This is the third in the series of party platform analyses.  The analysis of the Conservative platform analysis is available here, and that for the New Democratic Party platform is here.  Today’s analysis is the Green Party, which is every bit the piece of dramatic flaming ludicrousness we have come to expect from them.

I will start by being as nice as I can possibly be. 

<deep breath> 

There’s a somewhat odd reference to removing the 2% cap in post-secondary education funding for Indigenous students.  I think this is referring to the (old) 2% cap on growth in PSSSP funding for First Nations students, but the Liberals raised the cap by 16% in 2019 and have committed to doing more in future (though in keeping with how they run the Indigenous Services portfolio generally, they seem to be taking a long time to come up with a real solution).  In any case, this is a worthy, if dated, pledge.

There’s a very specific commitment to fulfill the full recommendations of the Fundamental Science Review, which is great, but this is then followed by a pledge to “increase funding for the granting councils from $22.4 billion to $30 billion” which is hilarious since the annual budget of the granting councils is about a tenth of that.  There’s also a commitment to raise Canada’s R&D spending (public and private combined) to 2.5% of GDP, an increase of about $22/billion per year, albeit one bereft of any clue of how to achieve it.

<deep breath>

And that was the good bit.

As for the rest of the platform….well, I would say pie-in-the-sky, but frankly that doesn’t really cover it.  See if you can pick out which of the following policies are in the Green Platform and which ones I am making up.

1. Abolish post-secondary tuition.  Cost: $10.2 billion annually.  No indication of how exactly you make this work with provinces that charge massively different amounts on tuition.  Nor is it clear if this includes international students or not (if it does, it’s a serious under-estimate)
2. Gehenna and Tartarus to be turned into fabulous ice-skating rinks
3. Cancel all federally held student-debt.  That’s a one-time $12 billion dollar hit if we are just talking about debt held by borrowers in repayment, $21 billion if we are including debt held by current students as well.  There is no commitment to convert student aid to all-grant in future (I suspect the Green Party is under the misapprehension that eliminating tuition means that they don’t need to worry about this), but if the point is to have no students with federal debt (provinces would still be free to issue loans, of course) then we’re talking another $500m or more every year.
4. Cupcakes for everyone.  Every day.
5. Improve funding in federal-provincial transfers to universities and colleges.  Apparently, they are going to do this without reference to the provinces, because they want this money only to go to institutions which have a measurable focus on “student-professor contact, mentorship, policies of inclusion and tenure track hires”.  They propose $10 billion for “re-investment in post-secondary and trade schools” but it is not clear if this is an annual sum or a sum over a term in office.
6. Herds of unicorns will sweep majestically across the country from coast-to-coast, distributing cotton candy to children.
7. Tripling the number of Canada Graduate Scholarships for Master’s students, doubling the number for doctoral students, and “position Canada as a destination of choice for international talent and support post-secondary institutions to welcome international students safely”.  Which, you know, if they are fee-paying, great: if not, being the destination of choice gets expensive fast.
8. Two words: magic beans.

But my absolute favourite promise in this manifesto is this one which I reproduce in its entirety so as not to lose any of the wackiness.  The Green Party promises to “Reintroduce a Retroactive Canada Emergency Student Benefit”, which will “ensure that all those eligible for the CESB receive $2,000 per month – the same amount as the Canada Recovery Benefit for the period beginning May 1, and until the pandemic is over” and “ensure that international and recently graduated students are eligible to receive this benefit.”

Now when I first read this, I was pretty amazed.  CESB was, by several light years, the most generous pandemic student support program in the entire freaking world.  It gave 1.1 million students $1,250 per month, in the four summer months of 2020 because it was assumed no students could get jobs (many could, as it turned out).  It cost the government $5.9 billion over four months. And the Green Party thinks it wasn’t enough!  It wants reparations paid to the students who received this money because it wasn’t as much as CERB ($2,000/month).  These would be worth around $3.6 billion to those who received CESB, plus my guess would be somewhere in the neighbourhood of $1.5-2 billion to those (recent grads and international students) who did not.

But then I realized it wasn’t just about reparations for those who did not receive CERB: actually, it was even more outlandinsh.  It wanted those reparations PLUS another $2,000 per month to all of these students for every month since the pandemic began and continuing on into the future until “the pandemic ends” (unclear what defines the end of the pandemic, of course).  Very roughly, we are talking about – on top of the $5 billion or so from the reparations promise – $2.75 billion per month for every month since August 2020.  If you can imagine that the pandemic is declared ended this coming December, that would equal another $44 billion, or $50 billion in total.  This is slightly more than the annual budget for the province of Alberta, or, indeed, just about the combined annual expenditure of every university and college in the country.

If you’re keeping track – but why bother?  Money grows on trees – that’s somewhere between $80-100 billion in one-time costs and between $11-21 billion in ongoing annual costs, depending on how you interpret points 3 and 5, above. 

This is flat-out bonkers.

Unlike some other platforms, this one ticks a lot of boxes – as in, it actually mentions granting councils, First Nations’ post-secondary education and, amazingly, core-funding for higher education.  But it still chooses to put most of its (let’s face it, fake, fairy-dust) money in things that do nothing for higher education institutions. It’s an abomination.