Tag: Housing

What Six Questions Tell Us About the Ontario Government

In the final scenes of the 1991 movie The Russia House, as Sean Connery is about to give “the shopping list” – a comprehensive list of questions about Soviet rocket technology – to what MI6 and the CIA believe is a potential Russian defector, there’s a conversation between a young agent and Edward Fox, who plays Sean Connery’s handler. “Sir, the shopping list.  It’s only questions isn’t it?  It wouldn’t tell anyone anything?” “Everything.  It would tell what we know

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The Reckoning

I am calling it now: Canadian post-secondary institutions are very close to the end of the road on international student number growth.  It’s not because demand is going to dry up or anything like that.  There is still room for hundreds of thousands more international students if we wanted them, and probably demand to match as well.  It is simply that too many institutions have become too greedy, and they are imposing intolerable externalities on their surrounding communities.  A backlash

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Millennial Complaints (Part 2)

So, before I was rudely interrupted last week by Ontario’s government with its tuition/OSAP announcement, I was talking about whether the belief of Millennials that they are a uniquely put-upon generation was justified or not.  My view was they certainly are not if your basis of comparison was income or wealth of Millennials in Canada versus its predecessors (i.e. the so-called “Generation X. But other measures tell a different story. In Canada, the balance on income and wealth tilts in favour of

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What a National Housing Strategy Tells Us About Higher Education

The big news in Canada last week was the unveiling by the governing Liberals of a “National Housing Strategy”.  Housing is a good policy file to watch for higher education policy types, because housing and higher education share a lot of qualities. This might not seem like an obvious policy analogy, but hear me out.  Shelter, like higher education, is often viewed as a “right”, but it’s one where the base assumption is (in North America, anyway) is that it

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Learning From Other Policy Areas: Housing

Sometimes, I think we spend too much time trying to learn from policy in other countries and not enough time learning from related policy areas in our own country. Take housing, for instance – probably higher education’s closest relative in policy terms. Choosing a home, like choosing an undergraduate degree, is a major decision with enormous financial implications, but both can be foreseen many years in advance, allowing people to plan for the purchase. Shelter and education are both considered

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