Morning all.  Today’s the day where I try to sum up and compare what the various parties are promising in different areas and what that likely means for the sector.  For greater detail on individual party platforms for PSE, you may wish to consult the previous analyses: Conservative, NDP, Liberal and Green.

Let’s start with the issue of transfers to provinces.  In previous years, but particularly in the two decades following the major cutbacks embedded in the Liberal government’s 1995 budget, this was an area where parties (particularly the NDP) would try to outdo each other to show their devotion to higher education.  This year, none of the major parties mentioned transfers.  The Green Party is promising $10 billion, but in the spirit of blindingly amateurish adventurism that pervades their platform, it’s genuinely unclear if this promise is meant to be over a term of office or annually (not that it matters, since it’s all magic beans anyway).  This does not mean there will be a freeze to transfers if others get in: the Harper government put in automatic annual escalators to transfers which the Liberals haven’t touched and therefore seem to be baked-in as an expected “normal.” But no one seems to think that doing something more or doing something differently is a vote-winning option.

The question is whether this represents a change in views about higher education or a change in views about fiscal federalism.  I suspect it’s the latter.  As long as parties can’t be seriously accused of cutting the Canada Social Transfer, then no one is unhappy, and so there is no pressure to make it a priority.  Instead, what parties prefer doing is proposing boutique stuff that the Feds can do on their own. 

And boy, does that instinct ever show up on research, where not only do parties want to be unencumbered by dealing with provinces, but they also largely want to be unencumbered from dealing with granting councils.  In the latter half of the Harper era, the Prime Minister’s Office effectively became a fourth (or fifth, if you include CFI) granting council, dispensing boutique scientific largesse without dealing with any eggheads with expertise in science or the management thereof.  This was in large part what David Naylor and co. were kicking back against in the Fundamental Science Review.  

But now this approach seems to have become standard for both the NDP and the Liberals.  The former talk about investing in research in forestry, clean tech, hydrogen and autism without ever mentioning granting councils.  The Liberals are offering $100M over 5 years for COVID research and $100m/year for a fund to pursue “moonshot” research (god help us all) on vaccines.  $75 million a year to help universities commercialize research (a sum that I guarantee will exceed the value of any new commercialization), and 1,000 additional Canada Research Chairs.  None of which involves the granting councils, so what exactly the Liberals think the benefit is of having an extra 1,000 people competing for the same limited pot of research funding is a bit of a mystery.

The Tories go further and eschew any new research funding, granting council-based or otherwise.  Instead, they talk about regulatory and policy solutions to intractable problems – incentivizing innovation in health care systems and reforming the ludicrously wasteful SR&ED tax credits (both of which are good ideas and could have real impact).  The Liberals, it should be noted, have an almost-identical promise on SR&ED.

SR&ED isn’t the only place where Liberal and Conservative plans overlap.  Both are committed to deeply under-baked ideas about creating a “DARPA for Canada”.  The Conservatives made a show of promising $5 Billion for a DARPA, but a quick look at the PBO costing estimate reveals that this is not fact true – they expect the institution to be “self-funding” by year 4, which is hilarious.  DARPA’s project success rate is only 5-10%, and nearly all the stuff that gives it a good name now (inventing weather satellites, the computer mouse, the internet) happened over 50 years ago when commercialization wasn’t a thing.  DARPA’s recent commercialization record isn’t shabby, but it sure as hell isn’t self-funding.  The idea that you can fund wacky, high-risk “out-there” research and get to self-sufficiency in four years suggests that the Conservative manifesto authors know nothing about innovation.  Or research.  Or risk.  Oy vey.

But the Liberal platform, offering $2 billion in seemingly hard dollars for the same pile of nonsense, is no better.  There are a lot of known problems in Canadian innovation policy and “DARPA” – that is, an extremely flexible, extremely opaque agency which employs no career public servants and does none of its own research but instead runs programs (mainly consisting of lots of seed grants to university and private-sector researchers) to develop high-level technological visions (e.g. “developing novel, bio-based technologies to overcome key challenges facing domestic supply of Rare Earth Elements (REEs)”), emphatically solves none of them.  Nor is it remotely imaginable that the Government of Canada would ever permit an agency to have the freedom and flexibility that DARPA has to achieve similar results (read Benjamin Reinhardt’s lengthy but still very good essay “Why Does DARPA Work” and see if you can imagine any of it in Canada).  Anyone who proposes a $2 billion effort without a reasonable rationale nor a plausible vision of how a program might work should not be trusted. 

On to student aid.  Here the Tories passed entirely, which is a missed opportunity given their stab at a youth-friendly stance in some of their housing proposals.  The Liberals and the NDP have decided to agree that interest on student loans is a bad thing and henceforth intend to eliminate it for the life of all student loans.  This is a wasteful promise which student unions adore but will have zero impact on access and precious little on affordability, as my colleagues Christine Neill and Saul Schwartz noted in an excellent essay here.  

On grants, the NDP wants to make permanent the temporary (2020-2023), Liberal Covid-response measure to increase the maximum Canada Student Grant to $6000 (their initial platform was a bit vague on this, but the costing document makes the intent clear); the Liberals give no indication of what they will do past 2023.  The Liberals are also promising (as they did in the last election) to give greater repayment relief to parents of young children and to delay the start of loan repayment, both of which are much more sensible and cost-efficient than their loan interest plan.  The NDP also have a reasonably sensible policy on student debt forgiveness but are trying to hide all the reasonable bits because their base would prefer a much less targeted and more wasteful approach.

(The Greens, again, exist outside this consensus – and outside all known variations of the multiverse – promising to eliminate all student debt at a cost of $21 billion or so – and then hand out about $50 billion in retroactive emergency COVID-funding to students because reasons).  

Anyways, enough trees – let’s try to look at the forest.  The big picture looks like this:  it’s not that there is nothing in these manifestos related to students, innovation and post-secondary education.  There is; some of it is pretty dopey, but it’s there.  The parties know that there are issues to be addressed.  Sure, the Tories appear clueless about students and the NDP clueless about innovation and so if you want to support the party that “gets” the most issues, the Liberals would be your choice.  Or I guess the Greens if your supply of LSD is sufficiently robust.

But what is striking is the extent to which the solutions that parties are touting are divorced from the actual problems they purport to solve.  No one, as far as I can tell, says “what are the problems/what are the solutions/what policies can we advocate for that will be effective and consistent with our ideology”.  Rather, the sequence looks more like “what are the policy areas that we need to look like we have a clue about/what policies can we think of that are at least adjacent to these areas and make it appear as though we are addressing problems/let’s do that”. 

(I wouldn’t say this is true of quite everything in these platforms…the SR&ED credit promise from both the Liberals and Tories is an exception.  But it’s true of an awful lot)

I don’t think this is a purely post-secondary education thing: I think it runs deeply across all party platforms.  But I think what one can see is that peak post-secondary organizations don’t seem to be able to stem this tide of nonsense, because it keeps coming thicker and thicker every year.   

Do you remember when Stephen Colbert invented the word “truthiness” – that is, the quality of seeming or being felt to be true, even (or maybe especially) if it wasn’t?  That’s kind of how I fell about all these manifestos.  They are not policy, really, just policy-ish. 

We deserve better.