I was speaking yesterday at the Government Relations Officers Conference in Banff, and it got me thinking about how the field has changed over the last 20 years.

I started in government relations back in 1996, working for the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (AUCC) – now “Universities Canada”.  Back then, most medium-to-large institutions had government relations officers, but not government relations offices.  There would be one person, maybe with an assistant.  Their role was essentially to act as a go-between from university Presidents, to the upper-middle level of provincial bureaucracies.  Presidents themselves did the heavy lifting of dealing with ministers and premiers; AUCC did nearly all the work in Ottawa, and was in a very real sense the “voice of universities”.

Today, of course, government relations are quite different.  It’s not uncommon for big research universities to have GR shops of six to ten people.   Many big research institutions now have people who are permanently – or semi-permanently – in Ottawa, and indeed they have founded their own lobbying group, the U15, precisely so that AUCC is no longer the sole “voice of universities”.

There’s a question here, naturally: is all this extra work and personnel “worth it”?  Are universities getting more bang for their GR buck than they did 20 years ago?  It’s hard to tell, of course, because of the lack of a genuine counterfactual; but for what it’s worth, my thought is that returns to government relations expenditures are decreasing, but that the situation in the late 1990s was probably completely unsustainable.

In the late 1990s, higher education was an easier sell to a core demographic of voters – and hence to politicians.  Boomers had teenage kids, and postsecondary was a major concern; now, they are more concerned with ensuring their own (or occasionally their parents’) health care.  Money might not have been much more plentiful in the late 1990s, but the argument for post-secondary was a lot easier to make back then, and frankly it took fewer people to make it.

Also, universities and colleges were considerably simpler institutions 20 years ago.  It took less time to explain the role of various parts of institutions, and there were fewer institutional partners to whom these explanations were due.  And the rise of “accountability culture” had not yet, well, arisen.  There were fewer reports to government, less pressure to demonstrate value for money, and the need to do community relations in tandem with government relations was considerably less.

Finally, over the past 20 years, government relations became an arms race.  In part, that’s because institutions were competing with one another for government money, but more importantly they were fighting against increasingly large government relations efforts from other sectors, which were also after government funds.  As others raised the bar, it was difficult for institutions not to respond in kind.

So, yes, government relations used to yield a lot more money per government relations officer than they do now.  And so to that extent, the folks in universities who see the expansion of government relations offices as examples of administrative bloat have a case.  But on the other hand, the policy environment is considerably more challenging than it used to be.  Universities and colleges – like other public entities – need to run harder just to stay in place.

If institutions had more flexibility in cutting costs, if their first reaction to any financial challenge weren’t always to raise more money, the need for expanded government relations might be less.  But since that’s not the case, it seems to me our institutions need as many people spreading the word about their good works as they can get.