This is part five of a five-part series.  Just showing up now?  See Monday (1949-62), Tuesday (63-74), Wednesday (79-93) and Thursday (1997-2011) to catch up.

I dwell much on the 2015 election today.  Most of you probably remember it reasonably well, and if you don’t, then you can click on these links to see details on that year’s Liberal platform, Conservative platform, NDP platform, Green platform, the various science platforms and an overall analysis here.   

What was maybe a bit surprising in historical perspective about the 2015 election was none of the seriously contending parties – I am excluding the Greens here – promised a great deal of money to the sector.  The NDP were the only ones offering significant new cash, mostly for students (the Liberals offered a big new grant program but proposed to pay for it by cannibalizing a set of tax credits), and none of the parties proposed increasing research expenditures in any significant way.  Apart from 2004, it was the most PSE-lite election this century.

Looking back over the last 70 years of election platforms, I think a few points are worth noting.

1)      Manifestos aren’t a great guide to governments in action.  Apart from the creation of the Canada Student Loans Program in 1964, it’s hard to think of another major federal initiative in PSE/science that was actually signalled by a manifesto.  The creation of the tri-councils, the Canada Foundation for Innovation, the Canada Millennium Scholarship Foundation (either its birth or destruction), Canada Research Chairs, the Excellence Research Chairs, the Canada First Research Excellence Fund, the 2018 research budget….literally none of these were ever in an election platform before being enacted.  It may be less that governments don’t care much about post-secondary education and science, and more that they don’t think there are a lot of votes in it, and hence these polices are not worth trumpeting in a manifesto.  (Yes, I am aware of the irony of discovering this at the end of writing 5000 words on manifestos this week, no need to point it out).

2)      Governments tend to run on their record rather than make new promises.  This is related to the first point.  The Tory platforms in 2008 and 2011, like the Liberal platforms of 1997 and 2004 (and indeed most of the Liberal reign from the mid-60s to mid-80s and the Diefenbaker platforms of ‘62 and ‘63), said very little about what they would do in the field, but a lot about what they had done.  It will be interesting to see if 2019 is different.

3)      The 30-year gap in policy thinking.  It’s interesting to read the party platforms from 1962 to 1965, when all three main parties competed seriously on ideas in the post-secondary field.  And then you get to 1968 and it just…stopped.  This was undeniably caused by the rise of Quebec nationalism and the desire not to get into fights about jurisdiction.  The NDP basically shut up about post-secondary education for the entirety of the 1970s and didn’t say much beyond “more transfers!” for another decade or so after that.   To the extent that there were promises in these years, they mostly revolved around research, apprenticeships, or Labour Market Information – anything that couldn’t be accused of being institutionally-based education.  It really took until 1997 for any real discourse to re-emerge, and then everyone was making it up from scratch because there was no long lineage of serious policy thinking about higher education in Ottawa (one might argue things are not much better 20 years hence, but that’s another issue).

4)      On PSE Policy, Liberals Need to be Taken Seriously but not Literally.  One of the interesting things about going down this little rabbit hole has been reminding oneself about how, over the past sixty years or so, Liberals have used education as a way of distinguishing themselves from Conservatives.  It’s not the actual policy instruments that seem to matter; Liberals can jump around on that from one election to the next (loans in the 60s, apprenticeships in the 1980s, research in the 1990s, grants to students in the 00s, whatever the hell Ignatieff’s “Learning Passport” was in 2011).  But they usually want to outbid the Tories and cloak it in a mantle of modernity, making themselves the “new economy/high tech” party vs the “old economy/resources-obsessed” Conservatives.  Often their proposals are deeply weird (see Dion’s 2008 proposal for a $25 billion scholarship foundation), never implemented (pretty much the entire 2000 manifesto), or ignored in favour of implementing someone else’s platform (post-1993 when they ditched their own ideas and used Kim Campbell’s instead). 

5)      Historically, support for basic research at election time is pretty weak.  Nearly all the references to research over the past fifty years have been related to improving manufacturing or the exploitation of natural resources.  With the exception of one or two Liberal manifestos and one NDP platform under Alexa McDonough, they’re nearly all about the application of science or social science to various problems (the ’68 Liberal platform was very big on funding social science, but very much in the sense of directed funding so that specific disciplines could help Big Government solve Big Problems). 

And where will higher education policy go in future elections?  Hard to say, obviously.  I have my doubts that we will see much change in direction on research; Canadians are cheap and basic research sounds too much like waste (what do you mean you don’t know where the research will take you?).  I suspect there will continue to be a bidding war on the left to try to make higher education cheaper; the question is really how far this can go before it runs into the constitutional reality that provinces actually run this policy field.

But maybe the most significant point to be made is that 2015 was the first election since 1980 where no party mentioned transfer payments to provinces as a means of supporting post-secondary education.  I am willing to bet this was not a fluke and we will not see any of the parties raise it this year either.  It’s not that surprising in the sense that interest groups seem to have lost interest as well (I can’t remember the last time Universities Canada mentioned the issue, for instance).  And yet, we’re at the end of a decade where provincial own-source payments to institutions – that is, net of federal transfers – has been falling relentlessly.  I get that everyone wants to concentrate on niche/boutique programs for which they can take credit, but it seems everyone is taking their eye off the ball here, to the detriment of institutions. 

Reports from the Parliamentary Budget Office have shown that provinces are slipping into long-term structural deficits while the federal government is heading towards long-term structural surpluses.  At some point, perhaps towards the end of the 2020s, there will need to be a re-balancing of fiscal responsibilities.  The question is whether or not this occurs in a thorough, sensible fashion (transfers of tax points, long-term rises in transfers), or piecemeal through a series of one-off, temporarily popular, it-was-a-good-idea-at-the-time niche expenditures.  The former is undoubtedly preferable, but current stupidity levels in Canadian politics make it unwise to bet against the latter.

OK, enough with election history.  Next week, we’ll start looking at this year’s election manifestos.