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Category: Government

A Long-Term View of Student Financial Aid in Canada

Over Xmas, someone asked me on Twitter whether student loans were replacing direct government support as a main source of public assistance.  I answered, no, direct government support either from the feds (mainly through research and infrastructure) or the provinces (operating grants), are worth about five times more that the annual value of student loans.  To wit, Figure 1. Figure 1: Annual Student Loan Disbursements vs. Total Government Transfers to Post-Secondary Institutions, Canada, 1989-90 to 2019-20, in constant $2019 Millions

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January 26, 2022 1 Comment

Victory

Morning everyone.  Ready for another term of being trampled by a goddamn virus?  Me neither.  Still.  Onwards. Towards the middle of December, the Prime Minster’s Office released mandate letters for all cabinet ministers.  Yes, a mere three months after voting day, a meager 18 weeks after Parliament was dissolved for an incredibly urgent election, “the most consequential election of our lives”, the Prime Minster finally figured out what it was that he wanted his cabinet to do.   Better late than

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January 10, 2022 1 Comment

Goodbye 2021 Hello, 2022

Ok, a few last words before we all take off for Christmas.  This blog is going on break and will return on January 10th.  This was a hard year.  In some ways harder than 2020 because Jumping Jesus on a Pogo Stick this pandemic just doesn’t end, and even if vaccines have attenuated its impact quite a bit, certain governments in particular – Alberta and Ontario, I am looking at you – spent a large part of the year actively making things

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December 9, 2021 No Comments

Ignoring Naylor

Cast your mind back to 2017 – 2018, when, in theory, everybody agreed that Canada’s Fundamental Science Review – aka the Naylor Review – was a Good Thing That Must Be Implemented.  And so we got the 2018 Budget, which dispensed billions of dollars, mostly back-ended, over six years and which was touted as the Greatest Research Budget Ever (via some competitive counting of the sort I described last week) even though in total it amounted to about a 14% real increase over

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December 6, 2021 1 Comment

Funny Math in Alberta

Many of my Canadian readers will likely have read a piece that has been circulating on the internet from Kim Siever, a self-described leftist internet journalist from Lethbridge.  The headline says it all: UCP Government to Cut Post-Secondary Spending by $1.5 Billion; That Number Rises to $3.5 Billion if you Factor in Inflation and Population Growth.  You know how I am always on about Economic Impact Analyses always being forms of competitive counting? Methodologically speaking, this is worse. Ok, so here’s

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December 1, 2021 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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