Category: One Thought to Start Your Day

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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Re-purposing Periodic Reviews

One of the things that drives me quite spare about higher education is the insistence that campus-wide pedagogical change is impossible, because of academic freedom or something like that. The result is that institutions cannot take serious collective steps with respect to pedagogical change, be it finding ways to increase Indigenous content, come up with coherent ways of adopting hybrid or incorporating AI in the classroom, etc. because every prof reigns over an independent kingdom of one and the number

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The Deeper Meaning of Election 2025

So, it’s voting day. I am pretty sure the Liberals are going to win a stonking majority, but regardless of who wins, there are deeper shifts at work which the sector needs to take seriously. Before I start, though, I need to take time to acknowledge something that happened last Wednesday. If you recall, I spent quite a bit of time discussing how the Conservatives had been pulling back on the “wokeness” issue. A few hours after I published that, CBC

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Election 2025: The Conservative Party Manifesto

Ok, the Conservatives finally released their platform yesterday. It’s…thin…so far as postsecondary education goes. It’s absolutely nothing like the extremely detailed and nerdy platform in 2021 which, let us recall, was released on Day 1 of the campaign (I remain firm in my belief that an Erin O’Toole-led Conservative Party would be walking away with this election). And there are definitely no signs of a reversion to the Harper era and it’s too often unremarked interest in Big Science and investments in major research

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Election 2025: The Liberal Party Manifesto

Today, I’m doing the Liberals, mainly because at the time of writing on Easter Sunday they have issued an actual full platform and costing document while the Conservatives have not. Spoiler: this is not your average Liberal platform. That a new leader might bring a change in Liberal priorities should have been clear enough to anyone who had the misfortune of slogging through Mark Carney’s book Values: Building a Better World for All, which I did a couple of weeks ago (the things I do

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