Category: Policy

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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What People Get Wrong about the New CCAA Law

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about Justin Trudeau’s record. A couple of people wrote in to chide me that I had not included the passage last year of Bill 59, a piece of omnibus legislation which among other things prevents postsecondary education institutions from using the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act (CCAA). I know a lot of professors—and perhaps more importantly, faculty unions and their provincial/national associations—think that this was a “Good Thing” because “Look What Happened at Laurentian.” To

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HESA’s AI Observatory: What’s new in higher education (January 31, 2025)

Spotlight Due to technical issues, the Friday blog remained in the cue and was not sent out. Here it is! Happy Friday! There were a few notable AI-related releases since my last blog, but the main one was most probably the International Scientific Report on the Safety of Advanced AI that was released earlier this week (you might recall that I had previously shared here the interim report, which was published in May 2024). Chaired by UdeM’s professor Yoshua Bengio,

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HESA’s AI Observatory: What’s new in higher education (January 17, 2025)

Spotlight Welcome back, readers!  2025 is most definitely starting on a high AI-wise, because we’re only two weeks in, and there are already some major new releases worth taking a look at. I’m sharing a TL;DR with you all below for two of these, in case you are still catching up with the start of the new semester and have not had a chance to keep up with everything happening in the sector.  The US Department of Education’s Office of Educational

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The Trudeau Legacy

I don’t know about you, but I find all the writing about the Trudeau legacy pretty goddamn annoying. Weeks and weeks of columnists yelling “resign!” followed by weeks and weeks of the same columnists yelling “he didn’t do it fast enough!” All true; all deeply boring. But since this is basically the blog of record for the sector, it would be weird to let the man leave without an assessment of his effect. So here goes: The early years A

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