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Category: Government

Nobody is Coming to Save Us, But…

You may have heard me say once or twice that “nobody is coming to save us.” I’ve been told that this has become something of a catchphrase in Canadian universities over the past year, so much so that I kind of wish we’d done merch with that slogan. The phrase is still true; in fact, given the metastasizing national security crisis, it’s arguably truer now than it was a year ago. But given the chaos south of the border, it

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March 17, 2025 5 Comments

Time for CARPA?

Cast your mind back, if you will, to the magical days of 2021-22 when Canada still cared about things like innovation and a huge debate raged about how to do it properly, so that for once Canada might not be dead last in the OECD for things like productivity growth.  Basically, there were two camps in this debate. One said that the way to achieve it was to copy the American system of ARPAs (Advanced Research Projects Agencies, of which the OG

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March 11, 2025 2 Comments

Liberal Leadership Platforms

As you may have noticed, there’s a Liberal leadership vote on, with results to be announced this weekend. The conceit of today’s blog is that anyone might want to vote for a leader based on actual policy platforms rather than “electability,” so buckle up and see what it is that an improbably fourth Liberal victory might mean. So, let’s start by looking at how the leadership candidates’ platforms shape up at the broad level. All of them want to talk

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March 4, 2025 1 Comment

Nova Scotia’s Bill 12

Just before I went on break last week, the government of Nova Scotia introduced a new bill into the legislature, Bill 12, An Act Respecting Advanced Education and Research. It quickly became apparent that this bill had not been discussed with any way shape or form with anyone in the postsecondary community, which generally spells bad news. It also appeared to have come not from the Minister’s office, but from the Premier’s which again generally suggests if not bad news then

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March 4, 2025 No Comments

Ontario Election Manifestos 2025

Y’all know I do one of these for every provincial election. This one is going to be a bit different because this time out E-Day is eight days away, and next week is a scheduled off-week for the blog. As of the moment I am writing this on Tuesday afternoon, only two parties have made any commitments on postsecondary education and only one has released a fully-costed platform. So, there’s a bit of guesswork involved here. I will update the

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February 19, 2025 1 Comment

One Thought to Start Your Day

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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