Category: Politics

New Brunswick Manifesto Analysis

Once upon a time, back when Frank McKenna’s was premier, New Brunswick was seen as something of a leader in Canadian public policy.  Balancing budgets, championing official languages, investing in telecommunications and the internet, creating jobs (even if a lot of them were in call centres) – New Brunswick was seen as having understood the nature of the Maritimes’ long-term challenges and moved decisively to address them. It has been awhile since anyone thought of New Brunswick as a policy

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Back to School 2018

Morning all.  Welcome back.  Everyone emotionally prepared for the semester?  No, me neither. So, it’s been an eventful summer.  The Saudi spat was most unfortunate: several thousand lives disrupted and a short-term hit of about $140 million to Canadian universities and colleges (they’ll make it all up on next year’s intake).  There’s some buzz around Ottawa on next year’s (pre-election) budget, particularly with respect to Indigenous education, something I’ll be talking about over the next couple of weeks.  And, of course, the Future Skills Centre (formerly

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A New Conservative Government

[the_ad id=”12740″] As you may have possibly heard, we had an election in Ontario the week before last. The Progressive Conservative Party led by Doug Ford won and will be sworn in on June 29th (i.e. after this blog goes dark for the summer). It will be another few weeks, or more likely months, before we get a clear picture of what this new government intends to do on post-secondary education.  Nevertheless, here is a brief thumbnail of what we can

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More York

[the_ad id=”12709″] Judging by most of my mail bag, yesterday’s piece on the York strike was a hit.  So, I thought I would throw in two tidbits which I didn’t really get to yesterday, as well as give my suggestion for a way out of the strike. Tidbit 1:  For those of you who don’t know the geography of York: it’s massive.  The main Keele campus is over 450 acres.  But, in a terrible for management/great for labour act of

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The York Strike

Back on March 5, CUPE local 3903, which represents graduate students, contract faculty and graduate assistants at York University, went on strike. A university offer was resoundingly rejected by the union membership in early April.  The union has consistently rejected arbitration. The Liberals dithered about back-to-work legislation until so late in the legislative session that it could easily be blocked by the NDP (which it was, as could easily have been foreseen given the NDP pledge never to use back-to-work legislation). 

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