Good morning all.  The HESA Towers team, split over four time zones, came together brilliantly last night to bring you our regular federal budget analysis, which you can find here.  Enjoy.  

(We finished by midnight which is an hour or two faster than usual.  We probably would have been done earlier if the Government of Canada didn’t make it essentially impossible to track spending data on youth employment over time.   Two thumbs down to ESDC on that score). 

This is a difficult budget to evaluate as it contains so much which is temporary or short-term.  Many of the items which are of the most interesting in this budget – on student financial aid, Indigenous education, youth employment – are time-limited to two years.   Others are intriguing but vague – more money to MITACS but for what purpose is unclear, something that looks like a resurrection of the sector councils.  It is, to be honest, occasionally amazing how little detail there is in a budget that took 25 months to prepare.  

Some things are very positive.  The student aid package, for instance, contains a number of extraordinary measures.  What people may choose to focus on is the two-year extension of last year’s doubling of Canada Student Grants from $3,000 to $6,000, it;s not clear whether this will be permanent and therefore it’s not clear in the end how significant it will be.  On the other hand, the changes to the RAP repayment threshold and the repayment maxima which will completely change how young borrowers experience their first couple of years of repayment.  But there is also the issue of changing the definition of student disability, which is likely to provide over 40,000 students with extra assistance. 

It was something of a genuine surprise that there was no dedicated fund for post-secondary infrastructure, because infrastructure is such a simple play (universities and colleges may still benefit from some general infrastructure funds but nothing dedicated).  less surprising was how much of the R&D funding in this budget is going into boutique, bespoke endeavours (AI!  Quantum!) and how little is going into general inquiry-based research.  It’s not just a matter of the government basically giving the finger to the 2017 Naylor report which *specifically* argued against such boutique spending; it suggests that when it comes to research, the government is still chasing hi-tech sugar highs rather than attempting to catalyse innovation and growth more broadly.  

So it’s a mixed bag: useful, smart stuff on student aid, welcome but unstructured initiatives on indigenous education, but when it comes to turning Canada into a genuine knowledge economy, the steak-to-sizzle ratio continues to disappoint.  

In any case, we hope you find the analysis useful.