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Tag: Federalism

Post-Covid Fiscal Rebalancing

One of the weirder things about the present crisis is that we seem to be re-writing all the rules of federalism without even noticing it.  This will significantly affect the future of higher education. The most important changes have been with respect to the Canada Emergency Relief Benefit (CERB) and the Canada Emergency Student Benefit (CESB).  Though there have been ebbs and flows over the history of confederation, income support for the under-65s, absent a strong link to the labour force (i.e.

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April 28, 2020 No Comments

Coronavirus (13) – Virus Federalism

Though the national media has dealt gingerly with the subject, the fact is that this pandemic is playing out very differently across the country.  Ontario and Quebec are still in full-on holy crap mode: the situation is bad, no two ways about it.  Not Italy bad, but bad enough.  But away from Central Canada, it’s a very different story, as this graph from Tuesday’s Globe and Mail shows. Look at BC, where despite proximity to the early outbreak hub of Seattle, new daily cases

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April 8, 2020 No Comments

(University) Life During Wartime

Since everyone is using war metaphors to describe current efforts against COVID-19, I thought it might be worth taking a trip down memory lane to look at what universities did during the World Wars (colleges, being mostly creatures of the 50s-70s, were not around then, so this is a single-sector survey).  I am not convinced it’s the right metaphor – in Britain, for example, their death-cult instinct makes them treat every crisis like it’s 1940. Because of their refusal to

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March 23, 2020 No Comments

Perma-SIF

As I noted back on Monday, one of the basic dynamics we see in Canadian public finance is the long-term deterioration of provincial finances and the long-term improvement of federal ones, mainly due to changing demographics and the cost of heath care. Take a look at the projections from the Parliamentary Budget Office from their 2018 Fiscal Sustainability Report, which shows this trend rather clearly: long-term provincial government debt numbers are off the charts, while the feds are on a continuous

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January 8, 2020 No Comments

2019 PSE Platforms – Green Party

Today’s blog will be the first in a series looking at the various federal party election platforms on post-secondary education, skills, and science. First up: the Green Party. I opened this year’s Green Party Manifesto with some trepidation because, well, the 2015 platform was such a dumpster fire. And, wouldn’t you know it, the 2019 platform is also a dumpster fire. Quelle coincidence! This is not merely an issue of bad policy; it’s about policy incoherence. Prior to the writ,

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September 30, 2019 No Comments

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