People are asking why I haven’t talked about the Naylor Report (aka the Review of Fundamental Science) yet. The answer, briefly, is i) I’m swamped ii) there’s a lot to talk about in there and iii) I want to have some time to think it over. But I did have some thoughts about chapter 3, where I think there is either an inadvertent error or the authors are trying to pull a fast one (and if it’s the latter I
A few months ago, someone asked me what I wanted to see in the budget. I said i) investment in aboriginal PSE, ii) system changes for the benefit of mature students and iii) changes to loan repayment (specifically, a reduction of the maximum loan payment from 20% of disposable income to 15%). To my great pleasure, the government came through on two of those wishes. But there is still a lot of work to do yet. Let’s start with the Post-Secondary
Readers may remember that about this time last year, I was giving the Government of New Brunswick a bit of stick for a botched student aid roll-out. Today I am pleased to give credit where it is due, and congratulate the folks in Fredericton for fixing the problem and developing a much better student aid system. Let’s go back 12 months to pick up the story. In February 2016, the Ontario government had come up with a fabulous new system which
Yesterday I suggested that Ottawa might be as much of the problem in innovation policy as it is the solution. Today I want to make a much stronger policy claim: that Canada has a uniquely stupid policy discourse on innovation. And as Exhibit A in this argument I want to present a piece posted over at Policy Options last week. The article was written by Kat Nejatian, a former staffer to Jason Kenney and now CEO of a payment technology company
The National Post’s David Akin had a useful article last week entitled Canada Has Failed at Innovation for 100 years: Can The Trudeau Government Change That? Read it, it’s good. It’s based around a new-ish Peter Nicholson article in Canadian Public Policy which is unfortunately not available without a subscription. But Nicholson’s argument appears to be: we’ve done pretty well our entire history as a country copying or importing technology from Americans: what exactly is it that Ottawa is going
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