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Category: Government

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

The Upskilling for Industry Initiative

Q.  I can’t keep track any more.  What’s this big new skills initiative that got some press a couple of weeks ago? A. The 2021 Budget contained a commitment to fund “an initiative to scale-up proven industry-led, third-party delivered approaches to upskill and redeploy workers to meet the needs of growing industries”.   Industry, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED) had a competition to figure out who will deliver it, much like they had a competition to figure out how to

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March 7, 2023 No Comments

Two POVs on the Coming Student Grant Changes

The Canadian Alliance of Student Associations has started a new campaign, entitled #halfyourCSG.  It rails against the perceived risk of a 50% drop in the maximum value of the Canada Student Grant (CSG) come this fall.  This might be kind of a sleeper issue for PSE over the next few weeks, so it’s worth taking a look at what the issues are and how everything might play out. To recap the policy evolution here: in 2016 the Liberal government raised

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March 6, 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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