Category: Canada

Student Summer Unemployment

Summer employment for students, being a vital source of both income and experience, is one of those things that everyone agrees is really important but almost nobody understands. What students actually do in the summer months is a messy mix of work, school, volunteering and (occasionally) bumming around. Today, we’re releasing the 2012 edition of our series on summer employment (co-authored by new HESA associate Jacqueline Lambert and yours truly), entitled Making the Most of It: Canadian Student Employment in

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Fall 2012: You’ve Been Warned

As we’re coming to the end of the school year, it’s worth looking ahead a bit to what we can expect next year.  You know, so you can obsess about it all summer before coming home. Public finances are only going to get worse.  Most provincial governments made their budget forecasts at a time when it looked like the US economy might be reaching take-off speed; that speed has now been firmly downgraded to “stall.” Throw in the non-negligible possibilities

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Chasing a Buck

There are a lot of institutions facing a demographic challenge over the next few years. Outside the GTA and the B.C. lower mainland, the youth population is in decline, and that means institutions in these regions are either going to have to start increasing their yields or find some new markets to exploit. (Or, I suppose, cut their budgets a bit, but that seems to be a last resort.) Though I can’t claim to have a lot of granular detail

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Those Statscan Cutbacks

Many will have seen news yesterday about large cutbacks in the works at Statistics Canada. On the basis of the news that lots of PSAC members had received notices that their jobs may be “affected,” a number of pro-Statscan commentators rushed to say that the agency needed to be saved because it provided such fantastic, non-partisan analysis. Well, yes. But yesterday’s notices appear not to have gone to any analysts, since they are not PSAC members.  The employees who got notices would

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On Being on Strike

What does it mean to be a student on strike? Recently, Concordia University announced that its board had settled on Ryerson provost Alan Shepard as its choice for president. Shepard, who’s had a very successful tenure at Ryerson, was unanimously recommended by a search committee that included student leaders. The prospective new president had hoped to engage in a public discussion with the university community prior to the formal selection taking place; unfortunately, the event was derailed by a handful

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