As you may have noticed, there’s a Liberal leadership vote on, with results to be announced this weekend. The conceit of today’s blog is that anyone might want to vote for a leader based on actual policy platforms rather than “electability,” so buckle up and see what it is that an improbably fourth Liberal victory might mean.

So, let’s start by looking at how the leadership candidates’ platforms shape up at the broad level. All of them want to talk about housing, economic growth, and climate change (the last one consisting of a huge number of excuses about why they are dropping what had been their signature Carbon tax policy and replacing it with a variety of not-very-convincing alternatives). Freeland seems to want to stake out ground as the wonkiest of all of them, with policies for just about everything except fiscal policy (which given that she was Finance Minister for the last four years is a little bit weird). Carney may be the first Liberal in history to reach the top of the greasy pole without talking about healthcare.

What Liberal Leadership Hopefuls Choose to Talk About

	Carney	Freeland	Gould	Baylis
Climate Change	X	X	X	X
Housing	X	X	X	X
Economic Growth	X	X	X	X
Health Care		X	X	X
Affordability		X	X
Defense		X	X
Foreign Policy		X		X
Cultural Industries			X	X
Government Reform		X		X
Party Renewal		X	X
Fiscal Policy	X
Tariffs		X

(On top of all this, Gould has some stuff about reconciliation with indigenous peoples, people with disabilities, and Basic Income (eyeroll) and Baylis has some ideas about foreign trade and immigration, part of which involves a significant increase in surveillance of Designated Learning Institutions. But basically you can take it as read that the table above encapsulates what Liberals care about.)

I want to spend the rest of this blog will focus specifically on candidates’ economic plans and how knowledge and skills play a role therein, but before I get there I should discuss one aspect of the Carney platform that may be of relevance. And that is his proposal to re-organize government spending so that “spending” and “investment” are more clearly delineated, and that any balanced budget commitments only apply to the former and not the latter, on the theory that investments pay dividends and including both in any balanced budgets pledges would stifle these future-looking investments.

Sounds enticing, doesn’t it? The question of course is: what counts as an investment? Is it just physical investments, or do things like Science and Education count? Carney is silent on the matter, but bank on it, when he becomes leader this is going to be a live issue in Ottawa the very next day. (This is not, of course, to say that this policy is in any way a wise one. Andrew Coyne lays out a pretty good list of reasons why it’s not in this article in the Globe and Mail).

But on to the issue which matters most for the postsecondary sector, which is how the candidates think about economic growth and what that might mean for any possible spending/ investment in support of that

Of the four candidates, Frank Baylis is the one candidate who actually flat out says we need to spend more money on universities (he does not mention colleges, although since the reference to universities comes under a general heading “investing in education” I suspect he means both) How? How much? For what? Details. No matter, it’s the thought that counts. For the others, it’s hard to see that they understand the role of knowledge in the modern economy. For instance:

• Mark Carney’s plan makes no reference either to skills or research as drivers of economic growth. For him it’s all about security, diversification of trading partners, infrastructure and government reform, inclusiveness and…government use of AI, for some reason.
• Chrystia Freeland’s plan makes no references to research, and only one to skills – but that is with respect to unlocking immigrants’ skills through foreign credential recognition. Skills for resident Canadians? Crickets.
• Karina Gould’s plan says nothing about research, though it does promise lavish if unspecified help for firms in specific high-tech/clean-tech sectors (I got Navdeep Bains flashbacks when reading it). It does talk about skills, but…you guessed it, only with respect to “skilled” (i.e. construction) trades. The rest of the economy? Fuhgeddaboudit

I highlight all of this simply for one reason. It suggests very strongly that the Liberal Party no longer has a clue—if it ever did—as to how the knowledge economy applies to Canada. Think about it: an entire party where not one of the leading lights thinks that intensification of the application of knowledge to firms or the economy is a source of growth worth encouraging. At best, what we have is some genuflecting towards the construction sector and an understanding that we need more (but apparently not better) tradespeople to build more housing and infrastructure. That’s not nothing—there are real needs to be addressed in the sector. But applying the same logic to the other 90% of the economy? Apparently, this occurs to no one.

In fairness, of course, none of the other parties understand this either. But that only underlines my point. Postsecondary education is not just absent from any candidate’s plans; the problems that postsecondary education is best placed to address aren’t even understood as being problems. This is why universities’ and colleges’ current advocacy strategies are such a disaster: they have yet to really face up to the fact that their root problem is that no political party thinks that economic growth has anything to do with either skills or knowledge. 

Without that understanding, without that belief, science and post-secondary are just answers to a question nobody asked.