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Category: Politics

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

Polling (Part 2)

Yesterday, we talked about polling and the framing of election issues in general.  Today, I want to talk specifically about post-secondary education polling.  Though post-secondary education does not register as a “major issue” in any of the pre-election polls, the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) nonetheless commissioned its own polling on post-secondary education (through Abacus), presumably the better to convince politicians that Canadians really do care about the issue.  The results (here, split across two documents) are…interesting, though possibly

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September 6, 2019 1 Comment

Polling (Part 1)

It’s election time and so – surprise, surprise – there is a lot of polling out there telling people who is going to vote for whom.  Tomorrow, I will talk about polling specific to post-secondary education and science, but today, I want to talk more generally about how polling frames election issues and how poor some of the framing seems to be going into this election. In the pre-writ period, the most important question in polling is “what is the

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September 5, 2019 No Comments

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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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