Late to this incredibly hip party on Canadian PSE history?  Catch up with the previous two installments here and here.

The late 70s to mid-90s were maybe the ghastliest period in Canadian history.  Economically, they were full of unemployment, inflation and debt.  Yet our politics were driven not by economics, as they would have been in normal countries, but by national unity: a referendum in 1980, constitutional conferences in 1981, repatriation in 1982, the Meech Lake Accord in 1987, three years of Meech, more Meech, incessant Meech, the Bélanger-Campeau and Spicer Commissions of 1991, the Charlottetown Referendum in 1992…I break out in hives just thinking about it.

Unsurprisingly, this was not a conducive period for federal education and skills policy.  The 1979 and 1980 elections– both of which were conducted in the shadow of the upcoming Quebec referendum – were the nadir in this respect.  The NDP said nothing about skills or education in either manifesto.  The Tories talked a bit of a game on youth unemployment in ’79 but their solution was a general tax reduction to spur business.  The Liberals talked up their record on R&D tax credits in 1979 and, since they were no longer in power in 1980, mirrored the Tory attacks of the previous year with respect to youth unemployment. 

By 1984, however, things had changed.  The campaign was a bit weird in that neither of the two main parties seem to have issued manifestos, though both issued compilations of leaders’ speeches.  John Turner talked a lot about apprenticeships and (bizarrely, given the recent record of federal cutbacks) provinces not paying their “fair share” in post-secondary education.  The NDP returned to the themes of skills and training, this time touting a business levy to support apprenticeships; it also suggested a boost in transfers to provinces, improvements to the Canada Student Loans Program, and the creation of a “national council on post-secondary education”.  For the first time since 1965, the NDP made no mention of provincial sensibilities in this area.

It was the Conservatives that went raving hog-wild on post-secondary issues in ‘84.  “Registered Training Accounts”, vaguely modeled on RRSPs, were on the table, as were youth-employment related tax credits for employers, unspecified improvements to the Canada Student Loans Program, more career counselling for young people and – that magic wand again – better Labour Market Information.  And while there was nothing specific for educational institutions (nine out of ten provincial premiers were Tories at the time) there were a ton of promises on research including “doubling our collective national commitment to R & D within the life of our first mandate”, which is possibly the most ludicrous promise anyone ever made in this policy space.  Then again, they won 208 seats, so perhaps realism is not the most important trait in political manifestos.

Not only did Mulroney pay no price for not keeping this ludicrous promise, he actually doubled down on it in 1988.  With no hint of embarrassment, the manifesto claimed he would substantially increase the tri-council budget, create a set of National Network Centres of Excellence (a promise he did keep), as well as create a new set of merit-based scholarships (these became the Canada Scholarships, which lasted until the Chrétien/Martin program review of 1995).   The Liberals made an identical promise on merit scholarships, made further promises with respect to improving apprenticeships, and issued some unspecified commitments to enhancing post-secondary financing and adding more funds for research.  The NDP recommended an initiative that would provide young Canadians with a two-year “guarantee” of postsecondary education, training, or work experience, though what that meant in practice was not spelled out.  The party also re-upped its 1984 pledge on infusions to provincial transfer payments in order to better fund higher education, copied the Tory pledge on increased funding for university research and development and made some vague noises about Indigenous post-secondary education.

What you have probably noticed by this point in the tale is that many party pledges were vague and insubstantial.  Vagueness was not just a feature of pledges concerning post-secondary education, science and skills – it was a feature of all political platforms prior to the 1990s.  That changed in 1993, with the release of the Liberal “Redbook”.  It was a marvel of a document and compared to any other Liberal platform since 1962 or so it might as well be from another planet.  It was substantive, contained a coherent theory about how the economy works (this is much rarer than you’d think) and – this is the ground-breaking part – actually enumerated specific future policy initiatives and costed each one.  This would, in time, change pretty much everything in terms of the way parties in Canada articulate their priorities to the electorate.

That said, on the issues that concern us, the Redbook reads like a feverish nightmare.  It was a mix of meaningless micro-promises with no money attached (an offer to help any province that so desired to create a national secondary school test in Math, Science and Literacy), interesting ideas that didn’t have a hope in hell of ever coming about ($550 million to spread apprenticeships into high-skilled trades areas like IT and biotech) and small inoffensive stuff like literacy programs and Youth Service Corps.  Once in power, they did almost none of this, preferring instead to mostly steal Kim Campbell’s (uncosted) Conservative platform, which included creating SchoolNet, introducing grants into the Canada Student Loans Program, and reforming the education tax credit to include part-time students.   The other parties mostly steered clear of these shoals: the Reform Party remained wedded to the notion of getting the feds out of provincial jurisdiction, and the NDP trotted out its ideas about training levies again.  (I have been unable to locate the platform of the Natural Law Party from that year, but presumably the creation of Yogic aviation schools would have been high on the list)

While education was mostly off-limits as we waited for the separatists’ moment to pass, parties did compete fairly vigorously on research.  As part of its Jobs Strategy, the NDP promised a “National Research and Development Strategy” – no dollar figures were given nor was there any particular specificity about whether this was university or corporately-based research, but we were assured foreign companies would pay for a good chunk of it. The Tories promised money for the industrial Research Assistance Program and the Network Centres of Excellence Program.  The Liberals made their biggest financial commitments – over a billion dollars – on investments in research, including the creation of a “Canadian Technology Network” involving universities, industry associations, and governments in order to “gather information on technology and related services from across Canada and from around the world, and make it easily available to industry” (the spread of the world wide web was still a couple of years away).  Heck, even the Reform Party agreed that spending on research was OK, provided it had targeted industrial applications.

The big point here is that by the mid-90s, Canada was entering a new phase: we had more or less understood that we weren’t going to get by on natural resources and we couldn’t borrow our way to prosperity.  1993 was the beginning of a phase where research and education spending became major policy issues.  But it is worth noting that at this stage, whatever support there was for research was closely tied to its application in business.   Pure research has almost never been a vote-winner in Canadian politics.