The Conservative Party is sometimes unfairly maligned when it comes to higher education.  Virtually no one, for instance, gave the Harper government credit for the quite stunning amount of money it spent on research during its first two terms, preferring to focus instead on the slow erosion of funding during its third term (during which time, it should be recalled, the party was trying to bring down an enormous post-financial crisis deficit).  Or the fact that it chose not to just let the Millennium Scholarship Foundation die in 2009, but instead replaced it with much higher permanent grant spending through the Canada Student Loans Program (or, indeed, the fact that adding grants to the loan system in the first place was an initiative of the Campbell government in 1993, though it only came into effect after the Liberals arrived in power). 

Conversely, sometimes the maligning is more than fair.  Take the Ford government’s student aid cuts for example.  Or the Higgs government’s dismantling of New Brunswick’s targeted free tuition on utterly spurious grounds.

Certainly over the later Harper years, the federal Conservatives started to look skeptical about research and indeed tepid about the knowledge industry as a whole, preferring to concentrate on efforts to build and sustain the country’s resource economy.  That’s partly due to the party having its political base in the west, where the resource economy is a bigger deal, but also – and this is a point too little appreciated in major urban centres – the resource economy is a lot more inclusive than the knowledge economy in the sense that it has a greater ability to pull up incomes at the low end of the spectrum (conversely, of course, it is also more a gendered economy).  It allowed the 2015 election to play out in part as a contest between the Old Economy (Conservatives) and New (Liberals), a framing which probably overstated both Liberal with-it-ness and Conservative without-it-ness. 

Since that time, however, the Conservatives have shown little interest in changing that framing.  Skills, education and science barely registered in the party’s 2016-7 leadership campaign, except when Scheer brought up the idea of free speech policies on university campuses, an idea which does not appear to figure in the federal platform because right-wing governments in Ontario and Alberta have already beaten him to the punch.  And in this campaign, they have stayed true to this path by having the weakest policy offering (in numbers, if perhaps not in substance) of all the parties in this election.

Now, as I noted yesterday in the NDP report, there is a bare possibility that the Conservatives might add to their policy offerings in the next two weeks; apparently a full costed platform is out on Friday and who knows, there might be a surprise in there.  If there is, I will update in a wrap-up piece on the election next week.  But as it stands, the entirety of their platform in the vital areas of skills, education and science – you know, the stuff most of the economy depends on, one way or another – consists of the following:

Skills: Nothing

Research: Nothing (which, to be fair, seems to be the default position of most parties in this election).

Education: A $600 million (and rising) commitment to double the matching portion of the Registered Education Savings Plan and the Canada Education Savings Grant.  This is a straight bribe to the upper-middle class (some good commentary from Shannon Proudfoot at Macleans on this here), as indeed it was when Paul Martin introduced the program 21 years ago. The difference being that Martin paired it with a whole bunch of other measures to help high-need students, while the Conservatives are not. Given that there is a pronounced positive relationship between education savings and family income, this is actually the single most regressive promise of any party in our area of concern and probably one of the half-dozen most regressive of any promises, period.

And that’s it.

Would a Conservative government, in practice, be this dismissive of post-secondary education?  Probably not.  In all three Harper administrations, Conservative governments delivered more for the sector than they promised at election time, and it would be very surprising if that weren’t the case this time as well.

But even if that’s true, Conservatives sure don’t make it easy for the sector to love them.  No siree, they don’t.