Election 2025: The Minor Party Manifestos

Morning all. As usual during federal elections, I devote some time to each of the party platforms before election day. Today, I am going to focus on the five parties that have absolutely no hope of forming government. Liberal and Conservative platforms will follow.

In increasing order of likely seat totals:

The new-and-centrist-and-made-some-kind-of- sense-when-Justin-was-running-but-harder-to-understand-now Canadian Future Party platform has a paragraph on postsecondary education. They’d like you to know they are in favour of more research. Basic research, applied research, knowledge transfer, you name it. Details are scarce. But there’s an interesting appendix to their platform on how they favour evidence-based policy making that in theory would have some good implications for people who produce such evidence (i.e. scientists and academics). One wishes other parties could make such commitments.

The increasingly-Irrelevant-but-still-on-the-ballot People’s Party of Canada manifesto actually has a fair bit of stuff which is relevant to postsecondary education, none of it good. As one might expect, they are very upset about EDI measures (though of course they use the American contraction “DEI” because where the culture wars are concerned, everything must come with the lens of the US right) and promise to “stop funding groups that promote DEI ideology (which depending on how you define this could very definitely include universities and colleges. In the same vein, the Party promises to “withhold federal funding from any postsecondary institution shown to be violating the freedom of expression of its students or faculty.” And, for good measure, the party wants to “substantially lower the number of visas granted to foreign students while eliminating work permits for them, except for academic work on campus.”

Moving on: the Green Party of Canada manifesto, as usual, is promising everything including the kitchen sink on postsecondary education. To be fair, this year’s manifesto is somewhat less shama-lama-ding-dong than the 2021 manifesto, which I costed at around $100 billion, but nevertheless the promises this time remain eye-wateringly large, but almost entirely in ways that leave higher education institutions no better off.

There are certainly promises to make higher education cheaper. The Greens want to forgive all outstanding federal student loans (about $27 billion last I checked), “fully fund” (whatever that means) the Post-Secondary Student Support Program (PSSSP) for First Nations students, and “gradually” introduce free tuition, starting with low-income students, presumably on the abandoned Ontario model. I guess that last one is meant to show some fiscal rectitude, though if you’re blowing $27 billion in the name of accessibility on students who have already accessed postsecondary education, you’d hardly think it matters much.

Then there are promises to spend money on institutions but only if they spend it on things the Greens deem worthwhile or reduce income from elsewhere. So, “stable public funding” to reduce “dependence on corporate donors” (are they trying to kill fundraising?), or “stable long-term funding” to support mentorship programs, expand faculty diversity and create more tenure-track positions (I am dying to hear the theory of federalism that makes this possible). And then of course there are proposals to reduce institutional income by capping international student tuition fees at some undisclosed “fair and reasonable rates.” Presumably, the Greens think they are doing international students a favour here; I am guessing that it has not occurred to them that the main response of most institutions to lowering international student tuition fees would be to drastically reduce their international student intake.

Three specific promises do hold some promise, even if they are phrased in a somewhat confused manner. First, there is a promise to “expand re-skilling and apprenticeship programs through the Canada Training Benefit, ensuring workers can transition into sustainable, high-demand careers,” a promise which makes infinitely more sense if you take out the words “through the Canada Training Benefit.” Second, there is a promise to triple funding Canada Graduates Scholarships at the Master’s level and double it at the PhD level” (why 3x one and 2x the other? No clue). And finally the party would like to “strengthen Canada’s position as a global research leader by increasing funding for universities and attracting top international scholars and students.” which seems awfully vague but at least has its ambitions in more or less the right place.

None of this is costed, of course. But I’d have to say this represents a minimum of $50 billion in new expenditures over 4 years, plus several billion in lower revenues to institutions by capping international student fees. And nearly all of it is in the name of making postsecondary education cheaper rather than better. 

Then there’s the New Democratic Party, which has made its platform very difficult to evaluate in part because it has chosen not to publish a traditional platform. It has a costing document, which lists the costs of specific promises. And it has a web page which contains 34 often vague policy “commitments”. But they don’t line up very well. So, while the costing document has a line-item worth $75 million per year for “training and apprenticeships” under “Stronger and more independent Canada,” the only apparent reference to training is in the section on Homes, where there is a vague reference to “training 100,000 new skilled workers” without specifying or what baseline they are measuring themselves against (there are currently about a quarter million apprentices in the construction trades). Would the money go to apprentices themselves? Would it be spent on training facilities? On subsidies to employers to increase training spots? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

What I can tell you is this: the word “student” does not appear in any of the commitments and nor, so far as I can tell, has it appeared in any NDP press release since they briefly focused on student housing in the fall of 2023.  Same with the words “universities,” “colleges,” “science,” and “innovation.”  The party did use the word “postsecondary” twice: once to signal support of reducing access barriers for indigenous learners, and once in the context of its Northern Ontario platform, where it indicated it wanted increased support for francophone institutions (i.e., Hearst and Sudbury).  That’s it.  That’s all.  And neither of those commitments are supported by any cost estimates, which suggests they aren’t important enough to be in the Party’s fiscal framework. 

Back in the 1990s and 2000s, you could pretty much guarantee that the NDP platform would have the biggest promises of any party in this area.  Now?  Basically nada.  It’s perhaps not that surprising that institutions are not high on the NDP’s list of target constituencies, but to not even mention students?  On postsecondary education, research, and training this is the thinnest NDP manifesto in over 40 years.

Finally, The Bloc Québécois manifesto, surprisingly, and for the first time that I can remember, has a few things relating to postsecondary education. It says it will advocate for greater spending on research, and will demand that the federal government support any provincial student housing initiative (the latter I think is probably already baked in because of the 2024 changes to the Apartment Construction Loan Program that offered low-cost loans to institutions building student housing). Kind of an interesting development.

Tomorrow: the Liberals