Category: Government

Quick Update on Research Funding

Remember the spring budget, when the Federal government announced a heavily back-ended $1.8 billion (spread over five years) boost to research grant funding, as well as the creation of a capstone research organization which might have its own funds to co-ordinate challenge-based research? Well, the federal government has recently been fleshing out these announcements through a series of badly coordinated media releases. And so today, we’re going to go on a quick government press release safari to try to work

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Talking about Corridors

If you’re in Ontario and are paying attention to the discussions around lobbying the provincial government for more money, you may have heard words to the effect of “we need to get rid of the corridor” or “we need to get rid of the cap.” This post is a small plea for everyone in Ontario to eliminate this phrase from their vocabularies immediately and start using more straightforward language instead. Some background on how the way the enrolment-based portion of

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A New Alberta Postsecondary Review

The week before last, the Alberta Minister of Advanced Education, Rajan Sawhney announced a funding review for Alberta post-secondary education. I saw a fair bit of snarky comment about this on social media which I thought was kind of unfair. (Note to followers: now that Bluesky actually has passed the minimum viable size to be a useful social media platform, you’ll mostly find me there rather than Twitter. My address is: @alexusherhesa.bsky.social). So, let’s break it down a bit. The

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Saskatchewan Election Manifesto Analysis, 2024

Hi all. Third of three manifesto analyses for this ballot-iest of Octobers, this time Saskatchewan which goes to the polls today. This one might be the simplest one yet, mainly because Saskatchewan elections—like those in the other two Prairie provinces—are a resolutely two-party affair. It has been 25 years since a third-party MLA has been elected to the legislature, and there is zero danger of that streak being broken tonight. But also because the differences in the two parties’ platforms

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Eating the Future

As anyone who was alive at the time knows, if you want to pick a decade when Canada was at its nadir, it was the 1990s. We managed to have a currency crisis, a fiscal crisis, a national unity crisis, and a recession which basically lasted seven years. It was bleak, bleak, bleak. But in one very important way, it was better than today. Because at least, even though we were broke (both Saskatchewan and Newfoundland flirted with bankruptcy in

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