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Category: Government

Questions About Alberta Data

I’m heading to Alberta for a couple of days this week, so I’ve been looking more carefully at some of what’s going on there, particularly following the MacKinnon Report on government financing.  And frankly, I’m a little perplexed at what I am seeing. Just to be clear, the Albertan government is currently on a kick to balance the budget after several years of deficits.  Nothing wrong with that.  Higher education is one of the areas they have decided is among those they

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January 20, 2020 5 Comments

The Lawsuit That Could Remake Canadian Student Assistance

This week in Toronto, an Ontario court is hearing the case of Jasmin Simpson, a deaf-blind Ontario woman who is suing the federal and provincial governments on account of the way they provide assistance to students with disabilities.  The Ottawa Citizen ran a very good article on the case yesterday, but I thought I would add my $.02 because the case potentially has some very big ratifications. (Before we start, I need to declare an interest.  For several years, I have worked with

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January 16, 2020 1 Comment

Perma-SIF

As I noted back on Monday, one of the basic dynamics we see in Canadian public finance is the long-term deterioration of provincial finances and the long-term improvement of federal ones, mainly due to changing demographics and the cost of heath care. Take a look at the projections from the Parliamentary Budget Office from their 2018 Fiscal Sustainability Report, which shows this trend rather clearly: long-term provincial government debt numbers are off the charts, while the feds are on a continuous

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January 8, 2020 No Comments

The New Federal Government

I know this seems a bit late because the election was almost three months ago, but unlike 2015, the victorious Liberals took their sweet time forming a government and it was not until mid-December, after this blog closed for the break, that it issued mandate letters to all its new Minsters.  But with those now completed and made public, we can begin to get a handle on how this minority Liberal government intends to govern with respect to PSE. Let’s

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January 7, 2020 No Comments

Welcome to the 2020s

Hi all.  Hope you all had a restful set of holidays. At the start of a new decade, it is fashionable to look ahead at what will happen in one’s sector.  Personally, I think that life is going to change in ways we can’t imagine over the next ten years, so getting too specific is a fool’s errand.  What I would like to do instead is talk about what the big challenges are going to be. The first big challenge

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January 6, 2020 4 Comments

One Thought to Start Your Day

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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