Category: Politics

Ontario (Dumpster Fire) Manifesto Analysis

You may have heard that there is an election on in Ontario.  I tried my best to leave the province for the duration but I’m back now, and holy Moses I wish I weren’t.  It is truly godawful.  A dumpster fire, as the kids say.  But duty calls, and so, forthwith, the traditional HESA platform analysis. Let’s start with the Liberals, whose platform on higher education is essentially that from the last budget: a commitment to a student aid program of targeted

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The Canadian IT Sector: From Self-Hype to Self-Pity

The Canadian tech sector has two modes: self-hype and self-pity.  Neither is very pretty. You may recently have seen articles floating around the internet talking about how great Canada is as a tech destination, how Canada is “winning”/ can “win” the AI race (whatever the hell that is supposed to mean – the verb “to win” takes on vast new meanings in these articles).  There’s been one every two weeks or so, often from big American magazines, for the last

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Debt-Free Policies

There’s a new policy fashion in student aid and it’s called “debt-free PSE” (or debt-free college, depending on which side of the border you reside).  But what does it mean? Some might think of debt-free PSE as being similar to tuition-free PSE, but in fact they are quite different in practice for two reasons.  The first difference is that under debt-free PSE, the level of tuition can be anything you please: the only thing that is constant is that all

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Budget 2018

Good morning all. We at HESA Towers have our 2018 Budget Commentary ready for your review. So, last night was interesting, what with the Budget, the response to the Naylor report and the criminal scheduling of all this on the same evening as Toronto FC’s home-opener (yes, I am still bitter).  It was particularly interesting because the budget’s direction was difficult to guess in advance.  Sure, we knew the middle class was going to be mentioned, and some focus on

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The Budget Speech Bill Morneau Should Give

“…Mr. Speaker, we know that living standards depend on productivity, productivity depends on innovation, and innovation depends on skills, technology, and competition.  So we are going to ramp up on all of them.  This won’t be easy.  It won’t be quick.  We are not doing this with an eye to the next election; it’s a marathon not a sprint.  But we have to start somewhere. Skills Let’s start with skills.  While recognizing that having a skilled labour force is a

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