The Canada Student Financial Assistance Program (CSFAP)—neé the Canada Student Loans Program (CSLP)—turns 60 years old this weekend. The story of how it came into being and how it still manages to function carries important lessons for the functioning of Canadian federalism, particularly when it comes to making “National Programs.”

Education is, of course, a provincial responsibility. It’s part of the deal that made Confederation possible: Quebec could only consent to a national government with representation-by-population government if there a means of preventing majority anglophone protestants from ever getting their filthy hands on francophone Catholic institutions. That deal was federalism, with education firmly in the hands of   the provinces.

This did not really come under question until after the Second World War. The Rowell-Sirois Commission, which looked at issues of fiscal-federalism in the late 1930s, barely mentioned post-secondary education. It was only in the middle of the 1950s, after the Massey Commission Report, that the government of Louis St. Laurent decided to try spending money directly on universities.

The feds got the incredibly goofy idea that they could just send money to universities: in total, the equivalent of fifty cents per Canadian to start with, later rising to $1 and then $2 per capita. It had just enough sense to know that doing so directly would violate the British North America Act, so what it did instead was hand over the entire set of money to what is now Universities Canada and let UC work out how to distribute the money among its members. This worked fine for about ten seconds, when Quebec premier Maurice Duplessis told Quebec universities that any money they accepted from this new fund would be deducted from their operating grant. The feds kept operating the fund outside Quebec, but once Diefenbaker came to power, he found a way to hand over money directly to la belle province. In effect, it was a 9-province “national program” with one opt-out.

(Famously, Pierre Eliott Trudeau took Duplessis’ side in this debate, and wrote about it eloquently in a 1957 Cité Libre article entitled “Federal Grants to Universities.” It is maybe the best explanation as to why the feds should stay the hell out of post-secondary education and other fields from which the constitution explicitly excludes it. I include the full text of the article for your reading pleasure here.)

During the Diefenbaker years, student groups put a lot of pressure on the government to come up with what they called a “National Scholarship Program.” Clearly, given the experience of grants to universities, this idea was never going to fly. But then, the national head of the Young Conservatives, Ted Rogers (yes, really), came up with the idea of a national set of tax deductions for tuition and other educational explanations instead, because surely a strict constitutionalist like Duplessis couldn’t object to that, right? Diefenbaker wasn’t sure, so he got the Young Conservatives Vice-President, a hard-drinking Laval law student who was known to all the Union Nationale cabinet barflies, to backchannel the idea to Duplessis. This Vice-President, a young man named Brian Mulroney (yes, really)reported back with the Premier’s OK and those deductions—which became credits in the Michael Wilson tax reforms of 1987—became a fixture of the Canadian tax code which still exists to this day.

But a tax code still wasn’t a national program, dammit. And when the Pearson Liberals came back to power in 1963, they did so with a promise to create…wait for it…a national scholarship program. They also came into power with a promise to create a National Pension scheme, which of course became the Canada Pension Plan (CPP). But again, both ideas ran straight into opposition from the Government of Québec, now led by Jean Lesage. On the Peason government’s side, the Minster of National Health and Welfare, Judy LaMarsh, was given the job of trying to steer both programs to their débuts. But after a few months, in maybe one of the most sexist moves of modern Canadian politics, Pearson decided LaMarsh wasn’t capable of standing up to Lesage. And so, behind her back, he sent his chief advisor, a British journalist named Tom Kent, who came to the Liberal Party and the Prime Minister’s Office by way of being Editor-in-chief of The Winnipeg Free Press, to Quebec City over Easter Weekend to do a secret deal with Lesage. The result—for both CSLP and CPP—was a system of “opt-out with compensation”: basically, Ottawa got a “national program” in nine provinces and Quebec got a big whack of cash to use at its own discretion provided that it ran substantially similar programs for its own citizens (the Northwest Territories and Nunavut would also subsequently withdraw from the CSLP but not the CPP). The date of the agreement? April 14, 1964. Sixty years ago this Sunday.

The CSLP (and now the CSFAP) was one of the weirdest “national programs” out there, and not just because of Quebec’s opt-out. It’s never been meant to be anything other than a supplement to existing provincial programs, which is why the feds have always delegated management of the program to the provinces. Not only do provinces build wildly different structures around the central pillar of CSFAP according to their financial means and policy preferences), they also get to interpret the CSFAP rules in somewhat different ways. It works as a national program in the main because a) the folks in Ottawa (well, Gatineau, actually), are pretty chill about the provinces doing all sorts of weird things with the program and b) provincial governments work pretty hard to translate Ottawa policy ideas into something half-way administratively workable.

The CSFAP is, in its way, a marvel of federalism at work. It is a central national program which gets put into practice in substantially different ways across different province, according to different local policy preferences. It is as a result in no sense what most people would call a “national program.” But it works and over the past 60 years has helped millions of Canadians access post-secondary education.

So, to CSFAP and everyone involved in student aid administration at either level of government: Happy Birthday. Thank you. L’Chaim. And here’s to many more.