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Category: Canada

Budget Commentary 2026

Earlier today, Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne stood in the House of Commons to deliver his second budget, the tenth of a Liberal government first elected in 2015 (it would be eleven, but they skipped a year during COVID). The government had dropped large hints over the previous weeks that the budget was largely going to centre around themes of sovereignty: not just military/security, but also cultural sovereignty. And of course, it came in the wake of some frenetic foreign policy moves

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November 5, 2026 No Comments

Apprenticeships

Apprenticeships are the red-headed stepchildren of post-secondary education in Canada, mainly because while the instruction is considered to be at a post-secondary level, the learners aren’t actually enrolled in any institution. Rather, they are employees who i) have been registered as apprentices and therefore have regulated wage rates and working/learning conditions while at work and ii) who take classroom training for 6-10 weeks per year at some kind of learning institute.  (The second part of that is a bit more

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November 4, 2026 No Comments

Rapid Collegiality and How to Achieve It

Over the past few years, I have on occasion (see here and here) emphasized the need for institutions to practice “rapid collegiality”: that is, to find ways of making decisions more rapidly without sacrificing the notion that in a shared governance system, decision-making responsibilities have to be broadly inclusive. The challenge is not only that we have more or less come to equate collegiality with unanimity (or at least provided an awful lot of people with an awful lot of

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November 3, 2026 2 Comments

Alberta in a Nutshell (2026)

Morning all. A couple of weeks ago, I told you I’d be spending a good number of blogs this year looking at provincial higher education systems and how they are doing. I’m going west-to-east and today it’s Alberta’s turn.  As figure 1 shows, overall enrollment in Alberta post-secondary institutions is up by just over 80% since the turn of the century. The graph makes it appears as though most of the growth has been in universities, and that’s true in

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November 2, 2026 No Comments

BC Election Manifesto Analysis 2026

I shouldn’t have to write this blog. This Saturday’s provincial election is completely unnecessary. But we’re having it anyways because the galaxy-brains around Premier Dave Eby couldn’t figure out in time that a catastrophically divided opposition might just become less catastrophically divided if faced with the threat of an imminent election.  Anyways.  This is not a good election for post-secondary education. Maybe not quite the worst I’ve ever seen in my fifteen-odd years of doing this, but it’s close. I’ll

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October 21, 2026 No 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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