No, this isn’t a Chuck Klosterman riff, and nor is it a pitch for Andrew Potter’s new blog on the end of the analog age (although I would strongly recommend reading both if that period is of any interest to you). It is, however, an attempt to close a little gap in my readers’ knowledge. I have been told by some of my millennial readers that my frequent references to the horror of the 1990s fly completely over the heads of some readers under the age of 45 or so. So today I am going to try to rectify this.

Let’s start with the politics of the 1990s. The country basically lost its mind in early 1990s when the Meech Lake Accord—an attempt to “bring Quebec into the Constitution” (i.e. get them to sign the deal the other nine had signed nine years’ earlier by modifying the 1981 agreement a bit). By the time this deal fell apart in June of 1990, the whole country was yelling at each other, mainly—but not exclusively—along Quebec/not-Quebec and Indigenous/non-Indigenous lines.

This led to a wild increase in support for the Quebec sovereignty movement, and to the following:

• An interminable set of constitutional negotiations which ended up as something called the “Charlottetown Accords” which never made sense even when it was signed.
• A referendum on the Charlottetown Accords in which they were roundly rejected.
• A 1993 federal election in which the Liberals took power, the Conservatives were obliterated and replaced on the opposition benched by two successor parties, the Parti Québécois and the Reform Party.
• A 1994 Quebec provincial election in which the Parti Québécois won a majority.
• A 1995 Quebec independence referendum in the “Yes” side lead for most of the last two weeks and the “No” eked out a ludicrously tiny-thin 50.9% majority.

So, the country was falling apart politically. Add to this:

• A recession of almost unparalleled ferocity from 1990 to 1992. You know how Americans talk about the 2008-9 recession? 90-92 was our equivalent.
• Unemployment rates of 12% or higher. At one point in late 1992 it was estimated that one in three people on the Island of Montreal was on some form of social assistance.
• A currency that was constantly being devalued, at one point referred to by the Wall Street Journal as “the northern Peso.”
• A central Bank headed by a team of unmitigated sadists, who insisted on keeping interest rates about 400-500 basis points above whatever it was in the US in order to prop up the dollar, and to hell with those unemployment rates.
• A series of federal budget deficits from 1990 to 1994 which topped $30 billion (about $60B in today’s dollars—for comparison, last year’s “out-of-control” budget deficit was about $40 Billion).
• A set of provinces which were all equally screwed, fiscally. Saskatchewan actually flirted with bankruptcy in 1993 before getting what amounted to a bailout from the feds.

In other words, the country was falling apart economically as well. What got us out of it all—albeit at an incredibly high price—was the Martin budget of 1995, which slashed federal spending including most notably federal transfers to provincial governments, including the ones that at least notionally were meant to support post-secondary education. And this of course had cascading effects on the budgets of provincial governments, who at the time also needed to balance their budgets because bond markets were going nuclear on anyone who wasn’t at least pretending to get their act in order.

So, what effect did this have on universities and colleges?

Well, you certainly had some provincial governments come in with an ax. In Alberta, Ralph Klein cut institutional budgets by 21% between 1993 and 1995. In Ontario, the Harris government delivered a 15-percent midyear cut to institutional budgets in 1996, and also permitted tuition to rise 20% in each of the years 1996-1998, on condition that institutions saved 30% of the money for student aid (today, institutions are begging for 5%). In Quebec, the cuts imposed by the Parti Quebecois in (IIRC) 1998 were smaller but still in double-digit territory.

What happened at institutions? Well:

• Most institutions experienced either pay freezes or hiring freezes or both. Nationally, the number of tenured or tenure-track professors fell by about 15% between 1992 and 1998.
• Unionization jumped as a result.
• In colleges, hierarchies flattened a lot. There was a whole layer of managers that got axed (I suspect these mostly grew back over the last fifteen years).
• Money got so tight that students lost out on some really basic educational experiences. At one major U15 university I know of, for instance, there was a period where science students couldn’t get into laboratories until their third year, simply because money was so tight.
• Basic maintenance got sacrificed. And I don’t just mean big capital outlays: I know of universities where for awhile only every second lightbulb got replaced, and where profs began bringing their own toilet paper to work, because they couldn’t be sure that facilities were actually re-stocking the loos.

There was one college and one university closure (the Nova Scotia Teachers’ College and College de Grands Lacs, but the latter was a hare-brained idea to begin with). We even gained a couple of universities in this period (Nipissing and Toronto Metropolitan, though both were evolutions of institutions that had been around for decades). There weren’t that many program closures. For the most part, what happened is best described by the noun enshittification; that is, we kept doing all the same things but with less money and a lot fewer bodies around to do it. There was little to no attempt to try to re-invent institutions by re-defining processes.

Now, in nine out of ten provinces, what has been happening for the last few years has been absolutely nothing like the nineties. I know there are some in the sector who like to scream “Austerity!” at anything that moves, but 1) in eight out of ten provinces, actual government cuts in the past few years have been nowhere near as severe as those from the 1990s, and 2) in Ontario, where government cuts were more than offset by international fees. It’s really only in Alberta where cuts have actually been anywhere in the neighbourhood of those in the 1990s (in percentage terms, the cuts of the last few years were bigger, but in absolute terms they were about same size because at the time government funds were a bigger piece of institutional base funding).

But what happens next, that’s the question. With the loss of many international student dollars and a near-total absence of new provincial dollars, are Canadian institutions headed back to the 1990s? Well, we’ll see. In Ontario, I am pretty sure the answer is yes. Elsewhere, we’re probably in for something in between long-term stagnation and veeeery slow enshittification.

Not quite the nineties. But probably worse than any decade since then.