Y’all know I usually do a full blog on manifestos for every provincial election.  And we have two of those coming up – BC on Saturday and Saskatchewan on Monday – so it seemed natural to publish these two today and tomorrow.  But for reasons which will shortly become apparent, I decided to combine them into one.  Both elections speak to bigger issues at play that need attention.

Let’s start in Saskatchewan, where the right-of-centre Saskatchewan Party (SP) looks poised to form a fourth straight majority government.  Their manifesto is here.  It’s quite a document, in that about 80% of it is about stuff they have done in the past, not what they will do in the future.  Their only promise in post-secondary education is that they are going to bump up the value of one of their scholarships, which 8,000 students currently receive, from $500 to $750.  Total commitment: $2 million per year.  Other than that: diddly-squat.  So, let’s chalk this up as, in practice, as a determination to see higher education investments fall in real terms due to inflation over the next four years.

In the other corner is the New Democratic Party (platform here, costing here), which makes four promises: remove interest from student loans ($5M/year), make tuition free for youth entering from foster care ($2M/year) restore the Northern Teacher Education Program ($3.5M/year), and an incredibly vague $10M/year commitment to “help workers retrain to stay competitive in a changing world of work”.  None of these are bad, but the commitments to institutions to cover their current responsibilities is diddly-squat.  Which means we need to chalk this up, in practice, as a determination to see higher education investments fall in real terms due to inflation over the next four years.

At the margin, the NDP has the more PSE-friendly program.  But for universities and colleges, what these platforms tell you is that there is no fundamental difference between the two: both of them think PSE institutions are doing just fine and there’s no new money coming down the pike.  Which, you know, fair enough – after the Albertan cuts, Saskatchewan’s per-capita spending on students will be the highest in the country, so maybe this is ok?

Now let’s go two provinces west to BC and start with the Green Party (platform here, which is costed, but in a way that obscures costs on individual promises).  The sum total of their PSE platform is: increase student grants (which looks like a mid-eight figures commitment to me).  Additional commitments to institutions can be summarized as: diddly-squat.  Because the Greens did not put their promises into a multi-year fiscal framework including revenue and deficit projections, it’s possible they would add money to institutions, but there is no specific commitment to do so.

And next to the BC Liberals (platform here), who are led by a former Minister of Advanced Education, Andrew Wilkinson.  Got to be something on PSE in that platform, right?  Well, yes: $60 million a year for a grab bag of hot takes: “encourage more apprenticeships”, “more work study”, “learn from the pandemic to train the health care workforce of the future.”  And they want to make all PSE providers to publish total costs (here comes four-year tuition pricing!), graduation and employment rates, presumably on a program basis, though it is not specified precisely. Allegedly this was inspired by a similar policy at OfSTED in the UK, which seems deeply strange given that OfSTED doesn’t really cover much of higher education.  What they seem to mean is something actually done by the Office for Students (OFS), which compels release of such data to a central platform to then be provided to students and researchers (it’s called DiscoverUni and can be browsed here if that happens to spin your wheels this morning).

But money for institutions?  Yes, actually: an extra $200 million in infrastructure.  Which is not nothing.  But for operating budgets, it’s diddly-squat.  And given the back-to-balance in five years rhetoric, one must assume that the best-case scenario for higher education is no cuts to nominal budgets (i.e. erosion in real terms).  And the real scenario is probably going to be a long way from best-case. 

And now finally the BC NDP (platform here).  They are promising: 2,000 new PSE spaces in “tech-relevant sectors”, an unspecified increase in grants, a continuation of the current tuition framework (not a freeze, but not much increase either), a review of the funding formula (massive vote-winner, that one), opening a second medical school in the province, increasing spaces in childcare, restoring a compulsory trades system, and making PSE free for youth in foster care.  Apparently they can do all this for $45 million, which really only works if those tech and ECE spaces are weakly funded, because boy, medical schools don’t come cheap (alternatively, the medical school actually might not be in the cost framework – impossible to tell one way or the other).  Money for institutions to carry out their existing duties?  You guessed it! Diddly-squat!   Some money to match inflation might be available in the broader fiscal framework, but it’s impossible to tell from the documentation.

Are you sensing a pattern here?   

We’re in trouble here.  As a sector.  All of us.  Most political parties see post-secondary education as a space to dole out money to students, not institutions.  For all intents and purposes the sector is now – thanks in part to huge advances in access – considered like a utility.  Like hydro or sewers.  And the important thing about hydro and sewers is that they do not make the headlines.  As long as they work, steadily and quietly, no one complains.  No one cares about having “world-class” utilities (ok, maybe Singapore).  What they want are “good enough” utilities, preferably on the cheap side.

Do you know of any post-secondary education institutions that think of themselves this way? I certainly don’t.  So, the absolutely inevitable result of these manifestos is making universities more market-reliant and more hungry for non-government funding.  And that, given governments’ obvious reluctance to countenance domestic tuition fee hikes, means more international students.  You could almost say that “more international students” is the implicit program of pretty much every party in the country, whether they know it or not.

Part of the problem is that political parties in Canada have for the most part stopped caring about economic growth.  Their platforms – with only a couple of exceptions – are big on spreading the benefits of growth, but on the sources of growth?  Mostly crickets, unless it’s about natural resources or tax reductions, in which case it’s all engines firing back to the 20^th (and occasionally the 19^th) century.   But even where they do care about growth – post-secondary education just isn’t part of the conversation. 

It’s all quite a terrifying prospect for the country’s future, when you think about it.  And tomorrow I’m going to talk about how to fix it.