Category: Budgets

Budgets, Trust, and POVs

It’s been an interesting couple of weeks for me. It’s end of term/conference season, and so I get a lot of requests to go around the country speaking to Boards, Senates, leadership groups, etc. And the most interesting parts of these discussions are the Q&As, particularly when the same theme crops up multiple times. And the bits that keep coming up are around budgeting. There’s an obvious reason why everyone is worried about budgeting. It’s because the sector is screwed.

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Budget Commentary 2024

Good (very early morning) all. Please find attached HESA’s Review of the 2024 Federal Budget. It’s a complicated budget with a lot of moving pieces, but the HESA Towers team did an amazing job last night in putting it all together for your enjoyment/edification. My take on this budget? Well, it is a difficult one to parse. There’s an effective cut to international student mobility. There’s an increase in funding to apprenticeships and First Nations’ students. This seems like a good trade. And

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Provincial Budgets, 2024-25

Morning, everyone. Yesterday, the government of Manitoba delivered its annual provincial budget, making it the tenth and final one to do so. That means I can do my annual analysis of provincial budgetary commitments! A couple of caveats before I start. First, there are several provinces that have changed the way they describe their post-secondary budget expenditures in their main estimates. The most important of these is in Quebec, where about a half-billion dollars in capital expenditures has disappeared from

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What Does a Poilievre Government Science Policy Look Like?

I did a tour of Ottawa the week before last, chatting with folks about what the future looks like. Here are some of the things I kept hearing. Treat absolutely nothing in here as a prediction, this is all just gossip. Now that last one I found very interesting, and I think it’s worth going back to the Harper record on Science and Universities. A lot of you got quite angry with me a few years ago when I compared

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A Queen’s Park (Almost) Nothingburger

Writing this blog because I suspect I am going to be inundated with press calls today and will not have time to answer them all. Journos! Take all the quotes you want from this blog—it’s fine with me. For those sick of hearing about Ontario—skip this one and we’ll see you tomorrow for the podcast with Andrew Norton. There was almost nothing new in yesterday’s budget. Virtually everything that is in the budget was already signaled about a month ago

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