Today is election day in Prince Edward Island, and so that also makes it HESA Towers Manifesto Review Day.  Buckle up!

 One of the things that makes PEI adorable is how tiny all its politics are.  Like, in other provinces, manifestoes might make a general nod towards K-12 capital spending, but on the Island, parties will make specific promises about renovations to specific junior high schools.   But then again, perhaps not surprising when the province is only barely larger than the combined staff/student population of the University of Toronto.

Remarkably, all political parties see UPEI and Holland College as partners:  as key institutions which can help the province achieve its goals.  Mostly this comes down to curricular help. The NDP wants to expand Holland College’s training programs for paramedics.  The Liberals want both UPEI and Holland College to generate expertise in CleanTeach, advanced manufacturing, bioscience and increase the number of digital medical specialists.  They also speak vaguely of “modernizing the apprenticeship system to make it more affordable for both students and employers” (not sure what this means exactly since employers’ main cost is apprentices’ salaries) and getting Holland College to do more training outside of Charlottetown. They want to set an actual policy target for PSE participation rates (which would make the province the first in the country to do so). The Greens want to increase the number of Registered Nurses and create a Physician Assistant program at UPEI.  None of this is costed, you understand.  These aren’t things these parties want to pay for (or, possibly more charitably, have no idea what it costs).  But they do show that all parties see that the future runs through the province’s post-secondary institutions, which is nice. 

But the actual promises?  The ones involving money?  It’s the usual story: everything is about affordability, and nothing is about quality.

So, just to take you through the depressing list quickly, in reverse order of their current polling positions:

The NDP wants to freeze fees at UPEI and make Holland College free by 2026.  It wants to retroactively wipe out interest on provincial student loans and replace student loans with grants. But it’s mostly nonsense: the promise on college fees is funded, but the freeze in fees at the university is not fully funded and there is no costing at all associated with the student aid promises. Make of that what you will.

The Liberals’ money promises mostly have to do with spots in medicine: increase student enrolment in nursing tuition-reimbursement schemes for nurses who choose to stay in-province. It is not clear from the costing document – which aggregates the cost of promises at a relatively high level – whether either the scholarship scheme or support for larger enrolments in nursing are included.  My guess is that they are not. 

The Greens platform is exhaustingly full of small-ball promises.  On health care-related matters, the party’s ideas include implementing “regional bursaries” (unclear what the word “regional” means here) for UPEI Nursing students, “working with” UPEI to allow current physicians and nurse practitioners to use medical labs for research and professional development and increasing the number of family physician residency spots from 5 to 10. You will not be shocked to discover that only the last of these is actually included in costing (and that at a weirdly low $30,000 per position)

On student aid there are promises galore: i) Update student debt forgiveness program to encourage more graduates to work in PEI after graduation, ii) Establish a $2,000 bursary program to encourage students to work in the construction sector, iii) Improve opportunities for students to participate in experiential learning to increase awareness and interest in trades, iv) Set the zero-payment threshold for PEI Student Loans to $40,000 gross income, indexed to inflation and with upward adjustments for family size. v) cover student loan repayments for the 2023-24 year (!) vi)  Promote enrollment in programs that address key labour shortages on PEI, vii) Increase debt reduction grants viii) Explore the possibility of expanding debt reduction programs to include students from other provinces and international students as incentive to stay and work on PEI.  

Tired yet?  Then there is i) Supporting employers to provide experiential learning opportunities that are relevant to students’ area of study. ii) continuing to make investments in open educational resources (OERs) to reduce the cost of textbooks for students iii) exploring opportunities for student-led housing cooperatives,  iv) Review post-secondary financial assistance programs to ensure there is adequate support for Island workers looking to reskill or upskill v) increasing financial assistance for graduate students doing innovative research vi)  Support the implementation of UPEI’s new strategic research plan vii) support for the Indigenization of UPEI and viii) Review funding agreements with Island postsecondary institutions to make sure they have adequate and predictable funding.

Some of this is even in the Greens’ costing document: assistance for graduate student research is listed at $500K, the experiential learning fund is at $200K, as is the $2,000 bursary program to encourage students to work in the construction sector.  $100K was set aside for Indigenization at UPEI and the repayment holiday for 2023-24 is listed at $2.35M. The rest is completely unfunded.

(One interesting note at the start of the Green platform is a promise to initiate a feasibility study to determine if a medical school is the best way to address the province’s healthcare worker shortage. It is the only note I have seen from any party injecting even a word of doubt about the wisdom of starting a Medical School on the Island. Not sure what the back-story politics to this is, but it’s interesting.)

And them, finally, we have the Conservatives, who seem pretty sure to be re-elected.  They want to provide free tuition for Islanders studying in PEI who commit to stay and work in PEI for two years in a select number of health fields (Resident Care Worker, Licensed Practical Nurse, Primary Care Paramedic and Advanced Care Paramedic).  They also want to increase the George Coles Bursary – which is a universal, non-needs-based grant to students studying in the province, essentially no different than a tuition cut for in-province students – to $3,500 per year for post-secondary students and expand the program to include students studying off-Island in programs that are not offered in PEI. Other commitments include funding more Open Educational Resources and providing internship opportunities for post-secondary students to work with sector and industry groups to obtain practical work experience with multiple companies or organizations in the same field.  Miraculously, these Tory promises are all included in the costing document and add up to about $2.5 million per year, with about half of that going on the George Coles Bursaries.

So, what to make of all this?  Well, as usual, what we see are provincial politicians who want to promise things, but not put aside money for them.  We also see politicians who put aside money to make higher education cheaper rather than better.   No surprise here – with the possible exception of the Nova Scotia Liberals, I do not think any political party in Canada has done better at any point in the last five years or so. 

What makes PEI a bit special is that – the NDP perhaps excepted (but we can probably except them since they’ve never won a seat) the parties are offering similar kinds of platforms. It’s not particularly ideological.  They all seem united on using blackmail via the financial aid system to keep PEI students in PEI, which is questionable but pretty much par for the course in eastern Canada.  They all seem to think post-secondary education is an important tool to improve health care, which is unusual to see in provincial election manifestos. Apart from that, you get fairly random enthusiasms (Indigenization!  OERs!) which you couldn’t necessarily guess from where the parties sit more broadly on the ideological spectrum.

In short: there are a lot of deeply half-baked PSE promises made in this election.  But half-baked is probably better than not baked at all, which is what we have seen in most provincial elections.  I don’t think there’s an obvious “clear choice” among parties here because they are all kind of throwing spaghetti against a wall and seeing what sticks and overall that’s probably a good thing.