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Category: Politics

Trudeau vs. Harper

As we move inexorably towards a fall election (21 October, in case you’d forgotten), it is time to try to evaluate how well the present government has done on skills, science and higher education and how its record stacks up against its main competitor, the Conservative Party.  We obviously can’t do a manifesto analysis now because the Conservatives don’t have a manifesto yet (though frankly, this recent set of policy speeches by Andrew Scheer are less than encouraging).  However, while

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June 4, 2019 8 Comments

Policy Stasis in Australia

Saturday was election day in Australia, and pretty much everyone knew what was going to happen.  The clapped-out two-term Coalition (Liberal-National, i.e. right-wing) government, which was so internally faction-riven that it had three prime ministers in six years via a series of “spills” that Canadian political geeks find so thrilling: the smooth Malcolm Turnbull defenestrating the Jurassic Tony Abbott in 2015, and winning an election before being booted by caucus last fall and replaced by the somewhat more Conservative Scott

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May 21, 2019 No Comments

PEI Platform Analysis

Prince Edward Island goes to the polls tomorrow, and while it is Canada’s littlest province with an electorate 10% smaller than the University of Toronto’s student body (unbelievably, the provincial budget is actually 25% smaller), but this is a pan-Canadian blog and by God no provincial budget or election is too small for us at HESA Towers to cover.  So, buckle up to find out what the parties are offering. Let’s start with the NDP, who are not even remotely

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April 22, 2019 1 Comment

New Brunswick Brings the Stupid

Before we were rudely interrupted by the Ontario government doing something both interesting and mysterious on performance outcomes, I promised you all news out of New Brunswick. This matters to maybe fifteen of you, but you know, this blog is nothing if not faithful to geographically micro-targeting higher education nerds. So here we go. Recall that back under the Conservative government of Bernard Lord, the New Brunswick government introduced a titanically wasteful graduate tax rebate, which was a massive windfall

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April 16, 2019 No Comments

Alberta Election Platform Analysis

Alberta’s provincial election is April 16th, just a little less than two weeks away.  New Democratic Party leader and Premier Rachel Notley is squaring off against former federal Conservative cabinet minister Jason Kenney, who leads the United Conservative Party (UCP). The UCP has (almost) ended the split on the right between the Conservatives and the Wildrose Party that was partially responsible for ending over forty years of Conservative rule following the 2015 election.  Notley has been given a hard task

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April 4, 2019 1 Comment

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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