Category: Government

Provincial Budgets 2025-26

Ok everyone, all the provincial budgets are in and so it’s time for our annual look at what another round of irresponsible pan-partisan political leadership has wrought for our sector for the next twelve months. Figure 1 shows the province-by-province breakdown of this year’s budgets, showing the change in transfers to institutions in real dollars over 1 year and 5 years for each of the ten provinces. In most provinces, collecting this data is pretty easy—you just look at the

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Opportunity and Talent

On the day of the federal election, the Globe came out with a list of eight “fateful issues” that Canada’s next Prime Minister (Mark Carney, as we now know) would have to face. I’ve read it a couple of times now and what strikes me most is not that the list is wrong, per se, but that the framing is so desperately plodding and unimaginative. And we need some serious imagination right now. Let’s get down to specifics here: the eight areas

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The Deeper Meaning of Election 2025

So, it’s voting day. I am pretty sure the Liberals are going to win a stonking majority, but regardless of who wins, there are deeper shifts at work which the sector needs to take seriously. Before I start, though, I need to take time to acknowledge something that happened last Wednesday. If you recall, I spent quite a bit of time discussing how the Conservatives had been pulling back on the “wokeness” issue. A few hours after I published that, CBC

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Election 2025: The Conservative Party Manifesto

Ok, the Conservatives finally released their platform yesterday. It’s…thin…so far as postsecondary education goes. It’s absolutely nothing like the extremely detailed and nerdy platform in 2021 which, let us recall, was released on Day 1 of the campaign (I remain firm in my belief that an Erin O’Toole-led Conservative Party would be walking away with this election). And there are definitely no signs of a reversion to the Harper era and it’s too often unremarked interest in Big Science and investments in major research

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Election 2025: The Liberal Party Manifesto

Today, I’m doing the Liberals, mainly because at the time of writing on Easter Sunday they have issued an actual full platform and costing document while the Conservatives have not. Spoiler: this is not your average Liberal platform. That a new leader might bring a change in Liberal priorities should have been clear enough to anyone who had the misfortune of slogging through Mark Carney’s book Values: Building a Better World for All, which I did a couple of weeks ago (the things I do

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