Hi all. Third of three manifesto analyses for this ballot-iest of Octobers, this time Saskatchewan which goes to the polls today. This one might be the simplest one yet, mainly because Saskatchewan elections—like those in the other two Prairie provinces—are a resolutely two-party affair. It has been 25 years since a third-party MLA has been elected to the legislature, and there is zero danger of that streak being broken tonight.

But also because the differences in the two parties’ platforms with respect to post-secondary education are pretty marginal.

Let’s start with the manifesto of the opposition New Democrats, who have budgeted for zero increases in post-secondary education or student aid. That said, it has earmarked $25 million over four years to “increase short-term training programs to get more Saskatchewan people working quickly in in-demand sectors,” which I suspect will be a straight transfer to either SaskPoly or the regional colleges. Another promise which might have some kind of effect on postsecondary education is its promise to bring in a “Grow Your Own” strategy to train and retain more health-care workers (confusingly, “grow your own” was also a Saskatchewan Party slogan in healthcare about a decade ago). What might this consist of? No idea. No details provided, even though the party first mooted the strategy (or at least the slogan) two full years ago. In theory, this might mean more money for health care faculties, but the party does not break out the costing of its health care promises (and in any event its health care spending commitments are inconsistent—in the manifesto it is listed at $1.1 billion over four years but the costing document puts it at $415 million).

That’s all she wrote on the left. Now, let’s go over to the governing right-wing Saskatchewan Party whose manifesto promises are largely about making education cheaper rather than better. So, an increase in the maximum value of the graduate tax credit for tuition to increase from $20,000 to $24,000 ($13 million over 4 years), a $5,000 rebate to reduce the cost of Class 1 Truck Driver training ($3 million over 4 years). And of course, zero for post-secondary institutes. Not much there, either.

(The increase to the graduate tax credit is just policy nonsense, a subsidy to people in their late twenties for doing exactly what they were going to do anyways, similar in many ways to eliminating interest on student loans only even less targeted. Sometimes it gets dressed up as a “retention” measure, or even a “talent attraction measure,” but as we at HESA Towers showed in a research brief published ten years ago, the amount of additional income required to get students to move to a province they didn’t want to go to—Manitoba and Saskatchewan in particular were astronomical—much more than any graduate tax credit can provide. So it’s basically a transfer that does nothing except enrich a group which in many ways is relatively privileged.)

But to be fair here, this manifesto comes after some not-insignificant announcements on education and training in the Spring Budget. There, institutions were given a 2.2% increase in base funding plus an extra $12 million for training for in-demand jobs and $15 million for health care training. This, you will note, is basically exactly the same 1-2 as the New Democrats are pushing, the difference being that the Saskatchewan Party actually can explain where the money is going (32 new med school seats, 600 new Nursing seats, a “Health Human Resources Plan” focused on positions involving nursing specialisms, paramedics and continuing care aides plus a small amount of money for areas like Speech Pathology, Occupational Therapy, Respiratory Therapy, etc). The budget also included small increases in Student aid funding (specifically, an expansion of the grant for students with dependents) as well as for apprenticeship training. Oh, and a bunch of infrastructure spending, mainly at the University of Saskatchewan and at the Polytechnic.

Skeptics about the Saskatchewan Party’s investments would rightly point out that the most recent budget increases only restore operating budget levels to where they were four years ago in nominal (not inflation-adjusted terms). And sure, that’s not good, but lower oil prices do nasty things to public finances in some provinces. Among the three provinces whose budgets are extremely hydrocarbon-dependent (Newfoundland & Labrador and Alberta being the others), PSE fared a lot better in Saskatchewan over the past four years (-8% in real terms) than it did in either of the other of the other two (-22% and -21%, respectively). And Saskatchewan still has the highest per-student expenditures in the college sector of any province in the country, as well as third-highest in the university sector.

(On the whole, this seems like a pretty good record to run on, but the Saskatchewan Party still feels the need to bolster its argument with a ridiculous case of Inserting Implausibly Big Numbers for No Reason. For example, ludicrous factoids like “The University of Saskatchewan has received more that $5 billion in operating grants since 2007—the year the Saskatchewan party took power!”)

Now, to be fair to the NDP here: they probably wouldn’t repeal any of what was in the spring budget. All that stuff is effectively baked into the fiscal framework. So really the competing offers are subsidies for jobs in-demand training from one side, and some make-graduates-wealthier stuff from the other. Pretty dismal.

If it were me, and I were voting just on the issue of postsecondary education, I’d probably (just) go with the Saskatchewan Party on the strength of the previous budget and the fact that per-student funding in Saskatchewan is currently among the highest in the country. But overall, the SK manifestos remind us once again of three things: i) no one is coming to save us, ii) there’s almost no original thinking on PSE issues and iii) to the extent politicians care about anything in the sector, it’s about making it cheaper rather than better.