Y’all know I do one of these for every provincial election. This one is going to be a bit different because this time out E-Day is eight days away, and next week is a scheduled off-week for the blog. As of the moment I am writing this on Tuesday afternoon, only two parties have made any commitments on postsecondary education and only one has released a fully-costed platform. So, there’s a bit of guesswork involved here. I will update the page next week if anything changes, but for the moment this is necessarily going to be incomplete.

So, here goes.

First, the governing Progressive Conservative Party, without whose firm, dedicated, informed guiding hand on the policy tiller since 2018 the province’s postsecondary education system would be as it is today, the party has promised…nothing. On any policy issue. Seriously, check the party website, not only is there no manifesto (let alone a costed one), there isn’t even a listing of commitments. There is a “news feed” which carries a couple of promises but is mostly just a listing of construction-sector union endorsements.

I have, of course, outlined what current Conservative Party policy would lead to by 2029, back here. It’s not good. Ontario has never been a leader in funding or regulating postsecondary education, but the Ford government has taken things to new depths, sometimes by ignorance or sins of omission, but more often through acts of deliberate vandalism, like a tuition freeze, a deliberate super-charging of international student enrolments at colleges and of course an utter failure to deal with the fallout when the federal government called a halt to things. They are a disaster. The gutting of the college sector in particular should be considered a policy failure of immense proportions which will have long-lasting repercussions (the fact that colleges have collectively been unable or unwilling to turn this into an election issue is a separate scandal).

Second, we have the opposition New Democrats led by Marit Stiles who have promised…nothing. At least not as of yet. The party’s website has a “commitments” page, which included nothing on postsecondary education as of right now. There are also two regionally targeted manifestos for northern and southwestern Ontario (to prove they aren’t just a GTHA party, maybe? the questions run deep) which are meant to reflect an overall platform. These contain nothing on higher education either.

The only thing we have from the NDP, as far as I can tell, is Marit Stiles’ answer to a question on falling international student revenue during the leaders’ debate on Monday night who said the answer was to “properly fund our postsecondary institutions” but made no statement about what that would mean in practice. She did however rule out increasing tuition, which given that it represents over 50% of income at postsecondary institutions, means that she’s kicking away the main pillar of potential financial support to institutions, as indeed Premier Ford has been doing for years.

(An aside here: do watch the entirety of the leaders debate if you get a chance. Yes, there are a lot of cringe-worthy moments, but the overall format is pretty good. Hope we get something more like this in the federal election.)

Now let’s go to the Liberal party, which last week issued a policy entitled “A New Deal for Young People” which is objectively disastrous. Much, much worse than what the Tories are offering. The key policy commitments and their costs/implications in the following chart.

Nonsensical Liberal Platform

Policy	Cost/Impact
Support the creation of 40,000 new paid co-op, internship, and apprenticeship positions through tax credits for employers who hire young people.	Really hard to tell without knowing more details, but there’s an obvious issue that there are already hundreds of thousands of jobs like this, so the prospect of windfall gains to employers seems high
Eliminate interest on OSAP loans and raise the income threshold for repayment to $50,000.	This is not a policy to increase access. It is a policy to make life easier for graduates in their 20s and 30s. The liberals used to know something about access: their 2015 policy of targeted free tuition did that really well. This policy is the opposite of that.
Cap international student enrollment at 10% for each Ontario college and university and expand campus resources and affordable student residence options.	This will reduce aggregate institutional income by about $3 billion per year. $3 BILLION. How did the Liberals come to think that being better than Ford meant imposing larger cuts on the sector?
Fund colleges and universities fairly to help them avoid being heavily dependent on international student enrollment.	The Liberals could have attached a dollar figure here. They chose not to. I guarantee you whatever number they eventually come up with—if in fact they do between now and next Thursday—will be less than $3 billion/year.

Objectively the worst Liberal platform commitment on postsecondary education anywhere in Canada in my lifetime. Just awful.

So that brings us to the Green Party platform, (and hey, kudos to them for actually publishing one because they are the only ones to have done so, and a costed one to boot) which contains a relatively simple five-point plan on postsecondary education:

Moderately Sensible Green Platform

Policy	Cost/Impact
Reverse Ford’s cuts 2019 cuts to student aid	Effectively, this revives the Wynne-era OSAP system. With changes to the federal system and the fall in the value of tuition, this probably costs somewhere in the region of $500M.
Replace the “faulty” performance-based finding model and replace it with something more “stable”	Clearly the Greens have no idea how little PBF affects the stability of institutional funding.
Ensure consistent standards and working conditions for all faculty including contract faculty.	Devil is in the detail here. I am not sure what this might mean in practice, but interpreted in the broadest way might impose significant new costs on universities and colleges.
Immediately increase per-student university and college funding by 20% and match inflation thereafter	HALLELUJAH. This would cost about a billion dollars or so, maybe more.
Modernise funding models for colleges to incentivise part-time enrolment so that more students can learn and upskill our workforce and continue the expanded funding for the “Small, Northern and Rural Grant”	I genuinely have no idea what this means. Part-time studies are already eligible for funding.

As you can see, I think the cost of the two big promises end up at about $1.5 billion. The Green costing document, however, suggests it will only cost $850 million in year one, with costs rising a bit thereafter. A math error like this is not good, but since the Greens aren’t going to be anywhere near government it probably doesn’t matter than much. Alone among political parties, they have made some specific commitments to increase funding.

Bookmark this page on the blog because I’ll add some text next week if anything changes. But as of February 18, if postsecondary education policy is your voting lens, the only decent option is the Green Party.