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Category: Politics

New Brunswick Election Manifesto Analysis, 2024

Good morning, everyone. Hope you had a good weekend. The New Brunswick election is a mere week away, so let’s get to our platform analysis. I’m restricting the analysis to the three parties with an outside shot of actually winning a seat—the Greens, the Conservatives and the Liberals—and yes, I know there are the New Democrats and the People’s Alliance, but c’mon. New Brunswick politics holds a special place in my heart. Mainly because of the frequency of moments of

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October 15, 2024 No Comments

British Columbia Election Manifesto Analysis, 2024

British Columbia goes to the polls on October 19th, and so it’s time to take a look at what the parties are saying about universities, colleges, and students. You’re about to get a lot of these because we have three provincial elections going on simultaneously (New Brunswick votes on the 21st and Saskatchewan on the 29th). Warning, though: This might be the simplest election platform analysis I’ve ever done because there’s just so little on offer. Let’s start with the

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October 8, 2024 1 Comment

Marc Miller Strikes Again

On Monday last week, the Liberals got humiliated in a pair of by-elections in Quebec and Manitoba. In response, the Liberal party decided it needed to regain some popularity and that the best way of doing so was to kick universities and colleges a bit. And so the Minister of Immigration (and unofficial National Minister of Higher Education) Marc Miller announced a set of changes to study visas and post-graduation work visas. (How do I know this was a sudden, unplanned

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September 23, 2024 3 Comments

What Does a Poilievre Government Science Policy Look Like?

I did a tour of Ottawa the week before last, chatting with folks about what the future looks like. Here are some of the things I kept hearing. Treat absolutely nothing in here as a prediction, this is all just gossip. Now that last one I found very interesting, and I think it’s worth going back to the Harper record on Science and Universities. A lot of you got quite angry with me a few years ago when I compared

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April 1, 2024 5 Comments

A Deeply Unhelpful Federal Court Ruling

Just before Christmas, the federal court released a judgement with respect to the case of a Chinese student applying to a Mechanical Engineering PhD program at the University of Waterloo and whether or not an immigration official was justified in denying a visa on national security grounds.  The decision has some enormous and (I think) deleterious ramifications for graduate student recruitment in Canada.  The background to this issue, obviously, is the rising concern about espionage in universities, in particular by

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January 10, 2024 1 Comment

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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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