Two weeks ago, the Government of Ontario tabled Bill 101, the Putting Student Achievement First Act, 2026. Appended to this Act, which mostly deals with K-12 education, is a completely unrelated schedule, which abolishes the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO). The backgrounder to the bill blandly says that “(in order)…to reduce duplication and administrative burden, the government is proposing to absorb the accountability and performance mandate of the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario into the ministry through this legislation.” What it doesn’t say is that it is nuking HEQCO’s research mission in its entirety (although, to be fair, this role has been substantially in abeyance since the Conservatives took power eight years ago).
So, what happened here? A little background is perhaps in order.
Back in 1919, the UK government created something called the University Grants Committee (UGC). The idea was that universities were so complicated to regulate and fund that governments required a specialist arms-length body, one that could act as a “buffer” between academia and the sordid world of politics, to manage the process. In the 1960s and 1970s Canadian governments, in one of those acts of forelock-tugging that Canadians have historically engaged in with respect to things British, started setting up a similar set of bodies. British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Quebec each set one up in the 1970s. The three Maritime provinces, in a fit of integrationist optimism, set up a joint body, the Maritime Provinces Higher Education Commission (MPHEC) in 1974. Quebec had the Conseil des universités. Ontario had the Ontario Council on University Affairs (OCUA). Only Alberta and Newfoundland missed the trend.
But then, one by one, these bodies started disappearing. Right-wing governments in Saskatchewan and British Columbia eliminated theirs in the 1980s. Quebec folded its Conseil in 1993. Manitoba replaced its UGC with a less powerful Council on Post-Secondary Education in 1996, but then closed that in 2014. MPHEC is still in existence, but its responsibilities now skew more towards quality assurance than advising on funding (though: more on that in a second). OCUA was a bit different than the others to the extent that it had something of a research arm and would actually publish information on the state of the system rather than just advise government. But it, too, was a casualty of government de-layering and was the victim of the first big cut-backs of the Harris government after its election in 1995.
The reasons for this wave of closures were all similar. Governments, having grown quite a bit in the 1970s and 1980s, no longer felt ill-equipped to run university systems directly. Universities suspected that they might have better chances if they made their case directly to government rather than to an expert body, so they weren’t too bothered by the loss and in some cases were quite supportive of the move. The problem was that while governments are reasonably competent at managing day-to-day aspects of governance (do you need a buffer body for funding if there is a reasonable funding formula, or if everyone gets the same 2% increase /decrease every year?), they aren’t very good at system planning, in part because governments’ internal research/data capacity is, on the whole, pretty terrible.
Enter Bob Rae and the report he did for Dalton McGuinty’s government, Ontario: A Leader in Learning in 2005, which recommended the creation of a new Council on Higher education. Rae was not enamored with the old “buffer model”, but he did think the government needed something of a brain to guide the system, because institutions don’t play nicely together and the then-Ministry of Training Colleges and Universities couldn’t actually plan its way out of a wet paper bag.
Here’s what Rae said:
“The Council on Higher Education would not be a body attempting to represent different constituent interests. It should not be a funding body. Nor would it be a “buffer body”. We need a council whose job it would be to bring the sector together, to encourage collaboration and to limit the scope of the “empire of the silos”. We need a council that would co-ordinate research on higher education, work with the sector and the government in establishing targets and measures for improvement and report on performance and outcomes. We simply don’t know enough about how we’re doing and how others are doing. Popular benchmarks of higher education suggest we are average. Average is not good enough for Ontario. It is ironic that institutions that spend so much time and money insisting on evidence-based decisions, spend so little time on research that evaluates higher education itself. Research on the postsecondary sector is inadequate and poorly publicized. This should change.…The Council should also provide valuable advice to the province on the evolution of the system.”
The Government of Ontario proceeded to set up the Council, but TCU was never really reconciled to this new organization, since it was in affect was an embodiment of the Premier’s Office’s lack of trust in the Ministry. The legislation that set up the council was slightly less ambitious than Rae’s vision, and crucially HEQCO was never given the power to compel data from institutions. This meant that effectively, institutions had at least a partial veto over HEQCO’s ability to execute its mandate (particularly the bit about “knowing how we’re doing”). For many years, HEQCO tried to buy some institutional good will by putting some of its research budget towards for calls for proposals from the sector, a strategy which produced some good research at the cost of making the overall research effort more diffuse and less impactful. And it never did bring the “empire of the silos” together.
HEQCO kept plugging along, though. Some of its best work was done in the late 2010s, specifically with respect to system sustainability. However, when the Conservatives came to power in 2018, the mission changed somewhat. The Ford government had very little interest in an arms-length unit doing anything at all to “set the agenda” in terms of system design, and so while research continued, it became substantially less ambitious. HEQCO was, however, given the task of monitoring the effectiveness of the government’s free speech commitment, a task it handled admirably by making public reporting on the subject as boring as humanly possible (here’s the 2025 report).
For whatever reason, though, the government’s patience with HEQCO seems to have finally ran out. The government will take over monitoring of its own freedom of speech policies (a prospect which does not excite faculty unions). Ontario seems not to be alone in this skepticism of outside bodies. Over the winter, the government of Nova Scotia has openly mused about leaving MPHEC while New Brunswick eliminated the MPHEC funding line from its provincial budget this year (it is unclear whether the funding actually disappeared or the line was simply amalgamated into another funding envelope).
I have made this point before, but it probably bears repeating: Canadian provincial governments think of post-secondary education as utilities, something that just needs to work. They do not see it as a strategic asset that needs to be managed as a factor in long-term growth. Planning for post-secondary education sector is not a thing. In such an environment, who needs research on the sector? And you can’t count on institutions to step up and fill the gap because, just like in Bob Rae’s day, they prefer a system of silos, because that way no one makes evidence-based suggestions that might interfere with their own priorities. Thus, Canada gets stupider.
So, farewell, HEQCO. You might not have met your initial promise, but the province is the worse for your passing.
