So, it’s voting day. I am pretty sure the Liberals are going to win a stonking majority, but regardless of who wins, there are deeper shifts at work which the sector needs to take seriously.

Before I start, though, I need to take time to acknowledge something that happened last Wednesday. If you recall, I spent quite a bit of time discussing how the Conservatives had been pulling back on the “wokeness” issue. A few hours after I published that, CBC reported that the Conservative had re-issued their platform to re-insert the March 26^th pledge about eradicating wokeness in the award of federal research funds, saying its omission has been an oversight. This works equally well as a data point for “Alex theorizes too much from inadequate data” and “Alex gets results!”

Anyways, back to the main story. I think the most important takeaway from all this is that when the going gets tough, political parties in Canada head for the 1960s. Here we are, faced with an existential threat from the Trump Administration on goods and the re-ordering of global trade patterns, and what is the unanimous response of Canada’s political parties? Double down on trade in goods, but see if we can hawk them to the rest of the world instead of the Americans! Build things! Any things! Ports, pipelines, roads, airports…you name it. All in the name of increasing the “goods” trade.

The idea that maybe, just maybe, we should pivot to selling more services (you know, the foundation of all modern economies? And also not subject to tariffs?) does not appear to have any traction at all. Once hewers of wood, always hewers of wood, I guess.

Much follows from this. If we wanted to pivot to services, we’d definitely be looking more to universities in particular to help “invent the future” in conjunction with domestic knowledge industries. Instead, this has become the skilled trades/apprenticeship election. There has never been a campaign period in which apprenticeships featured so prominently. That could have been a promising sign: our construction industry in particular needs a capacity upgrade, and our apprenticeship system, largely unchanged for decades, is similarly due for a makeover. Unfortunately, nothing that any of the parties is proposing helps with this. Not a single party has proposed much of anything that would widen the pipeline for skilled trades workers, let alone improve their training. All they are doing is finding ways to give money to apprentices, who happen to form a contested voting bloc. Not because this money changes anyone’s behaviour; we already know that’s not true— heck, that’s the whole reason the Liberals originally canned the apprenticeship grants in the first place. These moves are good financially for apprentices; they are unlikely, however, to increase demand for apprenticeship places.

(For those of you inclined to harrumph at the hypocrisy of this, ask yourself how different this is from the continual increases in financial aid in which the Liberals indulged from 2015 to 2023, in which they quadrupled the size of student grants before eventually rolling back some of the gains. Did these increase access? Probably, yes. Were increases of that magnitude necessary to make those gains? I have my doubts. And the Canada Student Grants have yet to go through anything like the program review that the Apprenticeship Grants did: if they did, I wonder what we would find in terms of value for money?)

The point to focus on here is this: when Canadians imagine what a prosperous Canada looks like, they seem to imagine Canada of 2008, when we aimed to be a commodities superpower, rather than the Canada of circa 2002, the era of Late High Chretien-modernism, when we were investing like crazy in science and were going to be a knowledge economy powerhouse. In this situation, simply going around asserting the importance of universities and colleges (which in most parts of the country are at least as focused on white collar occupations as on blue-collar ones) to Canada’s future is not likely to be very successful. The battle is not about whether universities and colleges can help build our knowledge-economy future; it’s about whether our future should be knowledge-based at all. And that’s not a fight the sector can or should wage on its own. There needs to be a broad-based coalition involving knowledge-intensive and green enterprises as well. And forging that coalition is something universities in particular have been strikingly unable or unwilling to do over the past decade. And so here we are.

To be clear, I’m not against putting money into construction trades/sectors if it is done intelligently. We do need an infrastructure binge, particularly in the housing sector. Such investments are necessary but on their own insufficient to ensure future growth, mainly because rising housing costs have made it seriously difficult to build the larger, denser cities needed to foster thriving export-oriented services industries.

What about the party platforms? They are all in their own way disastrous and deeply unserious. Both the Liberals and Conservatives have factored in $20 billion in revenue from tariffs but kept economic growth projections from the pre-tariff era; that is to say, they assume a tariff war but also assume it will not affect economic growth, which is batshit crazy. The Conservatives also assume their tax cuts will raise money, and that they can eviscerate the government IT budget with no consequences whatsoever; meanwhile, the Liberals just assume they can find $28 billion in savings behind the seat cushions. No matter who wins, national finances are going to be a mess.

On the substance of the platforms as they relate to science, skills etc., the two parties’ top priorities are identical: that is, to spend money in ways that make it appear as if they care about bigging up the construction trades but doing so in ways that are as ineffective as humanly possible. For the Liberals, that means spending over $1 billion to expand transfers to apprentices, which they know to be ineffective. For the Conservatives, it means spending $850 million transferring apprentice training from public organizations with decades of experience and plenty of wrap-around supports to union-run shops without. Pick your poison. 

Only once you get below this nonsense is there a difference. One party wants to add a tiny bit of money to research and set up a fund to help hire top international (read: fleeing American) research talent; the other wants to go fight a Culture War about wokeness in research. It’s not difficult to pick a side here. But boy, you have to go way down the platforms to see the difference.

This was supposed to be the election where Canada would “get serious” and start being smart about investments because existential crisis (blah blah blah). Looking at the parties’ priorities for skills, science and education, all I can say is: we have a long way to go.