Category: Budgets

The Meaning of 2025

So, was that a fun year, or what? From Marc “Tonya” Miller and the federal government knee-capping the postsecondary sector in January to Marc “Harding” Miller and the federal government coming back around in September to knee-cap the college sector specifically to Ontario college presidents calling each other whores and more…it was a year to remember. Heck of a ride. But as catastrophic as the current fall in revenue seems, it’s worth remembering a couple of things. First, we’re not

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Fall and Rise

Fall and Rise The question I am getting more often than any other these days is: “what are you hearing about cuts at colleges and universities?” And my answer for the most part has been: “damned if I know.” The reason for my confusion is that publicly available details are few and far between. The HESA Towers team has been scouring the public record for details on institutional budget announcements; by our count, only 34 universities or colleges have so

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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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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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“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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