Alberta’s provincial election is April 16^th, just a little less than two weeks away.  New Democratic Party leader and Premier Rachel Notley is squaring off against former federal Conservative cabinet minister Jason Kenney, who leads the United Conservative Party (UCP). The UCP has (almost) ended the split on the right between the Conservatives and the Wildrose Party that was partially responsible for ending over forty years of Conservative rule following the 2015 election.  Notley has been given a hard task running a resource-reliant province during a commodity bust and some of her decisions around spending and the politics of pipelines haven’t been popular, but for a first-time government where ¾ of the cabinet had never been MLAs before, let alone been in power, she’s had a remarkably gaffe and scandal-free tenure.  The question is: can she do it again?

For this platform comparison I am going to restrict myself to just the UCP and the NDP.  Yes, I know there are other parties, and one of them (the increasingly ideologically-confused Alberta Party) has a couple of seats in the legislature, but come on.  This is a two-horse race and both parties – quite remarkably – have issued reasonably detailed platforms that permit some detailed comparisons, so it’s worth digging in a bit.

Let’s start with the big one: transfers to institutions.  The NDP doesn’t give department-by-department breakdowns of its spending commitments, but it is committing to annual overall increases of 2.5-3.3% over the next four years (CPI is bumping along at about 2% right now, so that’s a little ahead of inflation but probably behind inflation plus population growth, which is 1.5%).  The 2018 budget – which gave estimates out to 2020-2021 (Alberta brilliantly has three-year budgeting) – suggested increases in post-secondary operating expenses would be in the same range, so it’s not a stretch to say that this is probably what PSE would get, too.  That said, the NDP’s last budget also projected drops in capital spending out to 2021 that were larger than the projected increases in operating spending and tuition fees combined, so its still a decrease overall if you want to look at it that way.

The UCP platform doesn’t give departmental breakdowns either, but it has a very different overall spending commitment: it is going to keep program spending nailed to where it is in the 2018-19 budget, at around $49 billion.  But that doesn’t mean every department will have flat funding.  In fact, with population growth, you’d assume there are some services that are going to have to grow, most notably health (the specific promise is to “maintain or increase” health funding).  Which means every other department is going to be looking at cuts, presumably including PSE. 

What about tuition fees?  Well, neither side has anything specific to say about that.  The NDP makes note of the fact that it implemented (past tense) a five-year freeze, which I guess ends next September.  Apart from that, the only commitment is to “stable, consistent funding to post-secondary institutions to ensure higher education remains accessible and affordable for all Albertans”.  Which I think means they are leaving their options open with respect to fees. The UCP’s platform offers mere silence, but I have a feeling they would probably at least be open to rises in fees for professional programs, where Alberta fees are sometimes fairly low.

The UCP does have a lot to say about some other things, though.  Maybe more than any opposition party I’ve seen in the last five years.  For instance, the need for more international students (a change, since previous Conservative governments actively discouraged this idea), reducing red tape for institutions, establishing a new intellectual property regime and ensuring institutions develop “free speech” policies consistent with the University of Chicago’s statement on the same (this is slightly different from the Ontario policy, but not much).  There are also a couple of policies around benchmarking and measurement. One is measuring Alberta’s performance against leading global research and governments in key innovation hubs like California, Texas, Israel, London and Hong Kong (no idea anyone would include Hong Kong in that list; I suspect they actually mean Singapore).  The other, which I am sure will cause no end of screaming, is “measure labour market outcomes of PSE programs to identify correlations between provincial subsidies and economic returns for taxpayers”, which I guarantee will not deliver the “philosophy bad/geology good” answer some fear and others eagerly anticipate.  Oh, and of course lots of new money for “skills”, which in UCP-ese is a synonym for “trades”, though most of this money is aimed at secondary schools.

The NDP is much more modest.  Their only two promises (apart from the one on the funding formula noted above) are: i) “work with post-secondary institutions to renew the funding formula and focus resources on creating new spaces, ensuring a lack of seats doesn’t stop qualified students from getting the education they need” and ii) “eliminate tuition fees for high school upgrading and English Language Learning programs, so every Albertan can acquire the skills they need to participate in today’s economy.”  The latter is projected to cost $130 million over the next four years; the former, intriguingly, has no budget impact at all, which I think means every institution is going to be required to take less money per student. 

So, my feeling is there you can’t really call either of these parties as the clear education favourite.  Under the NDP you are looking at funding increases a little bit above inflation, but this is possibly eroded by required expansion and an uncertain future with respect to tuition.  Under the UCP, you’re looking at an almost certain reduction in operating grants but some offset with respect to income from international students and (maybe) domestic students as well.  Where funding is concerned it’s simply unknown.  On other areas of policy, the NDP seems content to rest on its laurels (e.g. turning ACAD, Red Deer and Grande Prairie Colleges into universities) and not propose too much else, while the UCP offers some very definite ideas about focusing more on outputs and economic value, which I think is to some extent welcome (my God, how nice it would be are necessarily to have a Government that actually cared about outcomes), but may not be everyone’s cup of tea.  There are merits to both approaches, it’s really just a question of taste.