One of the tricky things about evaluating platforms in this election is that there is no way for anyone to know when a party is “done” with its announcements. They all get the PBO to cost bits of their platform, and that’s great. They can even, as the NDP has done, release a set of “commitments” (uncosted) and a vague “fiscal plan” (which basically says the party is going to stick to the Liberal formula of decreasing the deficit over time while simultaneously raising more revenue through a wealth tax—so think of their fiscal framework as the Liberals plus $8 billion or so). Does that mean they are done with announcements? Hard to tell. A lot of the commitments are pretty vague, and the party could certainly make a show of unveiling something more detailed in the next week or so if it wanted.

But dammit, I have a blog to run. And with 14 days to go, I can’t shilly-shally on this stuff. So today, I am going to analyse the NDP platform as it currently stands. If something changes before e-day, I’ll catch you up with my election wrap-up blog.

The PSE-related NDP commitments are, for our purposes, largely divided into two areas: skills are under “Building an Economy that Works Better”, and everything else is under “Making Life More Affordable for Everyday People”. 

The first of these sections has three areas related to our areas of interest, but, interestingly, absolutely nothing specifically on university or college research. It touts “scaling up high-tech success”, which contains platitudes but no specifics about procurement policy, sector-specific R&D strategies, fostering entrepreneurship and start-ups, or competitiveness. It’s basically current Liberal policy minus the superclusters. Similarly, a plan for the aviation industry talks about “commercializing new technologies” and “clean aviation” but makes no specific commitments. You can choose to see this as dangerously irresponsible for a party seeking power, or you can view it as a reasonable way to talk about priorities without getting bogged down in irrelevant details that might hinder future coalition talks. Eye of the beholder, etc.

Skills training is probably the strongest area of the NDP platform, in our areas of consideration. It contains that old standby policy of creating a 1% training levy on business, as well as a Workers Development Opportunities Fund to ensure there are training opportunities for those not eligible for EI. This latter is an excellent idea, even if the platform is less than clear about the co-ordination mechanism with provinces.

More importantly, the NDP has made a very significant commitment to “change EI rules to allow workers who quit their job to go to school to qualify for EI benefits, so that families can count on income support during that period of transition back to school.” This is in theory quite interesting – it goes some ways beyond the Liberals’ pledge in the 2019 budget to enshrine a right to training in Employment Insurance via the Canada Training Benefit, and it would certainly help mid-career workers who need year-long, full-time re-training programs. But boy howdy does it seem like there could be a lot of unintended consequences here.

Let’s start with how to qualify. At most, you need 700 hours to qualify for EI. For the 75-80% of students who work in the summer, they might accumulate 40×15 weeks = 600 hours. Of the 50% or so that work regularly during the school year, they tend to work 15 x 37 weeks = 555 hours. So, there would be a *lot* of traditional aged students eligible for this, not just mid-career workers. For a lot of students, there would be a huge temptation to load up hours in summer and maybe September and then take EI the rest of the way, avoiding loans altogether. You could make an argument for that, I suppose, but basically what would happen is that you would end up with one quite generous student aid system for students who work and another much less generous one (i.e., the current one) for those who don’t.

In theory, of course, you could put some kind of limit on usage to avoid this. Not age-based, obviously, because that would get struck down by the courts, but possibly only usable once every seven years or so. It will be *very* interesting to see what instructions they gave to the PBO when asking for a costing analysis on this proposal.

Another significant question here is how the heck a federal government would police this. The point of EI is to help those who are laid off. If you make an exception and say some people who leave jobs voluntarily should get EI provided they do something virtuous like re-training, you’d better make sure people are actually getting the training, otherwise it will become a free-for-all. But how would that work: would EI actually demand that institutions report regularly on student attendance? That sounds far-fetched, but how else would this get monitored and evaluated? Mysteries abound.

Over to “actual” student aid: the main promise is to make all student loans – current and future – interest free for the life of the loan, at a cost, according to PBO, of a bit over $500m at full-phase in and rising slowly thereafter. Which, you know, meh. There’s zero evidence anywhere for the notion that changing the interest rate on a loan induces more students to attend post-secondary and even if it did, that would be a bad rationale for subsidizing people who have already finished their studies. Could some graduates use a little help after graduation? Sure. Do all of them need it equally? Absolutely not. So why head in this direction? Again, it’s all a bit mysterious. Suffice to say, the federal NDP has a long history of being very reluctant to endorse policies which distinguish between deserving and undeserving students, even based on highly quantifiable factors like income. 

The NDP made some other promises here, though none so specific. The party claims it they will “improve Canada Student Grants”, which is a good idea though it gives absolutely no sense of how much money we are talking about or on what basis it would be improved (bigger grants to the same group of students? Similar-sized grants to an enlarged group of students?). Over the long term, the party promises “work with the provinces” (traditional Ottawa code for: we have no idea how this will work in practice) to move towards free tuition. This is, of course, a goofy idea, but it is par for the course for the NDP over the last twenty years.

In sum, there are some worthwhile notions about skills in here, but it is nowhere on research, and where PSE financing is concerned, cheaper trumps better and even the affordability stuff is pretty vague and unfocused. Not terrible, but not stellar, either.