Saying that we should remove barriers to student mobility sounds like a motherhood issue.  But scratch a little deeper, and you’ll see that, in fact, Canadians are pretty equivocal on the concept.

For starters, while everyone loves inbound mobility (come here!  It’s a great place!), there’s a pretty deep streak of protectionism in Canadian provincial governments on the issue of outbound mobility.  The sentiment of “let’s keep our kids at home” runs deep in many parts of the country.  It wasn’t until the advent of the Millennium Scholarship Foundation that all student aid programs became portable in most provinces (though Quebec maintains a policy of not funding students to go out of the province, unless the program is not offered in the province, “and it is in the interest of the Quebec collectivity”.  Yes, really).

But whose responsibility is mobility in the first place?  In Europe, with respect to tuition and student aid, it’s the receiving country who bears the cost – no matter where they’re from, students pay whatever the locals do, and have access to whatever student aid program the locals provide.  In Canada, our default assumption is that host provinces are supposed charge equal tuition to all Canadians regardless of their place of origin, but the responsibility for mobility on student aid lies with the sending province.  One can move from Nova Scotia to Manitoba and pay Manitoba rates of tuition, but one still has to rely on Nova Scotia Student Aid.

But there are exceptions.  The most clear-cut is Quebec’s insistence on charging tuition fees to out-of-province students.  Less clear-cut (but still clearly discriminatory), are the cases of Nova Scotia and Ontario.  The former provides tuition rebates to Nova Scotia students, but not to other Canadians.  Ontario has a variety of subsidies that are only available to Ontario students attending Ontario institutions (the tuition tax rebate is one, as are the many provincially-mandated, institutionally-managed access funds – funded through a “tax” on tuition paid by Ontarians and non-Ontarians alike).  These are all anti-mobility measures: they effectively create a two-tier tuition policy within a province, and (in Ontario’s case at least) provide extra subsidies to students who chose not to leave.

Interestingly, while Quebec’s two-tier tuition system is usually portrayed as a piece of xenophobia and rank insolence to other Canadians who, through equalization, are partially picking up the tab for Quebec’s lower tuition, Nova Scotia and Ontario are given a total pass, despite their policies having almost identical effects.

What that tells us is that Canadians don’t mind mobility barriers as long as they are dressed-up as “affordability enhancements”. Ultimately, such measures are self-defeating; as with trade barriers, eventually everyone is left worse off.  But there are enough small-minded politicians out there to ensure that these kinds of tactics always have a potential audience.  As budgets get tighter over the next couple of years, there’s a good chance we’ll see more examples of discriminatory tuition fees, loans, and grants being made non-portable across provincial borders.  I hope that’s not the case, but history doesn’t give me huge grounds for optimism.