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Category: Budgets

2026 Provincial Budgets

Last Wednesday, Newfoundland and Labrador became the tenth province to deliver its budget, and that means it’s time for my annual review of provincial budgets. Spoiler: while it’s the usual mixed bag across most provinces, Ontario is the epicentre of this year’s stories. And not in a bad way. Let’s start with overall budgeted provincial transfers to institutions, shown below in Figure 1. Growth this year after inflation is a stunning 6.5% – a rise not seen in 20 years.

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May 5, 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

Budget Redux: Student Visas

Since last Tuesday, there have been a lot of stories (like this one and this one) talking about how the federal government is reducing the number of new student visas and, as a corollary, how this will negatively impact college and university finances. Many people have asked me why the HESA budget blog didn’t make a bigger deal out of this last week. The answer is: we did in fact write about it in the full Budget Commentary (pages 7-8),

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November 11, 2025 1 Comment

The Canada Student Grant Cut

Somewhat remarkably, no media have picked up the story that the Canada Student Grants were slashed in last week’s budget. Possibly, this is because the government did not issue a press release saying in big letters, “HEY, WE ARE LOADING MORE DEBT ON LOW-INCOME STUDENTS”, and, without such an admission, no one wants to do the hard work of working out what just is going on.   So, let me save everyone the trouble. Here’s what happened: In the 2019 election,

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November 10, 2025 No Comments

Budget Commentary 2025

Hi all. Budget Day was yesterday, and it was a doozy. The HESA Towers team worked late into the night putting together our usual Budget Commentary for you to peruse at your leisure. We hope you enjoy it. But if you haven’t the time to read it in full, here are the five big takeaways. First, although large spending cuts were previewed, the cuts that occurred could not prevent the government from racking up a budget which in real terms was similar to the

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November 5, 2025 4 Comments

One Thought to Start Your Day

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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