Alberta goes to the polls next Monday, so it’s time for another edition of “check out those election promises”.  I’ll restrict my comments to the New Democratic Party (NDP) and the United Conservative Party (UCP) since those are the only parties likely to win seats or crack 3% of the vote (yes, yes, the Alberta Party – colour me unconvinced).

You can see the New Democratic Party Platform here.  It’s not quite a platform in the traditional sense of having a printed document or at least a pdf that you can flip through: rather, it is a web page with a series of talking points (the UCP, annoyingly, has done something similar).  Here’s the entirety of what it says about post-secondary education:

An Alberta NDP government will support and expand Alberta’s apprenticeship system by further funding the world-class union training centres to educate and recruit more apprentices into the skilled trades.  We’ll increase access to apprenticeship training and recognition of foreign-trained skilled workers. 

We’ll cancel the latest UCP increases to tuition saving 300,000 Alberta students more than $100 million and then cap tuition increases.

This needs a little bit of parsing, because there is a lot of subtext here.  To be clear, the Alberta NDP is *not* suggesting that it will invest in colleges to increase the supply of skilled tradespeople.  Rather, it is suggesting that it will invest in union training centres to increase the supply of tradespeople.  This is precisely the formula used by the Ford government in Ontario to woo organized labour: promise expansion of skilled trades but only insofar as that expansion can be put in the hands of organized labour.  This needs to be seen at least as much as a bribe to unions as it is an investment in education.

As for the tuition freeze…well, the devil is in the details, which are unfortunately quite sparse.  Read conservatively, this is a one-year tuition freeze for the 2023-24 year only.  After that, tuition will be “capped” but it’s not in the least clear what that means – no increases?  3% per year increases?  5%?  Who knows?  And it’s not at all clear that the revenue cut will be offset by any government funds.  It is listed as a decline in provincial revenues because universities and colleges are included on the province’s books, but there is nothing in either the manifesto or the costing plan to suggest it will be offset by funds elsewhere.   So this plan might simply be imposing another type of cut on Alberta’s universities and colleges.

There is also a commitment “for up to” to $200 million for a “Calgary downtown PSE campus” (which to be honest seems a bit insulting to Bow Valley College, which has been located there for decades).  The point seems to be that downtown Calgary is hurting and throwing in some campuses that will bring people there during the day is a Good Thing.  We’ll see, I guess.  Just to keep Edmonton happy (balancing the ambitions of YEG and YYC is a key competency for any successful Alberta government), the party is also promising $45 million for a NAIT Skills Precinct (which I assume has to do with the re-development of the old Municipal Airport lands) and apprenticeship training.

How much will all this cost?  Well, here’s the thing.  The itemized set of costs on NDP’s “costed fiscal platform” (which as far as I can tell resides only on Rachel Notley’s twitter feed, which is deeply weird) does not actually line up with the set of promises made by the party in its “Plan”.  The union training centres have no fiscal commitment attached to them, for instance, and there does not appear to be any institutional offset for the tuition freeze.  On the other hand, the costed program does include a line saying “30,000 new seats and bringing back STEP” (a summer employment plan axed by the UCP four years ago) which as far as I can establish is not one of the party’s actual commitments under its Plan.  I think the generous interpretation here is that the NDP has not solidified its views on post-secondary education and is just firing off ideas in whatever directions seem plausible without actually ensuring that the left hand knows what the other left hand is doing.

And then there’s the UCP.   First of all, you have to look at their record: a 31% real cut in funding over four years.  If they had done it by saying “Alberta used to be able to afford Cadillac-level education, and now because oil prices have descended from the stratosphere, we need to trim our budget to make it more Honda-like”, that would have been one thing.  But instead the government spent the better part of four years telling the universities why they were all leaches and paying McKinsey to compile a “strategy” for post-secondary which was not in fact very ambitious but was indeed ludicrously expensive.

Hard to get away from that one, but give the UCP points for trying.  First, they’re touting the plan which was announced in the last budget to expand seats in “areas of high demand” (it’s not clear to me that they are tracking actual student demand – it seems to be more a “get more students into those parts of the economy which are screaming the most for cheap labour”).  That’s good but a) this money isn’t going into base budgets and b) there’s nothing new here beyond what was pledged in the last budget.  Second, they are touting two new subsidies for graduates.  One is a $1,200 “signing bonus” (actually a refundable tax credit) distributed after staying in the province for “targeted skilled trades and professions where we have labour shortages” (no word on how this will be defined precisely though healthcare, childcare and skilled trades are all listed), and the other is a “Graduation Retention tax Credit”, a $3,000-$10,000 tax credit for students in “qualified high-demand professions” (again, no details on how this is to be defined) to stay and work in Alberta after graduation.

Now, long-time readers will probably recognize that second promise.  Saskatchewan instituted one of these around 2006.  Nova Scotia had one of these for a few years and then ditched it in 2014.  New Brunswick introduced one under a Conservative government, rescinded it under a Liberal one and then brought it back again under a renewed Conservative government.  Assuming you think policy should actually achieve its stated ends – that is, increasing retention of or actually attracting graduates – the evidence that tax credits of this size will make the slightest bit of difference is zero.  As we at HESA Towers demonstrated back in this 2014 study, the size of the financial incentive required to make an active difference to students’ post-graduation life choices is far larger than any tax credit is ever going to be.  It’s bad policy in the sense that it spends a lot of money and doesn’t incentivize anyone to change their behaviour.  And, indeed, the Alberta plan might even be worse because of its extra complications (i.e. limited number of fields/occupations) and lack of clarity as to whether it applies to graduates coming from other provinces, as was the case in all the other provinces where this has been used.

(On the other hand, if the correctness of a policy is to be judged by the amount of money it is handing out to some favoured group for no reason whatsoever, it’s fine.  Kind of like the Federal Liberals axing interest on student loans.  Anyone who says one of these policies is good and the other is bad has an awful case of partisan brain and should be roundly ignored.)

Neither party, of course, is actually talking about changes to base funding in post-secondary education, but then no provincial party anywhere ever talks about changes to base funding.  That’s something that just kind of happens in the course of governing, it’s not something anyone gets elected on.  It’s not good news, but it’s not a specific-to-Alberta kind of news, either.

There are two kind of interesting points here.  First is that neither party thinks that student aid is an issue, despite Alberta having the highest annual student loan borrowings in the country.   Yes, the NDP is offering a one-year tuition freeze, but the party’s congenital inability to use the student aid program to good purpose (it made no changes to the program when it was in office, either, despite its being the most loan-heavy system in Canada) is a bit weird.  Second, both parties at least in theory have linked post-secondary education to economic development: the UCP via the supply of skilled labour and the NDP mainly (it seems) as an anchor tenant for downtown Calgary.  I don’t think either plan as presented will be all that effective, but it seems like something post-secondary institutions in the province will be able to build on in the coming years.

Last Thursday in our transcription of our podcast interviewee with Javier Botero, we repeatedly used the spelling “Columbia” rather than Colombia, which is kind of mortifying given the subject matter.  We apologize for the errors.