Just before I went on break last week, the government of Nova Scotia introduced a new bill into the legislature, Bill 12, An Act Respecting Advanced Education and Research. It quickly became apparent that this bill had not been discussed with any way shape or form with anyone in the postsecondary community, which generally spells bad news. It also appeared to have come not from the Minister’s office, but from the Premier’s which again generally suggests if not bad news then at least that the province’s head honcho has some…ideas…about your sector which—particularly if they were developed in secret—might not be entirely to your liking.

From the university perspective, there are four things that have people…well, “up in arms” might be too strong but “agitated” certainly isn’t. They are:

1) The legislation gives degree-granting powers to the Nova Scotia Community College, which breaches universities’ monopoly on the credential.

2) The legislation would dissolve existing university governing boards and replace them with new ones, potentially raising the proportion of government-nominated Board members to 50%.

3) The legislation gives new powers to the Minister to direct Research Nova Scotia to adopt priorities for research funding.

4) The legislation alters 2016’s Bill 100 by giving power to the government to direct institutions to create “recovery” plan. 

Ok, let’s go through this one by one. 

First: I get how universities in Nova Scotia might get upset about competition in offering degrees. It’s a small province, there are a lot of universities, and competition is tough. But frankly concern over this strikes me as misplaced. New degrees are still going to have to go through the quality assurance process run by the Maritime Provinces Higher Education Commission (MPHEC), and this process provides ample opportunities incumbents to block competition. If you look at how this process has worked in other provinces, colleges have tended not to offer degrees in areas where there are incumbents; rather, college degrees tend to meet needs that are not currently covered by university degrees. The exception is nursing. And everyone needs more nurses. So I would argue that fears on this score are probably overdone: of the four areas of concern, this is the one I would be most sanguine about.

Second is the change to Board membership, which many are calling an “attack on institutional autonomy.” The actual impact of this change will vary somewhat form one institution to another because Board membership rules in Nova Scotia are kind of a mishmash: St. FX currently has no government appointees on its Board, Mount St Vincent has two, Dalhousie four, and Cape Breton twelve. Effectively what is going to happen is that everyone’s government representation is going to get levelled up to where it is at Cape Breton 

If that’s all this measure is, it’s no big deal: in British Columbia, for instance, the government selects six out of fifteen board members at most universities plus another two from a list of nominated alumni, and if anyone before last week suggested that BC institutions are less autonomous than Nova Scotia ones, they’d have been laughed at, deservedly. All provinces appoint Governors to Boards and in greater numbers than is currently the case in Nova Scotia, but in most cases they tend to be pretty hands-off after that. The more legitimate worry here is not the number of representatives, but how the government plans to use them. If the government suddenly has a hankering for more representation on Boards, there’s the possibility that it intends to use these nominees to direct universities, in a manner similar to Alberta (where the government is the opposite of hands-off). In other words, prima facie this does nothing but put Nova Scotia closer to the Canadian mainstream with respect to Board membership, but there’s certainly a possibility for something a bit nastier.

Third, there are the changes to the Research Nova Scotia Corporation Act. The bit that has people worried is that it allows the Minister—at his or her sole discretion—to determine research priorities for the province, and to align the corporation’s funding priorities accordingly. At one level, this is fairly ho-hum. Funders get to fund what they want, right? It’s nice to think that they’d be enlightened enough to fund whatever researchers want to do, sort of like the granting councils, but it’s hardly a given. And this government has previously signaled that it expects institutions to pay at least minimal obeisance to provincial political priorities in their operations.

The thing is though that a lot of what Research Nova Scotia does is provide matching grants to Nova Scotia universities when they are going after money from the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI). If funding were completely aligned with provincial priorities—whatever those turn out to be—it might create situations where the province could choose in effect to veto universities’ CFI applications. Some may recall that this is the same situation people worried about when Alberta passed Bill 18 a few months ago, and while I understand that situation has been resolved out west (apparently the regulations make it clear that university research is off-limits), it’s still something to be concerned about in Nova Scotia as well.

Fourth and finally, there is the one that worries the hell out of me, which is the amendment to Bill 100, passed back in 2015 (this would be a good time to either read the original legislation or refresh yourself with the blog I wrote about it back in 2015). The point of Bill 100 was in effect to create a university equivalent of bankruptcy protection, because at the time the idea of a university actually using real bankruptcy protection—i.e. the CCAA—was unimaginable. But basically, the idea was that a university would be legally allowed to suspend its various staff contractual obligations, as under CCAA, and be eligible for some extra funding (to tide them over) if the university admitted it was in a crisis and wrote a “recovery plan” which was at least minimally to the government’s liking. All voluntary, of course. And naturally no institution has ever used this power because damn that would be bad publicity.

So, it’s intriguing to see in the new legislation that the province has added a paragraph to the old legislation which permits the government to require institutions to put forward recovery plans on pain of losing existing funding. I have a hard time understanding what the government thinks it can achieve by doing this, but one strong possibility is that it envisages circumstances in which an institution is teetering on the brink and won’t undergo radical restructuring because of image or internal politics or whatever, and it would like the ability to force the institution to restructure.

It would be helpful if the government could clarify what it intends with this clause because some of the potential ramifications are wild; an attack on institutional autonomy the likes of which we’ve rarely seen in Canada. 

Hopefully all these questions can be answered and/or debated in committee and amendments made where necessary. You don’t need to subscribe to the sky-is-falling narrative some folks are peddling to see that there are some important issues around this bill that need to be cleared up.