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Category: Canada

Budget Basics

At around 4PM today, the Minister of Finance, Chrystia Freeland will rise in the House of Commons to deliver her third, and the Trudeau government’s seventh, federal budget.  This is a good opportunity to give y’all a peak at how the sausage gets made, and how lobby/interest groups play a role in the development of budgets. The annual budget cycle starts pretty much the minute the previous one ends.  During spring time, the government spends its time working out how

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March 28, 2023 No Comments

Time to Overhaul Apprenticeships

There are three ways in which Canada is an outlier in apprenticeships, none of which – so far as I can tell – are based on any principles other than “well that’s the way we’ve always done them”. The first way in which our apprenticeships are different is that they cover a more restricted set of occupations than other countries.  For us, “apprenticeships” are largely synonymous with construction trades and certain manufacturing fields.  Compare, for instance, our top ten apprenticeable

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March 13, 2023 2 Comments

International Women’s Day 2023

Today is a statistical overview for International Women’s Day. Let’s start by looking at student numbers.  Figure 1 gives us the long view on female participation in universities (sorry college folks: Statscan data for your sector is a mess prior to the 1990s).  Women represented about 20% of university students from the 1920s to the mid-1950s, apart from the years during World War 2.  Starting around 1955, women’s share of total enrolments began a steady climb.  By 1989, women passed

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March 8, 2023 No Comments

The Upskilling for Industry Initiative

Q.  I can’t keep track any more.  What’s this big new skills initiative that got some press a couple of weeks ago? A. The 2021 Budget contained a commitment to fund “an initiative to scale-up proven industry-led, third-party delivered approaches to upskill and redeploy workers to meet the needs of growing industries”.   Industry, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED) had a competition to figure out who will deliver it, much like they had a competition to figure out how to

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March 7, 2023 No Comments

Budget 2023’s Three Key Decisions on Students

There are three student-finance related measures to watch for in the upcoming budget.  One of them concerns graduate research funding and the other two concern student financial aid.  With this Liberal Government, one’d normally think all three decisions would land in favour of “more! more! more!”.  But there are faint signs that this government is starting to grasp that it has a real spending problem, and that makes these three decisions difficult to predict, for whenever the budget actually comes.

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February 13, 2023 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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