Category: Canada

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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Three Developments on the International Students File

First, there is the Conestoga-Sault College stand-off. You have probably already seen this one, but I have to point it out anyways, because it’s the most objectively hilarious thing that’s happened in years. Briefly, Sault College President David Orazietti made some comments to the effect that Conestoga President John Tibbits (the man who brought in 30,000 international students into southwestern Ontario, built new campuses to house them all and named one of them after himself) was the “bad actor” which

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COVID, PISA and So On

A few weeks ago, I was at a session which brought together several folks in the enrollment management business.  It was kind of an open-mike session, in which people could bring up topics that seemed most troubling and most in need of addressing.  So, the topic turned immediately to the preparedness (or more accurately the lack thereof) of incoming students.  Pretty much without exception, from the most to least selective institutions in the room, there was consensus that this was

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Women in Engineering

Back around 1990, women signing up to be Engineers was a political statement.  Because of Polytechnique.  Because of the Fourteen.  It felt like a surge at the time, but maybe it was just Engineering-inclined students doing what they would have done anyway, only putting a political sheen on the choice.  Regardless, if you’d told anyone in the early 90s if enrolments in Engineering faculties would still be run running 4- or 5-to-1 male to female thirty years in the future,

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