I thought I was done with election pieces for a while, but apparently Tim Houston wanted to get in an election this year (I guess it’s easier to run as a provincial Conservative while an obviously flailing Liberal administration is still in power in Ottawa), and so here we are with an election tomorrow and me with one more of these blogs to write. Fortunately for me, but unfortunately for the sector, the parties have conspired to keep this one short.

Now, while Nova Scotia has a lot of universities, it is not known for producing a lot of ground-breaking postsecondary education policy. If you need more background, take a look at my manifesto analyses for the elections of 2013, 2017, and 2021. For the past three elections, it’s largely been the usual depressing “cheaper not better.” The one real exception was the 2021 Liberal platform, which as I said at the time was the “longest love-letter to the community college sector ever to be included in a Canadian election manifesto.” Unfortunately, the Liberals imploded in the home stretch and so the contents of that letter came to naught.

And now, here’s what the various parties have to say about postsecondary education in this election.

The governing and likely-to-be-re-elected Progressive Conservative manifesto has to say about postsecondary education: nothing. It would like credit for announcing the opening of a medical school in Cape Breton last term, though.

Here’s what the NDP manifesto has to say about postsecondary education: bupkis. The word does not appear in the platform. Nor does the word “student” in any context other than K-12.

Now you might expect the Liberals to say something about post-secondary education, partly because they are usually a little more voluble on the subject and partly because their leader, Zach Churchill, is an ex-student leader (he was head of the Canadian Alliance of Student Associations in the mid/late aughts). But here’s what the Liberal manifesto has to say about postsecondary education:

• The Liberals will release a report on Student Housing which they claim the Conservative are stalling on and they will “work with” various parties to encourage greater housing density near university campuses. The platform costing document indicates that there will be no money available to make anything happen on this file, however.
• The party also says it will expand training positions for family doctors, accelerating pathways for international medical students, and forgive up to 20% of an in-demand health professional’s student loan annually for up to 5 years, based on the number of hours of in-person service. However, there is no line item in the costing document for either of these measures.

You will be shocked, reader, to discover that the word “college” does not appear the platform once. Guess the 2021 experience scared them off.

Message received? This is absolutely the weakest set of provincial manifestos I have read since I started doing these about twelve years ago. Nova Scotia politicians are absolutely doubling down on eating the future. And despite the fact that this vibe-shift has been almost a decade in the making, the Canadian postsecondary sector is failing completely to come to terms with it, let alone counter it. I think the answer is pretty simple, but it would require the sector to build bridges it seems unwilling or unable to build.

It’s not pretty out there, folks.