Category: Budgets

The Bombshell in the Ontario Budget

Morning all.  Yesterday at Queen’s Park, Finance Minister Vic Fedeli brought in the Ontario Conservatives’ first budget of their new mandate.   There were cuts of various sorts, particularly in social services, but in many ways it was gentler than people expected: the plan involves getting the budget to balance in five years, which frankly is what the Liberals probably would have done anyway (though they wouldn’t have got there exclusively by reducing the spend side).  It’s not even a strict

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That Weird Budget Commitment on Student Mobility

If you recall, way back in the middle of March, there was a federal budget (see our analysis here).  And as increasingly seems to be the case with Liberal budgets these days, there were a lot of unknowns.  Stuff that hadn’t been thought through.  Announcements on vague generalities with no actual policies behind them. (At the beginning of the Trudeau era, someone said “these people from Queen’s Park are used to running a government with six people; you can run

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The Academic Oligarchy’s Kryptonite

Following up on yesterday’s discussion on the long-term rise of administration: it occurred to me after hitting send that there’s another aspect to the rise of administration I forgot to mention – budgeting.  Historically, administration has to some degree grown as a function of the complexity of budgeting, for some very good reasons. A hundred years ago, budgeting in higher education was a fairly simple affair because universities didn’t actually do much (by today’s standards, anyway).  A small number of

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Budget 2019 Commentary

Good morning all. Here’s your 2019 Budget Commentary ready for your review, brought to you through a globe-spanning collaboration between the team at HESA Towers and your humble correspondent pulling an all-nighter in the Arbat. We hope you enjoy it. As has usually been the case with budgets in this government, Budget 2019 is largely friendly to PSE with mostly good intentions but often only half-thought through ideas on implementation. Let’s start with the unambiguously good investments; namely, those for Indigenous

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What to Look for in Tonight’s Budget

At 4 PM EST, Finance Minister Bill Morneau will rise in the House of Commons to deliver his fourth budget, and the last one before a federal election in the fall.  What can we expect from the budget on the big PSE-files?  Here’s a quick rundown. Transfer Payments: Status quo. Research: My guess is that there are small goodies in this budget, if only to give them an excuse to reprint everything they did last year in this year’s budget

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