If you recall, way back in the middle of March, there was a federal budget (see our analysis here).  And as increasingly seems to be the case with Liberal budgets these days, there were a lot of unknowns.  Stuff that hadn’t been thought through.  Announcements on vague generalities with no actual policies behind them.

(At the beginning of the Trudeau era, someone said “these people from Queen’s Park are used to running a government with six people; you can run Ontario with six people; you can’t run Canada that way.”  I kind of get the feeling that after three and a half years, those six people are just getting tired and don’t have the attention to detail they did in 2016.  And, of course, one of them resigned in February). 

The most important of these vague announcements concerned international mobility.  In the budget, the government promised “$147.9 million over five years, starting in 2019–20, and $8.0 million per year ongoing, for: i) an “outbound student mobility program” to help Canadian PSE students gain “International work/study opportunities” and ii) promotion of Canadian educational institutions abroad.  There was no indication of which ministry was actually going to run this program, and it had one of the weirdest multi-year budget projections I’ve ever seen: $21 million in 19-20, $44 million in 20-21, $66 million in 21-22 and $8 million in both 22-23 and 23-24.

Figuring out what was going on with this money wasn’t easy since literally nobody we contacted at Global Affairs knew a thing about it.  At one point someone there told us we should probably talk to University of Ottawa professor Roland Paris (co-author with Margaret Biggs of last year’s report, Global Education for Canadians) on the grounds that “he was doing some work for the Government on this” (Roland informs me this is not the case).  It is not a good look when a government department which may have responsibility for a file has no idea what is going in said file.

However, we have it all sorted out now.  The $8 million/year ongoing seems to be the money for export promotion, to be spent by Global Affairs Canada.  That’s a bit of a bump over what was there before (under the 2014 strategy we were spending $5M/year), but not an enormous one. The remainder is going to an as-yet-unknown outbound mobility program to be run by ESDC, on a three-year trial basis (hence the big fall-off in spending for 22-23) after which there will be a review. 

Well, now.

I mean.

Hm.

So, let’s review.  We have a program with essentially zero established parameters (what is a “work/study opportunity”?  Is it either work or study?  Is it both?  Who decides?).  And the Department of Finance has handed it to ESDC, which does not have any direct-to-student delivery mechanisms (it does all its student aid stuff through the provinces), nor any serious policy capacity in international mobility, nor very much in the way of connections with individual institutions, and which (if the 23-month-long process of setting up the Future Skills Centre is anything to go by)
have been known to occasionally have the odd hiccup in executing in a timely fashion.  And they have to get a program together that can spend $13 million worth in the next fiscal year.  Which, given that PSE institutions will need something in place by August if they are going to roll it out during the academic year, basically means the whole design phase has to be ready for cabinet in about 10-12 weeks.

Good luck with that.

Personally, I think this has bad news written all over it.  I suspect the only way ESDC is going to be able to get the money out the door in time is going to be outsource both the design and delivery of the program to institutions:  hand the money over to CICan and Universities Canada under a contribution agreement and hope to God they can make something work.  For internal reasons, both associations will want to make sure as many of their members get as much money as possible, so it will be a case of spreading money around quite widely, which in turn probably means putting as few conditions as possible on the money in terms of things like length of time abroad, type of program, whether any language acquisition is involved, etc.  All of this is a recipe for minimal actual impact.

If it were me, and I weren’t on some ridiculous schedule dreamt up by people in central agencies who don’t understand program implementation, I’d be strict as hell with this money.  I’d run it through a limited number of institutions on a competitive basis.  It would be up to the institutions to design meaningful programs which i) integrated work and study over ii) a minimum 4-month period iii) in a foreign language and which iv) involved curricular/credit reform so that all participants from all fields of study could participate without the risk of losing credits or having to extend their programs and v) had a strong program evaluation component.  But as you can probably imagine, I’m not holding my breath.