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Category: Politics

Canadian PSE History Through Election Manifestos: the 2010s and a Historical Perspective

This is part five of a five-part series.  Just showing up now?  See Monday (1949-62), Tuesday (63-74), Wednesday (79-93) and Thursday (1997-2011) to catch up. I dwell much on the 2015 election today.  Most of you probably remember it reasonably well, and if you don’t, then you can click on these links to see details on that year’s Liberal platform, Conservative platform, NDP platform, Green platform, the various science platforms and an overall analysis here.    What was maybe a bit surprising in historical perspective about the 2015

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September 27, 2019 No Comments

Canadian PSE History Through Election Manifestos: 1997-2011

This is part IV of a series.  Catch up with Part I, Part II and Part III.  We have arrived at the modern, post-Redbook manifesto period, where promises get costed, fiscal frameworks are explicit, and parties hew more closely to their promises.  At least in theory. During the Chretien-Martin years, the Liberals were, well, inconsistent.  In 1997 they talked small (their only real promise was the introduction of a small set of grants for students with dependents) but in office

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September 26, 2019 No Comments

Canadian PSE History through Election Manifestos: 1949-1962

Care about politics?  Of course you do. Horrified by the current federal election campaign?  Of course you are.  Well, the One Thought blog has you covered: an entire week on previous federal election campaigns, just to keep you distracted from the present one!  This is fascinating, I swear.  No, really. Over the summer, I spent a ludicrous amount of time on Université Laval’s Poltext site, which contains all the federal election manifestos going back to 1949 (and much else besides), and it occurred to me

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September 23, 2019 No Comments

Honing the University Party’s Growth Agenda

It’s election season, and so everyone is trotting out promises and coming up with manifestos. These manifestos are lists of specific promised policy initiatives, but they are also – implicitly – a description of how a political party sees the world – how it conceives of a better society and what steps it thinks are needed to get there.   Universities are not political parties, of course, but if we look at what they and their representative bodies in Ottawa (Universities

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September 16, 2019 1 Comment

Manitoba’s Curious Election

Manitoba votes tomorrow.  There’s not really much suspense in the whole thing: the Tories are going to get re-elected with a reduced majority.  And possibly because of the lack of suspense, the parties are treating this election in a very uncharacteristic manner. Ages ago – that is, before 1993 – political parties in Canada could say pretty much whatever they wanted and promise anything.  “We will spend more on education!” one party would say.  “No, more on housing!” another would

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September 9, 2019 No Comments

One Thought to Start Your Day

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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