Category: Politics

2021 PSE Platforms – The Conservative Party

Alright, fam.  You know the drill.  It’s a federal election, so between now and September 20th, I’ll be looking at various party manifestos to see what they portend for our sector, and then finishing up with some comparative analysis.  I am not entirely sure how many parties I will do: I never do the Bloc for obvious reasons, so that leaves three and *maybe* a fourth if the Greens get their act together to release any policies and stop behaving

Read More »

Back With a Jab

Morning all.  Ready to go?  No, me neither.  But the show must go on. It’s going to be a busy few weeks.  Our annual State of Post-Secondary Education in Canada comes out on Thursday.  We’ve got an election on September 20th, which may have some pretty significant consequences for post-secondary education (the childcare accords of the last few months are hugely consequential for higher education in a way that has not properly been appreciated, and I’ll be writing on that subject later

Read More »

Nova Scotia Manifesto Analysis (Summer Edition)

Morning all.  Hope you are having a good summer.  Just returning briefly to the blog because Nova Scotia goes to the polls today, and in the ancient, decade-long tradition of this blog (ten years ago last week, the blog debuted with this piece to a beta audience of about 100) I gotta do a manifesto analysis.  So, here goes. The NDP manifesto commitments on PSE are disappointingly thin.  The entirety of their platform is i) “(work) towards eliminating tuition fees, beginning with tuition fees

Read More »

Missions and Moonshots

There is a crowd of policy entrepreneurs in Canada – mostly but not entirely Liberal, mostly but not entirely based in Ottawa – who have really cottoned on to the whole notion of innovation.  Like many of us who have despaired over successive governments’ lack of cluefulness on this issue, they are dissatisfied with the status quo.  Unfortunately, these people are currently marching with wholly unjustified confidence towards policies that are largely buzzword-driven. It’s not just this ludicrous notion of

Read More »

Focus

On Friday, Newfoundland’s Premier Andrew Furey ruffled some feathers at Memorial (now officially “the Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador”, so no more calling it MUN, please).   In trying to explain what he intended to do with respect to the “Big Reset’s” recommendation of a 30% cut in grants without actually saying anything of substance, he stated: Memorial University has to figure out what it wants to be when it grows up…It has amazing potential, and it too is at a crossroads, of

Read More »