As anyone who was alive at the time knows, if you want to pick a decade when Canada was at its nadir, it was the 1990s. We managed to have a currency crisis, a fiscal crisis, a national unity crisis, and a recession which basically lasted seven years. It was bleak, bleak, bleak.
But in one very important way, it was better than today. Because at least, even though we were broke (both Saskatchewan and Newfoundland flirted with bankruptcy in 1993, the country nearly flew apart, etc. etc.) we were thinking about the future. And in particular, we were thinking about education.
The country actually had serious discussions about education policy, both at the K-12 and university level. Maclean’s would regularly do multi-page cover stories on both and people read them. They mattered. This is of course the period where Canadian university rankings originated and what people forget about those now is that the rankings were mostly an excuse for then-rankings editor Ann Dowsett-Johnson to write a 15-page think pieces about the State of Post-Secondary Education in Canada (no relation). The Rae government in Ontario launched a Royal Commission on Learning. A number of provinces held reviews of their post-secondary systems.
Almost none of this affected funding in the short term. Because as a nation we were cold, stony broke. Something like 30 cents of every dollar in tax was going just to pay interest on the debt (higher at the federal level). But the point is, people were thinking about education. Dollars came later, when we dug ourselves out of our fiscal/economic abyss, but in the meantime we actually had real discussions about how best to spend money in education (which, let’s face it, matters at least as much as the actual amount of expenditures).
Why did we do all this? Basically, we were worried about our kids. A long spell of de-industrialization plus the beginning of a telecommunication/information technology revolution made everybody pretty concerned about whether or not kids were learning the kinds of things they would need to survive in a new era. Add to that the fact that the boomers’ kids were the ones making their way through the system (the so-called “baby-boom echo”, a term which has since been more or less replaced by “Millennials”), and there was a fair bit of political saliency to concerns about education.
But it wasn’t just education. We did a whole bunch of other stuff that had long-term payoffs as well. We got rid of the deficit, so the children of the 1990s could grow up not having to waste all their tax dollars on interest payments (mission mostly successful). We turned the CPP into what is among the strongest pension funds in the world, again so that it would be there for Millennials. We started putting money into science. It was, for a brief shining moment, a world in which Canada designed policy for the future as much as for the present.
Now, you’d think we might be about to hit a similar moment in our political history. After all, as I showed back here, we have a similarly record-sized youth bulge moving through the system. In Alberta and BC especially, it’s overwhelming the secondary system and is headed straight for post-secondary. It should be the moment when we start spending on education, on making investments in the future.
But we’re not, are we? Forget whether we can afford to do so (we can, but that’s another story). With the welcome recent exception of housing—a policy field which might be where we have been committing the greatest crimes against the future over the last decade or so— we’re not even having discussions about policy, about how best to spend money and make policy to build a better future.
What we have instead is an incredibly bad case of present-ism. All our policy discussions are about how to avoid investing in the future, and spend money now, in the name of “affordability.” We spend time debating more government entitlement spending vs. tax cuts, but we never spend time talking about expenditure now vs. investing in the future (the left disguises this trade-off by claiming that all spending is investment, which is crackers, but whatever). I mean, think about the most recent round of big government expansion; namely, the expansion of childcare. Think about how that could have been framed as an education measure, to improve early learning, improve school- and learning-readiness. But it wasn’t, was it? It was framed as being about cost. About providing cheap care, rather than good care and even cheap care instead of abundant care (there actually were in fact some policy elements in the federal initiative designed to favour quality, but that’s not the way anyone chose to frame the issue). Which is another way of saying that we made it about the present rather than about the future.
This, friends, is the root cause of much of what ails Canada at the moment. It’s not a specific set of policies. It’s a refusal to talk about how to spend money, a refusal to discuss choices. It’s about being country which, frankly, has ceased to care about children and youth. It’s about the way we are systematically eating our future.
I am very much afraid that in this climate, the concerns of the post-secondary sector don’t stand a chance. No one will care about us if the main view about the future is one of complacency. This, and only this, should be the focus of post-secondary lobbying for the next year. Forget specific asks on research or internationalization or whatever. No one cares. The real battle is to get people to think about the future again. Nothing more or less.
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An excellent piece. It puts so much in perspective. I was hired as an assistant professor in 1989, the first tenure-track hire in my department in about eight years. That was not uncommon at any Canadian university then. By the time I submitted my first NSERC renewal the funding freeze had started. We younger folk were told that the funding would come back someday, which it did. But by that time we were mid-career and the funds went to those hired after us – as indeed they should have. But a lot of research careers never quite attained the level that they might have, which was a loss not only to the individuals but also to the country.
No, this isn’t a whine. Simply a way of echoing what you have said about the need to keep looking to the future rather than focusing on the present. If we plan we can hope to avoid some of the funding boom and bust cycles of the past with the associated damage that they caused.
Right on Alex.
However, the first step is for the post-secondary sector to get its own house in order.
Aging professors should not feel entitled to hang on to their salaries and benefits beyond the age of 65. It’s fine if there is a mutual agreement between the university and the faculty member. But they should not be collecting salaries while the school is running a deficit.
Ontario colleges addicted to international student tuition? Despite the study permit cap, Ontario colleges have changed little.
It’s no wonder public trust in colleges and universities is declining.
Read more in my book, The World’s Campus, by Doug Ronson
We do talk a lot about the future when it comes to fighting global warming and such. Moreover, much of the interest in affordability arises from the fact that with the roll-back of globalization, life is suddenly less affordable. It’s contextual.
The real worry in my mind is that the obsession with affordability, combined with an interest in the future, leads to transactionalism. Back in the 1990s, everybody seemed convinced that the future lay in jobs which were shortly to be offshored, and are now being done by artificial intelligence. This led, unfortunately, to an interest in focusing on particular fields. It’s taken a few years, and a crisis of affordability, for the obvious result to arise that students want to go to the least expense (and worse, effort) in order to prepare narrowly for their financial futures.
There’s an article on this in a recent number of The Chronicle of Higher Education, entitled “College Feels Transactional to Many Students. Who — or What — Is to Blame?”
In any case, I think it the true existential crisis facing universities in Canada as well as the United States.
Thank you Alex. Another insightful piece.
When I was at the Council of Ontario Universities, one of my efforts was to place our sector advocacy in a broader context. Don’t make it about us; make it about Ontario.
My challenge to the members of COU was to tell our story in the context of how it helps Ontario. What could the universities do to help create a stronger future for Ontario. Our tagline was “Partners in a Better Future”.
Each word in this tag line was important. The use of the word ‘partners’ was as important at the word ‘future’. Not only is the public policy discourse, as you point out, not focused enough on the future; the public policy discourse does not give enough acknowledgement to the need for cooperation and linkages to create a better society.
Creating jobs, building social capital, cleaning up the environment… none of these happen in isolation. The problems are complex but the solutions are made easier if we cooperate. I would challenge universities to look outward and seek ways to partner. The complex solutions of today require a vision for a future and a recognition that we must cooperate to deliver those solutions. Universities not only need to help think about the future, they must demonstrate partnership in building that future.
This was the theme of my term at COU and the subject of my last Blog at COU (see link below): https://ontariosuniversities.ca/news/partners-in-a-better-future/#:~:text=Educating%20students%20and%20advancing%20the,communities%20and%20for%20the%20province.
Planning for the future example made explicit here: https://www.gov.wales/well-being-future-generations-act-essentials-html