Category: Politics

Lines in a Budget

We hope you liked our review of the 2013 Federal Budget.  Just to round off last week’s commetary on the all things budgetary, I thought I’d offer a few thoughts on the dangers of coming to snap conclusions about government policy from a budget document. Obviously, there’s the problem of time.  It’s tough to try to get everything together, in a nice tight package, in the space of three or four hours; unlike the dudes who do news coverage for

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HESA’s 2013 Federal Budget Commentary

On Thursday afternoon, Finance Minister, Jim Flaherty, stood on the floor of the House of Commons, and delivered the Government’s eighth Federal Budget.  In lieu of an OTTSD for Friday, we at HESA have examined the document, and produced a commentary on its implications for higher education in Canada. You can read our 2013 Federal Budget Commentary, here. Thanks for reading.  And as always, let us know what you think.  

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A Dream Budget

Today is budget day in Ottawa.  Tonight, you’ll get our full budget coverage (replacing tomorrow’s morning blog), and if you’re of the twitter persuasion, you can follow my analysis from 4PM, on, at @AlexUsherHESA.  But for now, let’s think about what a good Canadian federal budget would look like for higher education. In keeping with the times, this will be a completely cost-neutral budget.  We’ll start with some obvious places to cut: the elimination of the education amount and textbook

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Skills Shortages (Part 2)

As I noted yesterday, much of the talk about skills shortages in Canada is data-free, and factually-challenged.  What, for instance, are we to make of claims that we have a huge shortage of people in the construction trades, when even a simple look at Labour Force Survey data tells a very different story? Unemployment by Industry, 2007-2012               Yeah, that’s right: workers in the social sciences, education, and government fields (mostly university graduates) have

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Skills Shortages (Part 1)

OK, apparently this week I’m going to have to talk about skills shortages, because it seems that people in Ottawa have LOST THEIR EVER-LOVING MINDS on the subject. The basics of the policy discussion are as follows: Canada currently has an unemployment rate of about 7.5%, which is deemed too high.  Despite there being roughly 6 unemployed people for every job vacancy, there are some jobs which are going unfilled because of skills shortages.  This, everyone can probably agree, is

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