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Category: Apprenticeships, Skills & Trades

Why Ottawa Can’t Do the Knowledge Economy

I have read two very interesting things in the past couple of weeks. One is Justin Ling’s excellent piece in the Toronto Star about the inner workings of the Carney PMO and what the government thinks it’s accomplishing (tl;dr: as efficient and business-like as the new PMO is, it isn’t actually trying to fix what’s broken in Ottawa because it often doesn’t know what the actual problem is). And the second is Jeffrey Ding’s excellent new book Technology and the

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October 7, 2026 No Comments

Mid-Year Update

So, last week, the federal government delivered its Spring Economic Update, a kind of mini-budget for people who can’t wait until November for their fix. I am sure you are wondering what, if anything, changed for post-secondary education. I’ll break it into five topics. First, there’s nothing in there on research apart from yet another round of tweaks to the Scientific Research & Experimental Development Tax Credit. No surprise there. Second, there is nothing in there rectifying or even hinting

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May 4, 2026 No Comments

Getting Serious about Apprenticeships

As I noted back on Monday, for a variety of deeply atavistic reasons, Canadian political parties have decided that the knowledge economy is out and some kind of 1960s economy based, improbably, on the construction industry, is in. And so, similarly, postsecondary students are out along with colleges and universities, while apprentices and skilled trades are in. Which, you know, whatever. Fine. But if we are going to do this, parties need to start developing policies which will improve our

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April 30, 2025 2 Comments

Deafening Silence on PIAAC

Last month, right around the time the blog was shutting down, the OECD released its report on the second iteration of the Programme for International Assessment for Adult Competencies (PIAAC), titled “Do Adults Have the Skills They Need to Thrive in a Changing World?”. Think of it perhaps as PISA for grown-ups, providing a broadly useful cross-national comparison of basic cognitive skills which are key to labour market success and overall productivity. You are forgiven if you didn’t hear about

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January 7, 2025 No Comments

The Road Ahead for International Students

You could be forgiven if, after the last few months, you thought that Canadian post-secondary institutions should be turning their attention away from international students. But nothing could be further from the truth. The underlying dynamics of international student recruitment have not changed—institutions still need money and provincial governments are basically united in their determination to prevent them from getting it from domestic sources—only the tactics going forward have. Let’s start on the college side. Their business has mostly been

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November 5, 2024 2 Comments
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One Thought to Start Your Day is our founder and CEO Alex Usher’s popular daily blog, brimming with up-to-the-minute insights and informed opinions on today’s higher education industry.

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