Writing this blog because I suspect I am going to be inundated with press calls today and will not have time to answer them all. Journos! Take all the quotes you want from this blog—it’s fine with me. For those sick of hearing about Ontario—skip this one and we’ll see you tomorrow for the podcast with Andrew Norton.

There was almost nothing new in yesterday’s budget. Virtually everything that is in the budget was already signaled about a month ago in its February 26 announcement on post-secondary which I covered back here. There is no reason at all to change the judgement that the package is wholly inadequate to the challenge the institutions are currently facing, and the announcement that tuition is frozen for another three years is essentially an act of vandalism, done not out of a love of students but out of a distaste for educational institutions.

What was new in the budget was all health-related: making the Extern program (which funds health care students’ internships) permanent, committing $128 million over 3 years for expanded nursing enrolments in colleges, and—perhaps most momentously, announcing that York University will finally get a medical school. We don’t know when it will get the school: the announcement was just for $9 million worth of feasibility studies and there is no money allocated in this budget for future years. Apparently, the point of this school is just to educate family doctors, which to be honest feels kind of weird because it’s becoming abundantly clear that not enough people actually want to specialize in family medicine these days because the working conditions are so crap. Still, good for York.

There’s also a roughly 30% rise in student aid spending, from 1 billion to 1.3 billion, which sounds impressive but as near as I can tell, this is automatic backfilling of the cut in federal grant aid that was announced in last year’s budget. Basically, when the feds doubled their grant spending during COVID, a fair chunk of that money just displaced what the province would have spent anyway, and the bounce-back this year is just that effect going into reverse. The province is spending more, but students aren’t receiving more.

Now, really, that’s all you should be reading about today. But I suspect you might be seeing more than that because of the unbelievably opaque way the government of Ontario presents its financial data. So, for instance, perusing the budget you might see something that looks like this:

I mean, wow! Spending on post-secondary will be cut by $400 million from 23-24 to 24-25? But, at the same time, it’s up $1.3 billion over 21-22? What topsy-turviness is this? Well, the simple answer is that these numbers are crap, because they mix apples and combine harvesters: colleges—but not universities—are directly incorporated into the province’s books.

The idea that institutional budgets get counted as part of the provincial budget is well established in Canada. In Alberta, Newfoundland and British Columbia, it is true of both colleges and universities. It makes a certain degree of sense if you think governments are ultimately responsible for these budgets and would be forced to cover any costs in case of something like bankruptcy: but it also means institutions have limited financial autonomy. In Ontario, for some reason, this treatment is given to colleges but not universities.

What this means is that when the government shows “ministry expenditures” on the university side it is showing transfers from the Ministry to institutions (a shade below $4 billion this year is my guess though thereis actually no way to tell for sure from the budget documents) but on the colleges side it includes all expenditures, including the ones which are paid for through student fees. So all those increases in “Ministry expenditures” prior to 2024? Those aren’t public expenditure—those are international student fees.

(Is this as dumb as a bag of hammers? Why yes. Yes, it is.)

And that drop of $400 million between 23-24 and 24-25, despite the government announcing a month ago that public expenditures would be rising by $1.3 billion over three years? That means that the government implicitly believes that college expenditures (and thus income) is going to drop by $700-800 million this coming year due to the loss of spaces under the new international student visa regime. I am pretty sure this is too optimistic, but whatever.

The Ontario government does, eventually, publish apples-to-apples figures when it releases its Public Expenditure Estimates, but unlike every other province—which publish their Estimates on Budget Day—Ontario waits six months to provide this data to the public. This is not a policy specific to the Ford government; the Government of Ontario was equally opaque and contemptuous of public transparency under the Liberals, too. Making the province genuinely and deeply terrible is a bipartisan thing here.

Anyways, the tl;dr here is: ignore all the numbers in the budget because they are meaningless. Also: ignore 90% of the budget announcements because they were announced a month ago. The actual news is money for nurses, and money for a York Medical School that might open sometime before 2030 but I wouldn’t put money on it.