Today’s blog will be the first in a series looking at the various federal party election platforms on post-secondary education, skills, and science. First up: the Green Party.

I opened this year’s Green Party Manifesto with some trepidation because, well, the 2015 platform was such a dumpster fire. And, wouldn’t you know it, the 2019 platform is also a dumpster fire. Quelle coincidence!

This is not merely an issue of bad policy; it’s about policy incoherence. Prior to the writ, the party released a set of commitments. It then asked the Parliamentary Budget Office to analyse its various platform commitments. On the basis of this, and some more not-very-good, back-of-the envelope thinking of its own, it then released a “costed platform” which showed how the individual pieces all fit together. The problem is, these three sets of documents don’t always say the same thing, which makes for a lot of head-scratching and some room for interpretation.

Let’s start with the research part of the platform. There is some minor boutique stuff around supporting innovation in mining and supporting technical schools for alternative energy, but as far as basic science goes, the platform essentially offers two bullet points, namely:

• Invest in scientific research and implement the full funding recommendations from Canada’s Fundamental Science Review.
• Enhance funding for the granting councils, including NSERC, SSHRC and CIHR.

The first bullet point is relatively clear and coherent; it means pushing funding to the Tri-councils up by about $600 million over four years on top of the Budget 2018 commitments (or half that, if you re-allocate money the Liberals gave to CFI over and above what the Review asked for). The second bullet is… well, what is it exactly? A re-statement of the first bullet? A declaration of intent to fund these organizations over and above Review-recommended levels? It is hard to imagine that two such bullet points could be put into proximity to one another by anyone who actually understood the files. And then there is the costed platform which promises… a $50 million rise in granting council funding in 2020-21 and nothing thereafter, i.e. nothing large enough to actually meet the Review’s recommendations.

But the Green’s big ticket item in our field (in fact, the second-biggest commitment in the platform after a national pharmacare program) is one to make tuition free for Canadian students and—according to the platform document—“forgive the portion of the student debt that is held by the federal government” (this is not actually what is in the costing document, as I’ll get to in a second).

The Greens do not explain exactly how this is to be achieved, other than to say they will give money to the provinces with strings attached (more on those in a minute). From the very scanty PBO description, it looks like what they plan to do is hand over cash to each province in an amount sufficient to equal current tuition. This is, from a simple political point of view, utter fantasy because tuition varies substantially from province to province and this formula provides proportionately the most to Ontario (which, generally speaking, has done the least to contain tuition costs) and provides the least to Quebec and Newfoundland (which have done the most). If you think that formula is going to be acceptable to any province other than Ontario, you are very much mistaken.

But leave that aside for a bit. How are they going to pay for getting rid of domestic tuition, which currently nets institutions something like $10-11 billion? Well the first billion or billion and half is going to come from getting rid of the tuition tax credit, and then a similar amount will come from eliminating Registered Education Savings Plans going forward (existing ones would be grandfathered), as well as the Canada Education Savings Grants and the Canada Learning Bonds. Total savings about $3 billion. So, the net cost of the promise is in the $7-8 billion range, including offsetting reductions in Canada Student Loans Program spending (which actually is not very much because most CSLP spending goes to grants which are based on income, regardless of tuition costs). The PBO is careful to say that while its modelling includes student responses (an increase in demand) it does not model provincial responses, which one might reasonably believe to be substantial.

Now, back to that promise to forgive debt. The statement in the platform sounds absolute—as in “we’re forgiving all debt!” That would cost about $20 billion. Evidently at some point the platform committee realized that was totally infeasible, and the promise that was actually costed by PBO was to forgive “debt for students that are unemployed or earning less than $70,000 per year as of November 2020”, and this apparently will cost about $9 billion. But then there is this curious exclusion: “This policy is not applied to students entering repayment after the measure is implemented as it is assumed that no additional debt for tuition will be accrued”. Which is bizarre. Read literally, it means no one currently in school and whose studies do not end until after November 2020 will be eligible for debt relief. That is, this is a measure which benefits past students but not, for the most part, current ones. I cannot tell if this is bad drafting or bad policy. With the Greens, one can never be sure.

A final point to note about the Green platform is that in the platform document, the party claims it will “tie funding in federal-provincial transfers to universities, providing more to universities and colleges with a measurable focus on student-professor contact, mentorship, policies of inclusion and tenure track hires”. In other words, they seem to be under the impression that the federal government is in a position to tell provinces how to arrange funding to individual institutions. Presumably section 93 of the constitution is just something that applies to other people.

Anyways, there you go. If it sounds incoherent, it’s because it is. This is a party that allegedly cares about the environment, but which does not envisage increasing carbon taxes, and whose platform involves roughly 30 times as much spending on pharmacare as on climate change. It’s a very, very strange beast.