When it comes to higher education, one of the most salient facts about Canada is that we are a federation in which both levels of governments play important roles.  Yet, to put it mildly, we are not very good at co-ordinating those roles.  Indeed, some might say we are uniquely bad at it.  If we were serious about higher education, we wouldn’t be.

The main problem has to do with Science and how it is funded. The bulk of our scientific work force resides in universities, where their salaries are paid by a mix of tuition fees and provincial tax dollars mainly on the basis of undergraduate enrolments.  But the dollars that fund the actual science come mostly from Ottawa.  The size of the workforce thus depends on provincial dollars, but there is no way to connect this with the amount of research funding available.  Nor is there a way to mediate if federal research priorities incentivize universities to behave in ways which are counter to provincial priorities (for instance, by making them focus more on research than on teaching than they otherwise would).

This is, frankly, ruinous.  It has caused immense distortions in our higher education system and makes the whole system less efficient.  There are two basic causes: one is that provinces have an insufficiently developed sense of science policy and so cannot easily talk to the federal government on these issues, and the second is that the federal government prefers to ignore provinces wherever possible.  And to be clear, the reason the feds don’t talk to the provinces isn’t because they think the provinces have nothing to say, it’s because they might have something to say and then the feds would have to pay attention to it, which would limit their untrammeled freedom of policy manoeuvre.  The federal government places a much higher premium on the ability to make big announcements about investments in flashy university infrastructure/technology than it does on the long-term coherence of the system.  And if the provinces can’t find the dollars for the upkeep on the shiny buildings the feds funded?  Well, too bad, so sad.

(it would be interesting to write a history of major Canadian institutions through an exclusive lens of broken federal spending commitments which left provinces holding the bag.  Hospitals, colleges, universities, you name it – if it’s a major Canadian institution in an area of provincial jurisdiction originating after World War II, it’s at least even money that the province started it based on a promise of 50-50 funding from the federal government that was later renounced.  And thus the Federation stumbles on.)

It is not beyond the wit of humankind to develop co-ordinating mechanisms in policy areas where jurisdictional goals may overlap.  Indeed, some serious federal countries (e.g. Germany, Switzerland) have regular forums in which the two levels of government can discuss areas of common interest in higher education and arrive at compromise solutions.  Canada, unfortunately, is not such a serious country.  I mean heck, it took the Naylor Report and a couple of years of intense lobbying for the scientific community to even get the four federal granting councils to co-ordinate with each other about policy, let alone bring provinces into the discussion. 

It has come to the point, I think, where several provinces have just given up and ceded power to the federal government.  If you look at institutional capital expenditures over the past 20 years or so, an increasing fraction of these are coming from Ottawa: and since these expenditures are mostly tied to research, you have this phenomenon where the priorities of the government spending on new things is not the same as the priorities of the governments spending on keeping all the old things afloat.  In the short term, this approach avoids arguments; in the long term it makes the system worse.

I don’t think we are likely to see a halt to this any time soon.  As the Parliamentary Budget Office has pointed out, we are heading for a period where the federal government will be running sustained surpluses while the provinces run sustained (and possibly crippling) deficits.  So, the scope for this kind of counter-productive chicanery will increase.  Overall, one might imagine some kind of trade-off in terms of provinces uploading certain responsibilities to the federal government, but since a) education is the very last responsibility Quebec would ever hand over to the feds and b) Quebec is also the only province whose finances are in structural long-term balance, the likelihood of a deal in this respect seems slim. Thus, we are stuck with a situation where we have provinces and the feds, each sovereign in their own sphere, both funding a set of institutions that straddle the two spheres to different purposes.    

The solution is to get various people in the room talking.  The absolute worst way to do this, of course, would be to have the federal government in the room at Council of Ministers of Education, Canada meetings.  Remember: the problem at hand is not to get the federal government more involved in education, it’s how to ensure that that the federal role in Science and Technology complements provincial education goals.   Instead we should try at least one of two other possibilities.

The first would be for provinces to up their game on science/research and innovation and create a Forum of Science and Technology ministers (along the lines of the Forum of Labour Market Ministers) where representatives of both levels of government could discuss issues that come at the interface of technology, science and the economy.   A second, more complicated, but perhaps less constitutionally fraught path forward would be to adopt an “open method of co-ordination” in Science (much like that used in Europe in the Bologna process) which would a) soften the constitutional edges by involving a large number of social actors other than governments – including, most importantly, institutions themselves – and b) focus on system conditions and continual improvements rather than on set-piece debates around annual budget allocations. 

Neither is a perfect solution, but either would be considerably more sophisticated than the system we have now.  It would be complicated, yes.  But serious countries don’t shy away from challenges just because they are complicated.  Particularly in a policy field which everyone agrees is so central to social and economic progress.   

Note: I had planned a coda to this series for tomorrow, but it will have to wait for Monday as tomorrow I’ll be reporting on the Ontario budget and probably also some news out of New Brunswick.  ‘til then.