Category: Government

Lo! More Mediocre Provincial Budgets

The Government of Saskatchewan delivered its budget yesterday which means that all ten provinces are now in – much earlier than usual (there’s usually one irritating May holdout).  And guess what?  It’s another year of (on aggregate at least) barely keeping up with inflation! Figure 1 shows changes in budgeted year-on-year transfers to institutions, in constant dollars.  The national increase is 0.4%, with a big gain in Quebec offsetting a small decrease in Ontario and a larger one in Alberta

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Enough, Ontario

Our usual annual round-up of provincial budgets will come Wednesday, right after Saskatchewan posts its numbers, but as I was writing a draft of the piece I realized it makes almost no sense to talk about national trends in provincial funding without looking at what is going on in Ontario, because to a large extent it drives the national numbers.  And what is going on in Ontario – what has been going on in Ontario – over the past decade

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National Strategies on International Education

This post is co-authored by Robert Burroughs, HESA Research Associate.  A few years ago, when the Government of Canada released its “Strategy for International Education”, I gave the document a lot of stick because it wasn’t really a strategy, possessed no serious logic model and generally didn’t link resources to expected outcomes.  It was more of a laundry list of things attached to a relatively arbitrary target more than anything else. Having recently had occasion to read a few other countries’ international

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A Challenge and An Opportunity in College Education

Earlier this week the Manitoba Government released a report that I and my colleague Yves Pelletier worked on for most of last year, the Manitoba College Review (you can read the report here). It was a challenging assignment, but I am very grateful to the many people to everyone who spent time with us and contributed to the report, and to all the alumni who answered our survey.  In terms of system governance, we made some fairly sweeping recommendations, ones that give government

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Why Are We Applauding Statscan’s Lack of Strategic Focus?

Remember about twenty months ago when everyone was gaga over the idea that the feds were going to pay for an expanded version of the faculty survey? And there would be data on part-timers!  And on equity criteria!   And maybe community colleges too! Of course it was never clear that this would achieve anything like what its supporters claimed (mainly because it’s not clear how many profs are prepared to have certain personal data on things like race and disability recorded by

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