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Category: Budgets

From Jazz to Symphony

I spent all last week in Asia, at events put on by the International Association of Universities (IAU) in Tokyo and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in Jakarta. As usual, these meetings were interesting for me not so much because I can discover secrets of “how they do things better elsewhere” (they don’t, by and large, we’re all screwed for roughly the same reasons, which is that the public does not want to pay for the kind

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December 3, 2024 4 Comments

Quick Update on Research Funding

Remember the spring budget, when the Federal government announced a heavily back-ended $1.8 billion (spread over five years) boost to research grant funding, as well as the creation of a capstone research organization which might have its own funds to co-ordinate challenge-based research? Well, the federal government has recently been fleshing out these announcements through a series of badly coordinated media releases. And so today, we’re going to go on a quick government press release safari to try to work

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December 2, 2024 1 Comment

“Eating the Future” in Action

Y’all probably remember me talking about how Canada is eating the future by spending tons of money on consumption but not enough on real investments that pay dividends down the line. Today, I want to show you a prime example of that, and this: spending on the elderly. In every budget there is a line-item called “Elderly benefits” which includes Old Age Security (the non-contributory pension everyone over 65 gets) and the Guaranteed income Supplement (the means-tested income boost for

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November 13, 2024 4 Comments

Errata

Hi all. This is a bit embarrassing, but I need to come clean about something. I made a graph about federal government research expenditures back on budget night and have reused it several times since to make a point about anemic federal spending. The problem is, I goofed. Here is the graph, supposedly depicting federal spending on the tri-councils and the Canada Foundation for Innovation in millions real (that is, inflation-adjusted) $2023 dollars, including the increases in funding out to 2028-29

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November 13, 2024 2 Comments

The Memory Hole

It should come as a surprise to no one (at least no one who has not been sheltering under a rock for the past couple of years) that Canadian universities are in for a serious bout of belt tightening. Not everywhere, and not all to the same extent. But the math is pretty simple: the international tuition fee gravy train has come to a halt and no provincial government seems willing to replace this income, either through higher block grants

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September 11, 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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