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Category: Government

FutureSkills Lab: Told You So.

A short one today because I’m still theoretically on vacation and have to catch a train (Nagano!) Remember that RFP I told you le tout Ottawa was talking about?  It’s out.  You can read it in all its glory here. Apparently, the government thinks there is some non-profit organization out there (provincial governments and for-profits are forbidden from bidding) which can do the following (quoted from the bid): Identify, analyze and measure trends in the labour market for in-demand skills over the short and

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May 25, 2018 1 Comment

FutureSkills Lab

Hey, does anyone remember FutureSkills Lab?  That big idea that came out of the Barton Committee about a year and a half ago and included in the 2017 budget with at least moderate amounts of fanfare?  The one that was supposed to “identify skill gaps with employers, explore new and innovative approaches to skills development and share information so that Canadians are well equipped for opportunities in the new economy”? It kind of seems to have died a quiet death,

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May 8, 2018 No Comments

Better Arguments for Superclusters

[the_ad id=”12142″] A couple of weeks ago, the Globe and Mail published an op-ed “Beyond “the Next Silicon Valley”: Why Many Kinds of Economic Superpowers Matter” by Dalhousie University President Richard Florizone and MIT’s Scott Stern. It is, in my opinion, a better explanation of and argument for superclusters than anything the government itself has published, but it’s also a rebuttal (I think) to naysayers (like me) of the Supercluster concept, so I thought it worth reviewing some of the arguments

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April 23, 2018 1 Comment

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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April 11, 2018 No Comments

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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April 9, 2018 2 Comments
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