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Category: Politics

How Jean Charest Could Learn to Stop Worrying and Love a Tuition Rollback

If you’re Jean Charest, you’re probably starting to get antsy about the student strike jeopardizing the winter semester. But there’s actually a pretty simple way that the Quebec government could solve the impasse. A few weeks ago, we explained how what universities charge (sticker price) is different from what students pay (net tuition), due to the multi-headed loan-and-bursary monster known as student aid. But loans and bursaries aren’t the only way to offset tuition – there are also billions of

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April 11, 2012 1 Comment

The Ontario Budget

Well, I don’t think anyone quite expected that. The quick summary: faced with enormous structural deficits, the Ontario government chose to close the fiscal gap with delays in capital projects, some cross-government efficiency measures and – not to put too fine a point on it – sticking it to public sector workers. The upside is that as a result they managed to avoid program cuts in most areas, which to be honest is a bit of a miracle. If you

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March 28, 2012 No Comments

The Tensions in First Nations PSE

One thing that rarely gets talked about in First Nations’ higher education is the question of who’s driving the agenda – chiefs, elders or students? As with any political agenda, there are a number of legitimate actors with different and valid interests. The first set of actors are the chiefs. They have a big say in Aboriginal PSE, not just in Saskatchewan where they actually own First Nations University of Canada, but anywhere that small Aboriginal institutes have sprung up

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March 12, 2012 1 Comment

You Couldn’t Make It Up

This email is G-rated, so I can’t use the full range of sexual/scatological imagery needed to describe my true feelings about the Ontario government’s Tuition Rebate announcement last week. I’ll keep it to: I told you so. To recap, the Ontario Liberals made a not-particularly sensible election promise to give a 30% rebate tuition to full-time dependent students. But at least it involved giving some new money to low-income students, even if it came at the cost of providing a

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January 9, 2012 9 Comments

A Harper-ized Canada Student Loans Program

I rarely say this about a Jane Taber article, but her Christmas Eve piece on Prime Minister Harper’s stewarding of federal-provincial relations was mildly fascinating. Her thesis is that Harper is gradually starting to impose his vision of water-tight federalism and has a long-term plan to get the federal government to back off and let provinces get on with doing whatever they are supposed to do under Article 92 of the Constitution. So, what’s the impact on higher education? I

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January 4, 2012 1 Comment

One Thought to Start Your Day

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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