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Category: Politics

Party Platform Analysis: The Greens

So, we’ve been in this ghastly election period for several weeks now, but it’s just starting to get interesting, with parties releasing actual platforms.  I’ll be putting together briefs on each of the parties as they come out, starting today. Let’s start with the Green Party, which is the first to have released a complete platform.  This platform is slimmer than the sprawling 185-page monstrosity the Party had up on its website for the first weeks of the campaign, and which

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September 11, 2015 7 Comments

October 20th

Policy-making in Ottawa is like a huge river, moving in a slow stately procession, and only occasionally providing excitement if you hit some rapids.  It’s not like Washington, which – for all its vaunted “gridlock” – is actually more like an ice jam: there is a lot of pressure in the system, and things can move pretty quickly if the jam breaks somewhere.  Partly it’s because of our Westminster system, and our tradition of party discipline: there are not many independent policy

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August 26, 2015 1 Comment

Welcome Back

Morning, all.  August 24th.  Back, as promised. School starts shortly.  The new crop of frosh were born in 1997, if you can believe that – to them, Princess Diana has never been alive, and Kyoto has always been a synonym for climate change politics (check out the Beloit Mindset List for more of these ).  Stormclouds line the economic horizon.  It’s going to be an interesting year. In the US, progress on any of the big issues in higher education

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August 24, 2015 No Comments

Truth and Reconciliation

Earlier this month, Justice Murray Sinclair released the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).  There are some elements of it that make for interesting reading from a post-secondary perspective. (To international readers: for a period of roughly a century, the Government of Canada provided education to First Nations Students through a series of “residential schools”, which were mostly run by one of the main churches.  These places were horrific; over that century, or so, tens of thousands

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June 18, 2015 4 Comments

Will Things Change if Harper Goes?

There is a strain of thinking in higher education that goes something like this: “everything bad in higher education funding is the fault of neo-liberals [this being a general term of abuse rather than an actual ideological signifier].  Once neo-liberals are out of office, we can get back to the good old days, and not worry about austerity”. It seems to me that the evidence for this point-of-view is pretty thin.  Near as I can tell, neither of the main

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June 10, 2015 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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