The economic and fiscal history of Canada from the early 70s to the mid-90s is one long, bad disaster movie (the Cassandra Crossing, say). Unemployment went over 6% in 1974 and didn’t come back down to that level until 2008. For nearly all of the 1980s, it was over 8% and from 1982 to 1994 it was over 10% half the time. The Keynesian medicine that was supposed to get us out of such messes simply did not work because
Morning all. Since people seem to like these history pieces so much, I’ve decided to get us mostly caught up to the present day in one go. Hope you enjoy! The period roughly from 1959 to the oil crisis of 1973-74 is rightly thought of as a Golden Age for higher education in Canada, much as it is in the United States. Universities ballooned in size and gradually became more research-intensive. A new class of institutions, community colleges, were added
During the war years, post-secondary education was essentially on hold. But immediately afterwards, in the period from 1945-1960, there were some major developments. The first was dealing with a major surge in enrolments due to returning veterans. In 1944-45, full-time enrolment was 38,516, slightly below where it was in 1938. Two years later, swollen by several cohorts of military veterans taking advantage of a post-war benefits program, it was 76,237. By 1950 those numbers were starting to fall again –
If you look at the history of Canadian post-secondary education, there are two particularly notable things going on with respect to the first four decades of the twentieth century. The first is that western Canada got universities. And the second is that Eastern universities entered into contracts with the state. East of Winnipeg, very few new universities were created in this period. Newfoundland (not yet part of Canada) created Memorial University after WWI, and Mount Saint Vincent and Saint Thomas
If you’re in the business of trying to describe Canadian higher education, one of the hardest things to do is to try to explain Canada’s community college sector, since the institutions that comprise it vary substantially from one province to another. If one takes a historical approach, then there are, broadly speaking, three types of colleges in Canada. There are Quebec’s CEGEPs, which are sui generis both in Canada and internationally. Technically creatures of the 1960s, their roots go back over a
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