Category: Government

Ford’s Francophone Fracas

FordLate last week, Ontario Finance Minister Vic Fedeli delivered a mid-year economic statement.  There wasn’t a whole lot of news in it, to be honest.  For the most part, it was a final government statement about how bad the previous government had been and a re-statement of actions taken to date.  There were repetitions about the need to get to a balanced budget and to reduce electricity rates, but no timetables for either were given.  But there were a few things

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Update from India: The National Institutional Ranking Framework

Yesterday, I discussed the need to change culture in Indian universities to make them a bit more focused on output and less focused on the employment privileges of their faculty.  There is one trick the Modi government has used in this respect, the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF).  That’s right – in India, the government ranks its institutions.  And not for funding purposes – just to rank them and give them a kick in the tail to pay attention to performance.

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Update from India (1)

I spent the last couple of weeks in India and the Middle East.  Over the next couple of days, I thought I would lay out some of my observations about higher education in these countries. First up, India, which has maybe the world’s most complicated higher education system (which I detailed in a three-parter back in 2014, here, here, and here – this blog will probably make more sense if you read them first).  Stripped to its essentials, India has the world’s second largest

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The Balance of Federal-Provincial Expenditures

Today, I am going to try to pull all this data together to see to what extent federal and provincial shares of expenditure in PSE have changed over time. As far as institutional expenditures go, the presence of federal indirect transfers complicates a good historical look at the question.  Up until 1976, it’s possible to look directly at cash and tax transfers specifically designated for PSE, and it is possible again after 2007-08 when the Harper Government carved out a

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Federal Expenditures on Students

Over the last couple of days, we’ve looked at federal transfers to institutions.  Today I want to look at federal transfers to students, which are Kind Of a Big Deal. It seems kind of hard to imagine today, but just over twenty years ago, the feds couldn’t wait to get out of the field.  In 1994, Liberal Human Resources Minister (and later U of Winnipeg President) Lloyd Axworthy tried to get a “win” on student aid by – and I

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