Manitoba votes tomorrow.  There’s not really much suspense in the whole thing: the Tories are going to get re-elected with a reduced majority.  And possibly because of the lack of suspense, the parties are treating this election in a very uncharacteristic manner.

Ages ago – that is, before 1993 – political parties in Canada could say pretty much whatever they wanted and promise anything.  “We will spend more on education!” one party would say.  “No, more on housing!” another would say.  No one asked for numbers, because it was understood that political promises were more statements of priorities rather than specific, auditable pledges.  And certainly, no one published anything as specific as an overall fiscal framework.

Then in the 1993 federal election, the Liberal manifesto forever known as “The Red Book” (though if I recall correctly it was actually called something pretty anodyne like “Creating Opportunity”) came along and literally everything changed.  Individual promises had to be costed.  Collectively, promise costs had to be totalled and included in an overall fiscal framework, so people could judge whether the numbers added up.  I’m not sure the political discourse improved as a result, but it certainly changed the way parties talked about their promises.

Until this Manitoba election, that is.  Because this is the first election I can remember where none of the parties are providing a fully costed platform with an accompanying fiscal framework.  Which makes it really hard to work out what’s going to happen post election in a lot of areas, including PSE.

Here’s what the parties have said:

The Progressive Conservatives released a document called “Keeping our Word” explaining how they met all their promises from the last election (which, in the case of PSE, includes a fairly minor commitment on scholarships).  They released a “Five Point Guarantee” which promises both more spending and tax cuts.  And they released a whack of individual promises, some of which seem to have fairly big price tags (on health and school construction in particular).  They appear to have issued a press release totting up the value of these promises as $856 million, though how that squares with a promise to invest “an additional $2 billion in health care services and facilities over the next four years” isn’t clear. As of last Thursday, the party had chosen not to release this memo on its website, so we have no idea whether all this money is going to come via new tax revenue or by cutting existing programs, and what that will do to departmental base budgets.  The Conservatives have made no dedicated promises on post-secondary education, though a plank in the platform on the film industry includes $1.5 million to Red River (a substantial portion of which will immediately go to a search firm to replace its needlessly-fired former President, Paul Vogt), and part of the women’s health platform is a promise to re-boot a previously stillborn midwifery program which will graduate all of six students per year.  Whoopee.

The New Democrats released a document called “For All of Us”, and unlike the other parties, they did manage to consolidate their promises in one spot and sort of costed them (they grouped promises into three big buckets and provided estimates for the buckets, but not the individual pledges).  The total cost of new promises is a little over $400 million, half to be paid for by offsetting cuts and half by various revenue increases.  But the party is carefully silent on what they are going to do with the existing budgets in health, education, etc. (and if you think they are actually going to freeze those budgets in nominal terms for four years, you clearly don’t know the Manitoba NDP), so we don’t know what the plan is for universities and colleges.  All we have is a commitment to keep tuition linked to inflation, to undo the Pallister cuts to ACCESS bursaries for rural, northern and Indigenous students, and a vague commitment to help students get co-op jobs.

The Greens – who seem likely to gain a seat for the first time in this election (probably in Wolseley, which was Green way avant la lettre) – have kept their post-secondary education promises relatively modest.  The first is to provide 50% of all student assistance in the form of a grant, and the other is to make loans income-contingent (which, since they already are for most intents and purposes, shouldn’t be a hard promise to fulfill).  The Greens provided no cost estimates for their grant promise, but if I recall my student loan stats correctly, it would be in the vicinity of $15 million per year.  But again, no fiscal framework, so no way to gauge what would happen to base institutional budgets.

The Liberals, like the Greens, have chosen not to consolidate their promises or show any fiscal framework (full list of promises here).  Their post-secondary plan goes under the catchy title of a “Zero-Barrier” plan and is probably the most detailed of the party platforms in our area.  There is $5 million for ACCESS bursaries (which I believe is what the NDP is implicitly promising as well), restoring a $12 million cut to base budgets under Palliser and promising budget rises in line with inflation shortly thereafter, which they claim will allow them to offer a tuition freeze “without cuts to programs or services”, the last bit of which is plainly incorrect (if 2/3 of your budget is rising with inflation, and 1/3 of your budget is frozen, your overall budget will not keep up with inflation, which almost certainly does mean cuts).  Additionally, there are a bunch of vague and uncosted promises about expanding access to student aid, broadening access to trades and STEM programs for women, and improving access to psychological therapies for students.

So, where does this leave us?  Nowhere very good.

If we take absence of evidence as evidence of absence, then literally every party platform likely leaves institutions worse off in four years than they are today (the Liberal plan just gets there more slowly).  Of course, parties might just not be levelling with us.  Maybe the NDP or Greens would raise base spending, but they’re hiding it.  Maybe the Tories would allow tuition to rise to compensate for the base grant freeze they are almost certainly planning.  Maybe, maybe, maybe.  We just don’t know.  And we can’t know, because the parties don’t want to tell us. 

 A sad state of affairs.