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Category: Canada

Missions and Moonshots

There is a crowd of policy entrepreneurs in Canada – mostly but not entirely Liberal, mostly but not entirely based in Ottawa – who have really cottoned on to the whole notion of innovation.  Like many of us who have despaired over successive governments’ lack of cluefulness on this issue, they are dissatisfied with the status quo.  Unfortunately, these people are currently marching with wholly unjustified confidence towards policies that are largely buzzword-driven. It’s not just this ludicrous notion of

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June 15, 2021 1 Comment

Back to 2038

Judging by the feedback on yesterday’s blog, y’all are pretty interested in demography (One Thought followers are the best followers. How great is it that my most popular blogs are about demography?).   So, I thought I would follow up on the three biggest threads of questions and commentary which have flooded my inbox and blog comments over the last 24 hours. First: where did I get the data?  Well, that one’s easy.  Statistics Canada does projections every few years,

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June 9, 2021 1 Comment

To 2038

Universities – and to a lesser extent colleges – are dependent for their livelihood on a steady supply of young people coming through their doors.  For the past decade or so, most of the young Canadian population has been on a downswing, with some parts of the country seeing their youth populations drop by as much as 20%.  The result has been a slight drop in total domestic enrolment nationally, and some significant drops locally.  At many institutions, this fall

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June 8, 2021 7 Comments

Statues and Names

Let’s talk about Ryerson and McGill. In brief: McGill University is named after James McGill, a Montreal fur-trader and farmer.  He was not a particularly notable figure in life, but after his death in 1813 he left a reasonably large bequest, including most of the land on which the downtown campus now sits, to start a college.  He also over the course of his life owned five slaves (three Black, two Indigenous). In brief: Ryerson University is named for Egerton

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June 3, 2021 4 Comments

What You Have to Believe to Believe the Cromwell Report

You will likely recall the Azarova affair at the University of Toronto, which I first wrote about back here. It has now risen to international prominence because of Masha Gessen’s piece in the New Yorker, the Canadian Association of University Teacher’s (CAUT) censure motion and an increasingly successful boycott U of T campaign.  To summarize: early last August U of T’s law faculty, while hiring a new Executive Director for its International Human Rights Program, began employment negotiations with Dr. Valentina Azarova. She is a)

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May 25, 2021 1 Comment

One Thought to Start Your Day

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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