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Category: Politics

Canada Apprentice Loans: Adventures in Government

I know it’s exceptionally nerdy, but I highly recommend the experience of reading a new law’s regulatory impact statement, for no other reason than to get a taste of the sheer absurdity of government these days. Take the regulations on the new Apprentice Loan Act. The executive summary on the cost-benefit of the program (scroll down a bit) reads as follows: The Canada Apprentice Loan (CAL) will cost the Government of Canada (GoC) $74 million over 10 years, from 2014–15

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January 8, 2015 2 Comments

End of Term

Hi all.  Today’s blog will be the last for 2014.  Normal service will resume on Monday January 5th. End of term is always a time for stick-taking.  And so I’d like to offer a few thoughts on what’s happened in 2014. First, the positive stuff.  I think we should note an enormous and fairly positive shift in the tone of the discussion regarding education and the labour market.  The fact that I was not able to offer a “worst back-to-school” article this year is

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December 12, 2014 7 Comments

Massachusetts, Not Michigan

TD economist Ed Clark gave an enormously important talk last week, which deserves a lot of attention.  You can get the gist of it from two quotes: “To return to the path to prosperity, Canada needs to stop wasting time worrying about how to get low-wage jobs back from the U.S. or abroad and start thinking about how to use our well-educated population, immigration policies and public health care to our advantage”. “Stop competing with Michigan. Start competing with Massachusetts”.

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December 8, 2014 1 Comment

Solving the Fees Problem

So, here’s the problem: Canadian governments are mostly broke.  Even the ones that didn’t look broke a couple of months ago (Alberta, Saskatchewan, Newfoundland) are now very definitely broke (especially Newfoundland).  There’s no money for PSE.  Everybody knows that. So, equally, everyone knows that the only way institutions are going to avoid a crunch is either by turning themselves into finishing schools for the Asian middle class, or by charging domestic students higher tuition fees.  No one genuinely thinks the

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December 3, 2014 No Comments

The Canada Post-Secondary Education Act

History lesson: Back in 1864, Canada West (i.e. Ontario) was getting hot under the collar about a little thing called representation by population.  Since the Durham Report, the two Canadas had been governed under a system that gave both Upper and Lower Canada a veto over legislation.  This had made sense when the two colonies were roughly the same size, but now that Canada West was growing faster, it seemed like a bad deal. The solution to this problem was

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November 19, 2014 No Comments
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