I shouldn’t have to write this blog. This Saturday’s provincial election is completely unnecessary. But we’re having it anyways because the galaxy-brains around Premier Dave Eby couldn’t figure out in time that a catastrophically divided opposition might just become less catastrophically divided if faced with the threat of an imminent election.
Anyways.
This is not a good election for post-secondary education. Maybe not quite the worst I’ve ever seen in my fifteen-odd years of doing this, but it’s close. I’ll take you through all five parties’ manifestos.
Let’s start with OneBC, whichis the counter-reformation wing of the old BC Liberal Party. It’s just relentlessly retrograde and full of the “how can residential schools have been bad if we gave them an education” kind of nonsense.
The OneBC platform is here. You will be shocked, dear reader, to find out that OneBC has no positions on anything related to higher education. To the extent they have positions on education, they are all of the “more testing, go back to letter grades, parental bill of rights, more homeschooling, ban strikes” variety.
On to the Green Party (platform here), whose default position on higher education is “make education cheaper, not better”. The headline the Party wants you to hear is: “Tuition freeze and an extra $40 million in student grants”. But since there is no funding in the platform to compensate universities and colleges for the freeze, by my calculation this will make universities about $100 million worse off over the course of four years relative to current policy. The addiction to clown shoes is strong with these folks.
Now on to the governing New Democratic Party. They’re in government, they should have ideas, shouldn’t they? Well, you’d hope so, because they’d be in trouble if they were running on their record. And hey, the Avison Report was finished months ago, couldn’t they get ideas from that? Well, maybe. The Avison report wasn’t released in the late summer as (I think) was originally intended because the Minister went on mat leave, and so we have no idea what ideas may be floating around on Orange-ist circles on that score. All we can do is go by what’s in the manifesto (plan here, deeply vague and unhelpful costing here). Here are the NDP manifesto’s commitments on post-secondary education in full:
GIF: “Tumbleweed” via Reaction GIFs.
Yes, really.
And then, there are the BC Conservative Party, brought back from the dead by the egregious snap election call, and – if polls are right – on track to form the next government. These guys are the true heirs to the old Liberal Party, somewhat to the left of One BC, but not by all that much. Their platform is here. The education section consists mostly of things like “kids need to be safe”, being nice to LGBTQ students should be forbidden, and so forth. On the higher education side, the party makes exactly two promises: “expand dual-credit programs, apprenticeships and paid work experience” (without actually explaining what this would cost) and requiring institutions to “enforce codes of conduct and crack down on the targeting of Jewish students as a condition for receiving provincial funding.” This, of course, raises a host of questions about definitions and enforcement, but as a great former BC Conservative once said “elections are no time to discuss serious issues”.
So, all of this is a pretty poor show. British Columbia is the country’s third biggest province, a province that has historically had trouble providing higher education spot for all its citizens, a province possibly hurt worse than any other by Marc Miller’s desire to be the anti-Theresa May, a province with a huge life sciences industry, a province billions of dollars in the hole, a province with so much potential that is teetering so close to the fiscal edge, and NO ONE can muster any desire to talk about the institutions on which the province’s future talent pipeline depends. If all of that doesn’t depress the hell out of you, you clearly have a better supply of diazepam than I do.
(Mom: that was a joke. I have no supply of diazepam).
If you are minded to grasp at straws for a teeny, tiny bit of comfort about post-secondary education commitments in this midst of this horror show, let me introduce you to the fifth party in this election: “CentreBC”. I know, I know, WTF, right? As if there ever a middle ground in BC between the NDP and whatever the current main anti-NDP conglomeration is at any given moment (ok, yes, Gordon Wilson in 1991, but remember how well that turned out).
Anyways, there is no need to learn much about this party, which has had four leaders in the past five months, because it will disappear the moment this election is over. As the name implies, it’s the cuddliest splinter of the old BC Liberal Party, now down to a single MLA, Elenore Sturkow. Basically, it’s for fiscal conservatives who aren’t very keen on bashing Indigenous rights – and that, apparently, is a very small constituency in BC (polling has them on about 4%).
Apparently, the CentreBC platform is here. It contains a number of mainly small, sensible commitments re: post-secondary education. Enough to know that the party actually thinks PSE institutions are a valuable asset to the province. They include:
- A continuation of the current tuition policy (not great, but not as bad as the Greens).
- Create a $125million/year PSE Stabilization and Skills Fund (which is good: a boost of about 8% of current provincial spending) which institutions can get access to i) after they have spent down their reserves and ii) cut “administration” by 5% (which is not so good).
- Bump up BC grants by 20% and index thereafter
- Add nursing and teacher education seats
- More dual credits from high schools.
Nothing earth-shattering in here, a couple of devil-is-in-the-details issues, and the costing is impossible to evaluate because they lump all this in with a whole bunch of K-12 promise and cover it with a hand-wav-y “Hey presto! $2 billion!”. But, damn, it’s more thought than the other four parties combined have put into the sector. Too bad it’ll all be lost in time, like tears in rain.
