I would call an ambitious document; the panel’s terms of reference instructed that any recommendations “be considered through the lens of fiscally responsible and affordable

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The Future of French Language Universities in Ontario

Before the Ford government came to office in Ontario, the province had exactly zero French-language universities.  This might seem strange in a province with something close to a million French speakers, a third of whom use it as a first language.  After all, Manitoba – which has a similarly-sized francophone population in proportional terms – can maintain Université de St. Boniface, so why couldn’t Ontario? The answer is that at the time Ontario had two very good bilingual universities in

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The Other Side of the Coin

I’ve spent a lot of time recently talking about Ontario colleges, about how they have responded to persistent underfunding by via the international student business (either on their own or via public-private partnerships).  But I have not spent so much time discussing the province’s other sector, the one which faced similar losses in government-controlled revenue but did not did not pursue international quit so arduously.  So today, let’s talk about Ontario universities. We can start by looking at financial data

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A Short Explainer of Public Private Partnerships in Ontario Colleges

I always get questions about international students and visas when I travel across Canada talking to university and college audiences.  And what I find is that in most parts of the country, they are genuinely puzzled about what is happening in Ontario.  Most say they have heard about all these “unscrupulous private colleges” who are “taking advantage of students.” Online, more racist theories suggest this is a story of “human trafficking” in which these “private colleges” are “in on a

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