Obviously, it’s ridiculously early to start thinking about next year’s budget, but there are several things happening between now and next spring which could end up making Budget 2023 a pretty critical one for post-secondary education in Canada. 

Here’s my thinking:

–          2022-23 marks the final year of the Budget 2018 research funding package – that is, the response to the Naylor Report on fundamental research.  For the past five years, the sector has been living off the planned increases which were baked into the fiscal framework.  These increases were expected to amount to a little over 13% over five years, after inflation, but assuming the current bout of inflation lasts well into next year, it will end up being under 10%.  And if left unchanged next budget, much of this progress will be given up in the next year or two and we’ll be back to where we were in 2017 (or to put it another way, about where we were in 2010).  Assuming the government does not want to go back to this position, it has a lot of work to do in the next twelve months. 

–          The Canada Student Financial Assistance Program is currently running to about three different sets of directions.  One set dates from Budget 2021 and is meant to be permanent (increasing the loan repayment threshold to $40,000, reducing the repayment rate above the threshold to 10%) and according to ESDC’s departmental report this is all supposed to be implemented this year.  Another from 2021 Budget was designed to be time-limited (the increase in grants from max $3000 to $6000 as a “temporary OID measure”) until Summer 2023.  And then there is a third set of directions from the Liberal manifesto of Fall 2021 which were not implemented in Budget 2022 (increasing the threshold to 50,000, reducing interest rates to zero, various other measures to make it possible for student not to repay their loans). By next budget this mess is all going to have to get straightened out (does the $6000 stay or not?  What about the ruinously expensive and practically useless zero-interest-rate policy?).  All of this implies a lot of work to do in the next twelve months.

–          Funding for the Future Skills Council runs out in 2023-24. If there isn’t something worked out by budget time next year, the Centre will find it hard to retain staff (Ottawa loves giving time-limited funding to arms-length organizations, but its permanently-tenured and eternally-funded public servants have difficulty grokking the havoc that their dilatory method of making funding renewal decisions wreaks on recipients).  Will it be renewed with no conditions?  Will there be a tweaking of its mandate?  Again, there is a lot of work to do on this over the next twelve months.

–          There is much to be done over the next twelve months to define the mandate of the new Investment and Innovation Agency (which I will talk about in greater detail tomorrow).  There probably isn’t another announcement in this area in Budget 2023, but a lot of the work that is going to have to happen on this file will occur in parallel with the work on new granting council funding.  There is opportunity for integrated thinking on the two subjects. For instance: if the innovation agency is going to increase private R & D expenditure, it might be possible to re-think how requirements for private-sector involvement in tri-council grants are handled.

–          The Business-Higher Education Roundtable will presumably see its funding renewed before the next budget, but as is the case with the Innovation agency, this work will be happening at the same time as a lot of other work in the higher education space, so why not at least try to make some horizontal connections across the policy areas?

There is, in short, an awful lot of higher education/innovation/skills business to take care of in the next twelve months.  And to say the government does not yet have a holistic picture of what it wants to achieve in all these areas is a bit of an understatement.

So, there is an enormous opportunity for policy entrepreneurs to start thinking hard about how to link ideas across these policy fields together.  And, preferably, think about how these policy solutions can help deal with some basic problems of economic growth; namely, how to deal with a demographically-challenged workforce and slowing productivity. 

Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be offering up some suggestions in all these areas.  But whether my policy recommendations are to your taste, the fact remains: there is a lot of work related to post-secondary education which will need to happen over the next 12 months.  If the sector chooses to address these issues promptly and in an inter-connected way, the feds will have to do so as well.  But treat them separately and, well, we’ll deserve the subpar policy-making we get.