Last week, I analysed the Conservative Party of Canada platform.  This week, I am doing the New Democratic Party’s platform, which is available in its entirety here.   

I find this manifesto disappointing because apparently the only thing New Democrats care about is making higher education cheaper.  Not better.  Not more adapted to helping Canadian business compete or Canadian society to become smarter.  Just cheap, cheaper, cheapest!

In fairness, that’s at least partly because this manifesto is peculiarly written, in the sense that in some (but not all) policy areas it eschews promises of any sort.  So for instance, after some carping about some (entirely fictitious) cuts to health care by Stephen Harper and Justin Trudeau, it is notable that the NDP platform does not promise any substantive changes in health care transfers; instead, there is a lot of talk about “working with the provinces” (a phrase that appears a staggering 21 times) on wait times, access to primary care, access to palliative care, ending private long-term care…you get the idea.  The point is to outline future priorities without making any actual commitments.           

This is kind of wild because “restoring transfers” (usually to some pre-1995 standard) used to be the central part of pretty much every NDP platform.  I am not sure if this is in fact a subtle admission that transfers have in fact – contra the mantra about cuts – been restored and then some, but whatever the reason, the NDP make no commitments to increase transfers, be they for health, social services, or for post-secondary education.  That doesn’t mean transfers won’t increase – there is a built-in escalator that one imagines the NDP would be unlikely to modify downwards – but simply that transfers are no longer a preferred policy instrument.  This is arguably a convergence with the Liberals.

It’s a similar story in terms of research.  There is nary a mention of universities or colleges or granting councils or anything like that.  But they do claim (without offering specifics) that they would like to invest in forestry research, clean tech research, research on hydrogen, and autism research.  Would it go through granting councils?  Would it go through some kind of god-awful DARPA clone?  No idea.  Zero.  And there is no dollar figure attached to the commitment, either. 

Where the NDP does get specific is when it comes to “affordability”.  If I can get nitpicky for just a second, it is notable in the manifesto that the section on “affordable post-secondary education for everyone” is right next to the section on “affordable, quality cell phone service and broadband for all”, reading as if the NDP thinks quality is a priority for iPhones and Galaxies but not colleges and universities.  In fairness, one could argue that’s not too different from the other parties, but then again, the other parties aren’t planning on spending quite so much, so badly, on a set of student aid measures to solve a comparatively smaller affordability problem.

After making a ritual bow in favour of making tuition free “over the long term” (i.e. they aren’t actually promising to do that), the NDP manifesto proposes to:

• “stop profiting from student debt” and remove interest from federal loans. As I have explained before, there is no profit in student loans and it is borderline financial illiteracy to say so; and as Christine Neill and Saul Schwartz have pointed out, subsidizing loan interest is a really ineffective way to help student loan borrowers. Basically, the way to think of this promise is as a small but widely-distributed subsidy to a subset of educated early-career workers.
• “forgive up to $20,000 in student loans”. I reviewed this promise a few months ago, and noted that it was a bit weird: it’s a reasonably well-targeted measure that the NDP insist on presenting as much more generous than it actually is. Still, it’s probably the best bit of the platform.
• “double non-repayable student grants”. This one is confusing because there is no baseline specified. Recall that in the 2019 election, the Liberals promised to increase grants to a maximum of $4,200 from $3,000. Then, before this was implemented, COVID came along and as part of the COVID response decided to raise the grant to a maximum of $6,000 through to July 2023. Because there is no baseline, it is unclear whether the NDP are promising to make this temporary rise permanent or if they are suggesting that grants should increase to $12,000/year, which….wow. That would be generous, almost certainly unnecessary, and not a great use of money given alternate possible uses for the money (evaluating opportunity costs of any investment is not a strong point of any of this year’s manifestos). That said, income-based student grants are generally a better investment than tuition reductions so it’s to be devoutly wished that they sick to their short-term plans over their long-term ones.

And that’s it.  All students, no institution.  Cheap > better.  SMH.