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Tag: Liberal Party

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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November 29, 2017 1 Comment

The Talent Angle

The post-Naylor Report effort to get big new investments in fundamental science is in trouble.  Bluntly, the Finance Department appears not to be buying the argument that fundamental research is, in fact, a good investment.  I’m not 100% surprised: the Naylor mostly tended to assume the wider benefits of research to economic growth rather than demonstrate or prove it, and the big U-15 institutions have banked everything on a rhetorical strategy of: money for research –> a miracle occurs –>

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November 14, 2017 5 Comments

The Unfolding Disaster of the Liberals’ Innovation Policy

This Government, man.  It is something else. Today, the Hon. Navdeep Bains, Minister of Shaking Hands With Tech Executives, is in Halifax to – are you ready for this? – kick off a nationwide tour to announce the shortlist of the Superclusters competition.  Yes, the man has decided that it’s a good use of public money to spend the Parliamentary recess week jetting from one-part of the country to another announcing not the winners of this jumped-up contest but the shortlist. 

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October 10, 2017 2 Comments

Twenty Years Ago Sunday

Five years ago I wrote the following blog, under the headline “fifteen years ago today”.  I think it’s worth running again (with a couple of minor alterations). On September 24th, 1997, Jean Chrétien rose in the House of Commons to present his reply to the Speech from the Throne. About half-way in, he noted casually that there would likely be a financial surplus that year (a miracle, considering where we’d been in 1995). And he was planning to blow it

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September 22, 2017 2 Comments

The Meaning of Zero

I’ve had a lot of time over the past week to think about the federal budget. And the more I think about it, the more baffled I am about the decision to completely stuff the granting councils. I think it is either a sign of real political ineptness, or that something pretty awful is in the pipeline. It’s not as though the Liberals are averse to spending on Science, per se. The budget dropped hundreds of millions of dollars on

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March 31, 2017 No Comments

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One Thought to Start Your Day is our founder and CEO Alex Usher’s popular daily blog, brimming with up-to-the-minute insights and informed opinions on today’s higher education industry.

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