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Category: Canada

2026 Quebec Election Manifesto Analysis

Morning everyone. We are now six days away from an election in the province of Quebec, which the polls have pegged as being an absolute nail-biter. With five parties polling above 10%, it’s conceivable that the Parti Québécois might gain an absolute majority with less than 30% of the vote. Do not skimp on the popcorn next Monday night.  Dear reader, you will be shocked to learn that post-secondary education has received virtually no attention in this election, a fact

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September 29, 2026 No Comments

Data for Internationalization

The following is adapted from a talk given at the National Association of Foreign Student Affairs (NAFSA) conference in Orlando, Florida, back in May. My thanks to Mike Alcott of ApplyBoard for the invitation to participate in the panel. There are a lot of folks in the business of moving international students from one place to another who want more data. They think more data will help them target students better by predicting changes in international student demand. But is

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September 28, 2026 No Comments

Concordia’s Quiet Revolution

Okay, so Canadian higher education is pretty cautious and risk-averse, and so perhaps the bar for calling something a ‘revolution” is pretty low. But everyone needs to take a look at what has been going on at Concordia this year, because if what has been happening there were to spread widely, I think you genuinely could call it a revolution. It’s big, bold, and has the potential to alter for the better some of the basic underpinnings of universities’ financial models. Concordia

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September 23, 2026 2 Comments

Associate EU Membership and Labour Mobility

Yesterday, I sketched out the likelihood of Canada joining the Erasmus program; now I wanted to address the issue of labour mobility. As a couple of news outlets breathlessly reported during the whole EU thing last week, a new agreement might allow Canadians to “live and work visa-free” in Europe (and vice-versa, although no one seemed to want to dwell on that). But how likely is this? So, we can’t know exactly until something is negotiated. But precedent is pretty

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September 22, 2026 No Comments

Erasmus for Canada? Not so Fast.

Everyone seems very excited about the prospect of Canada becoming an associate member of the European Union (even though “associate member” is not an actual thing in any EU statute, but whatever), and in particular are talking about the value of greater student mobility since apparently Prime Minister Carney would like Canada to join the EU’s Erasmus scheme. In the words of the world’s greatest living cartoonist, Aislin…”everybody take a valium”. Sure, everybody loves Erasmus in theory. Who could be

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September 21, 2026 2 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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