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Category: Politics

What to Look for in Tonight’s Budget

At 4 PM EST, Finance Minister Bill Morneau will rise in the House of Commons to deliver his fourth budget, and the last one before a federal election in the fall.  What can we expect from the budget on the big PSE-files?  Here’s a quick rundown. Transfer Payments: Status quo. Research: My guess is that there are small goodies in this budget, if only to give them an excuse to reprint everything they did last year in this year’s budget

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March 19, 2019 No Comments

Michael Wilson and Education Tax Credits

This past weekend, Michael Wilson died.  Here in Toronto he was well known for his multiple roles on Bay Street, his work as a mental health advocate and his six years as chancellor of the University of Toronto; elsewhere in Canada he is remembered as our ambassador to the United States (2006-2009) and, more dimly, as a senior cabinet minister in the Mulroney Government, most importantly holding the Finance portfolio from 1984 to 1991.  However, one thing he doesn’t often

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February 12, 2019 No Comments

Speak of the Devil

Yesterday was one of those days when I completely lucked out.  There I was, having just published a piece on possible scenarios on what the Ontario government might do in post-secondary education, when suddenly various news outlets began reporting that a new tuition framework was due to be announced later this week.  And it was a doozy: according to the report, the Conservative government was planning on reducing tuition in all regulated programs (ie. excluding international students and the graduate and

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January 16, 2019 4 Comments

A Skills Budget?

If you’re in Ottawa, January is Kremlinology month, in which every news story, no matter how vacuous, is parsed for clues about what may be in the federal budget, usually delivered sometime between mid-February and late March. (Note here to anyone at PMO or Finance reading this:  your attempt last year to disrupt HESA’s thorough budget-night coverage by making it coincide with Toronto FC’s home-opener was deeply unwelcome.  Fair warning: I will be incandescently angry if the budget is February 26th, so schedule this

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January 9, 2019 No Comments

That Ontario Auditor General Report

Last week, the Ontario Auditor General put out a report on the Ontario Student Assistance Program and more specifically the new Ontario Student Grants – you know, the ones that made the province’s Targeted Free Tuition program possible.  And while the media release that accompanied the report really reads as if it had been written by a partisan staffer (it is void of nuance), the report itself is pretty interesting, not least because it accomplishes what apparently OSAP was incapable of doing on its own:

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December 11, 2018 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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