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Category: Government

Health Spending

Y’all are used to me playing around with financial data in the post-secondary sector.  Today, I want to play around a bit with data on cost escalation in the health sector, just so you all can see what the heck the post-secondary sector is up against when it comes to budget discussions in provincial cabinets. Let’s start with Figure 1, which shows provincial spending on health and post-secondary education since 2002.  Turns out that in the 2000s, post-secondary education was

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October 11, 2022 No Comments

Quebec Election Manifestos 2022

Quebec goes to the polls next Monday, and while I do election manifesto analysis for all provinces, the one for Quebec is a bit extra special, both because of the sheer number of parties and because Quebec’s one of the few places in the country where we have seen consistent increases in investment, even if the current government does have some funny ideas about things like “academic freedom”.  In reverse order of current polling results: Parti québécois.  Remember when they

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September 29, 2022 No Comments

Trends in University Income

I haven’t done a deep dive into university finances into a couple of years, so I thought I would take a couple of days to look through the latest data from the Financial Information of Universities and Colleges survey (confusingly-named, since it does not include community colleges).  Today I’ll do revenues, and tomorrow expenditures. Let’s start with the simple long-term change in revenues.  Far from being in an “austerity” situation, universities have been growing their total income at a rate

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September 27, 2022 2 Comments

Evaluating the Superclusters

Yes, this again.  Why?  Because a few weeks ago the feds released an economic analysis of the benefits of Innovation Superclusters (recently rebranded as Global Innovation Clusters to make them sound slightly less ridiculous).  It’s horrible analysis, but since this topic unites my twin pastimes of making fun of crap economic impact analysis and crap pseudo-industrial policy, I could not resist.   Some background: early in the Liberals’ first term, they announced that the key to growth was clusters – that

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September 19, 2022 1 Comment

Saskatchewan in a Nutshell

We have almost come to the end of the nutshell series.  In this, the final installment, we will look at Saskatchewan, which when you think of it is kind of to the other provinces what Canada is to the rest of the world.  The quintessence of Canada, if you will. Taking Saskatchewan last is partly a function of data problems in the province.  As in several other provinces, college numbers are subject to a sudden surge in the late aughts,

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September 14, 2022 2 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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