Category: Government

Plus ça change

I was recently reading this great book of essays edited by Philip Altbach (if you are studying higher education and have never read Altbach, you are should immediately read everything by Altbach) entitled University Reform.  It’s a great read, in particular the introduction, which lists the nine challenges facing higher education systems around the world.  They are: Some of these nine challenges overlap a bit (for instance, “relevance” and “the changing role”) and others are linked closely (growing enrolments, financial

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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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Chicago to Lethbridge

A couple of weeks ago, a philosophy professor at the University of Lethbridge named Paul Viminitz invited Frances Widdowson to speak.  Widdowson, a historian, was fired from Mount Royal University a little over a year ago mainly, I gather, because of her determination to air in class her view that Residential Schools were actually kind of good.  The invitation was not just for her to expand on these views (as well as, more generally, her odious idea that Indigenous knowledge

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That Bill Morneau Book

I read Where to From Here: A Path To Canadian Prosperity, by former Liberal Finance Minister Bill Morneau, this weekend.  I cannot in good conscience recommend anyone else read it – it is bland, provides almost no new insight into the workings of the Trudeau government, and the “aw shucks can’t we all be more decent and moderate?” shtick gets old fast. But it has an important lesson for the post-secondary education sector.  And that is: the sector counts for nothing in Ottawa

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Emergency Benefit Puzzles

Last week, Statistics Canada published a fascinating little report on how much assistance Canadian students received from the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) and the Canada Emergency Student Benefit (CESB) during COVID.  The results are interesting but lack a bit of context, which I thought I would provide. It’s been nearly three years since CERB and CESB were a thing, so here’s a refresher:  CERB was announced on March 25 just a few days after much of the economy came

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