Guys!  I’ve got it solved!  This whole funding thing!

You know how Liberal MPs are taking up the entire back-to-school season with on-campus announcements of Strategic Investment Fund (SIF) money?  It’s annoying, right?  I mean this is money isn’t some “favour” delivered through hard work and pork-barrelling by the local MP.  It’s technocratically-determined funding decided upon by a professional public service.  And yet all the universities and colleges have to go through this rigamarole, saying “thank you” to the local MP, and having pictures taken that can be used ad nauseam in local media.

OK, I get it.  Politicians need to get “credit”, and it’s not just about personal political advantage (though I suppose that never goes amiss).  It’s important that the public knows how their money is spent and media “events” help with that process.  To that extent, it’s perfectly legitimate.   But why is it legitimate for some types of spending and not others?  Why do the feds get these heaps of publicity for a few hundred million dollars when provinces hand out over a billion dollars a month every year?

That’s not a novel observation on my part, or anything.  Everyone has had this discussion of course.  It hasn’t exactly passed unnoticed that announcements of capital projects (especially ribbon-cuttings) get more fanfare than announcements of operating grants. And there’s a too-smug, too-certain line that everyone knows about how “if only we could do ribbon-cuttings for operating grants” then politicians would give money for that, too.

Now, there’s at least some truth to this.  Relative to operating grants, universities and colleges have been getting more money for capital these past fifteen years or so.  And presumably the ability to get good press out of announcing such funding has at least some small role to play in it.

But do we really know that we can’t hold media events for operating grant announcements?  Or have we just never tried?

I mean, clearly, the fact that the money has already been announced is no barrier to getting media out to events.  Every last dime of SIF has already been announced weeks ago.  Hell, last week the Science Minister showed up at Humber College to re-announce changes to the Canada Student Loans Plan that had not only been announced five months ago but which had actually gone into effect four weeks previously.  Timeliness and novelty are clearly not the issue.

Some people might say: “ah, well, you can’t announce operating grants because they aren’t new.”  But this is small-time thinking.  There’s almost always a part of the funding that is new, even if it’s only 1 or 2%.  And what that money is funding changes quite a bit every year.  One year it might be buying RECORD LEVELS OF ENROLLMENT, and in another SIXTY NEW PROFESSORS AND A NEW CENTER FOR STUDENTS WITH DISABILITIES.  Tie it in with some kind of re-announcement about new goals, multi-year agreements, whatever, and you’ve got yourself a bona fide news event.

Not a ribbon cutting, maybe, but a reason for provincial politicians and institutional officials to be pleasant to one another in public, to explain to the electorate what their money is buying, and have some photos taken.  And who knows?  If people are right that positive media is what begets more capital funding announcements, maybe it’ll help bring operating grants back up a bit too.

So come on, institutional government-relations types and provincial media-flack types.  It can’t be beyond your wit to organize some media for all that massive public investment.  Give it a try.  It can’t be any less legitimate than this interminable parade of SIF announcements to which we’re currently being subjected.