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Category: Funding and Finances

What People Get Wrong about the New CCAA Law

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about Justin Trudeau’s record. A couple of people wrote in to chide me that I had not included the passage last year of Bill 59, a piece of omnibus legislation which among other things prevents postsecondary education institutions from using the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act (CCAA). I know a lot of professors—and perhaps more importantly, faculty unions and their provincial/national associations—think that this was a “Good Thing” because “Look What Happened at Laurentian.” To

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February 5, 2025 2 Comments

Student Aid in Canada: The Long View

Note: this is a short version of a paper which has just appeared in issue 72:4 the Canadian Tax Journal. How short? I’m trying for under 1000 words. Let’s see how I do. Canadian student aid programs existed in scattered forms since just after World War I but became a “national program” when the Dominion-Canadian Student Aid Program (DCSAP) was created in 1939. Under this program, the Government of Canada provided block cash grants to provinces who administered their own

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February 4, 2025 No Comments

Ontario in 2029

Back in 2022, just after the last provincial election, I wrote a piece looking forward a few years and predicted that the years 2023-25 were going to be chaos for Ontario postsecondary institutions. And I was right, although I can’t claim to have anticipated any of the specifics. Given that we are now going back into an election, I thought I would try to look into a crystal ball and look at what the province’s postsecondary system will look like

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February 3, 2025 No Comments

Re-capturing the early 80s

Most of the time when I talk about the history of university financing, I show a chart that looks like this, showing that since 1980 government funding to the sector is up by a factor of about 2.3 after inflation over the last 40-odd years, while total funding is up by a factor of 3.6. Figure 1: Canadian University Income by source, 1979-80 to 2022-23, in billions of constant $2022 That’s just a straight up expression of how universities get

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January 15, 2025 No Comments

College Financials 2022-23

StatsCan dropped some college financial data over the XMAS holidays.  I know you guys are probably sick of this subject, but it’s still good to have some national data—even if it is eighteen months out of date and doesn’t really count the last frenzied months of the international student gold rush (aka “doing the Conestoga”).  But it does cover the year in which everyone now agrees student visa numbers “got out of control,” so there are some interesting things to

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January 13, 2025 No 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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