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Category: Politics

The Spring 2021 Election

Yesterday, we talked a little bit about what fiscal re-balancing between Ottawa and the provinces might look like after the pandemic, and I argued that on balance, the likeliest option was some type of uploading of responsibility for income support to the federal government.  But this might not be the only thing that changes after the pandemic: there are a lot of big, ambitious ideas out there about what a post-Corona Society looks like: lower carbon futures, expanded social security/protection futures

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April 29, 2020 No Comments

Post-Covid Fiscal Rebalancing

One of the weirder things about the present crisis is that we seem to be re-writing all the rules of federalism without even noticing it.  This will significantly affect the future of higher education. The most important changes have been with respect to the Canada Emergency Relief Benefit (CERB) and the Canada Emergency Student Benefit (CESB).  Though there have been ebbs and flows over the history of confederation, income support for the under-65s, absent a strong link to the labour force (i.e.

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April 28, 2020 No Comments

Coronavirus (2)

Things are happening so quickly that I am starting to think I need to temporarily turn this blog into a full-on everyday Coronavirus feed.  A lot has happened since Monday. Overseas: In Austria, the government has told all universities to halt lectures and move online as much as possible.  It is unclear from the stories I have read whether there this is an open-ended or time-limited decision.  Greece closed all of its universities on Tuesday for a period of two weeks. 

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March 12, 2020 No Comments

A Tale of Two Budgets

The first two big provincial budgets of the year came from British Columbia and Alberta and they could not have been more different. To start out in Victoria, the folks in BC had a nice, tidy, almost do-nothing budget.  Grants to institutions rose by 1% – that is, slightly less than inflation – while spending on student aid rose by nearly 23%.  Some but not all of that money went to a new “BC Access Grant” which got trumpeted all over the

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March 11, 2020 2 Comments

Higher Education and the Democratic Primaries, 2020

The Iowa caucuses take place south of the border tonight.  The Democratic Primary has come down to four serious candidates – Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg and Joe Biden – with another two (Mike Bloomberg and Amy Klobuchar) circling around the edges.  It’s a short primary season this time out, partly because Iowa is taking place a few weeks later than usual and partly because California is voting four weeks from now instead of four months from now.  Because

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February 3, 2020 1 Comment

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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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