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Category: Government

Provincial Budgets 2023-24

Morning, all.  It’s time for our annual provincial budget round-up.  University Affairs has done its round-up of budget announcements; I’m here to put the whole set of financial commitments under the lens and give it some long-term context. A couple of caveats before I start. First, PEI is not included, for the simple reason that the government chose not to submit a budget before going to the polls a couple of weeks ago.  But, in the big fiscal picture of

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April 19, 2023 2 Comments

Historical Higher Ed Data-Palooza Part 2

Today’s discussion might be a little less exciting than yesterday because although I now have all this cool data on finances going back to 1920, holy hell are there some difficulties coming up with way to provide a unified data series through that period.  So, apologies, but you’re in for some long parenthetical statements on methodology. The main reason I was looking for historical data in the first place was that I was trying to resolve a long-standing puzzle around

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April 12, 2023 3 Comments

Research Re-shuffle

The Advisory Panel on the Federal Research Support System released its report last week while I was playing boulevardier in Tokyo with Little Miss Sumo (somehow, I’d never really noticed what an enormous fraction of the city’s economy and real estate is devoted to cube toys and claw machines).  It’s more interesting than the usual Ottawa report, and not just because of the murky politics. The report begins with a problematique wheremost of the space was devoted to telling the

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March 27, 2023 1 Comment

Changes to Canada’s Innovation Landscape

Yesterday, I described a variety of different type of innovation organizations around the world and suggested that part of the problem in Canada is that the federal government has difficulty understanding any kind of innovation agency whose mission is not “give out more gobs of cash”, because in today’s Ottawa it is expenditure which indicates virtue, not the outcomes of those expenditures. So, given that, how do we evaluate two significant recent changes to the innovation ecosystem in Canada? The

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March 15, 2023 No Comments

Can Canada Out-think the Underpants Gnomes?

I recently read a fascinating book called “How to Make an Entrepreneurial State: Why Innovation  Needs Bureaucracy “ by Rainer Kattel, Wolfgang Drechsler and Erkki Karo, all of whom are influenced by Marianna Mazucatto, whose work I have discussed here and here.  It’s fascinating for two reasons: first, that the book says next to nothing about how making the state more entrepreneurial or why innovation needs bureaucracy, but it is a very inclusive history of the types innovation policy structures

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March 14, 2023 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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