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Category: Government

Skills, Innovation, Quality, Blindness

One of the many, many frustrating things about Canadian policy over the past couple of decades is the combination of blindness and bad habits that our policy makers have with respect to the role of skills. Let’s start with the blindness, which mostly applies to our policymakers’ understanding of the relationship between skills and innovation. Innovation, to be clear, is not “invention”. It’s not about discovering some new idea or application and then building a world-beating company around. This might be the tech

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March 10, 2026 No Comments

There Is Such A Thing As A Dumb Question

You may have seen a story last week from CBC about the New Brunswick provincial government wanting to slash $35-50M from post-secondary funding this year. The story was actually about four days old when the CBC ran it – l’Acadie Nouvelle had all the goods the previous Friday based on one quite astonishing piece of paper that the Minister of Post-Secondary Education, Training and Labour circulated to university Presidents at a meeting two weeks ago. Here’s the picture L’Acadie Nouvelle

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March 2, 2026 2 Comments

Skills for Sovereignty

Hi everyone. The blog is off this week, but given the release of the Defence Industrial Strategy, it seems worth flagging a few early observations – and providing an update on how this is shaping the agenda for our upcoming session of the National Defence Research Roundtable, which is focused on the role of post-secondary institutions in developing skills as part of a new approach to sovereignty and national security. So, the Defense Industrial Strategy (DIS) is finally out. I

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February 24, 2026 No Comments

Ontario Status Quo Ante

Thursday morning, Ontario’s Minister of Colleges and Universities made a very big funding announcement: $6.4 billion in new funding over four years. It was certainly a welcome announcement, but as my analysis below shows, it’s not a magic cure by any means, and there is a big sting in the tail of the announcement for students. The fundamentals of the announcement are that the provincial government announced that it was going to provide universities and colleges with three big new

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February 17, 2026 No Comments

Report Back on the National Defence Research Roundtable

You may recall that back in mid-November – on the back of some discussions that took place at the University Vice-President’s Network meeting in Victoria – HESA launched a call for a meeting in Ottawa focused on: i) how to coordinate and advance defence research in Canada, and ii) developing sector-wide advice on how Canada should structure future defence and security research investments. On December 15th, 77 people showed up in Ottawa to discuss exactly that.  Today, we are releasing National Defence Research

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January 14, 2026 1 Comment

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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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