I know this seems a bit late because the election was almost three months ago, but unlike 2015, the victorious Liberals took their sweet time forming a government and it was not until mid-December, after this blog closed for the break, that it issued mandate letters to all its new Minsters.  But with those now completed and made public, we can begin to get a handle on how this minority Liberal government intends to govern with respect to PSE.

Let’s start with the overall political situation.  This is a minority government, but it has a fairly large plurality and with the Conservatives having chosen to go through a period of totally unnecessary internal bloodletting leadership race and the NDP being basically broke, it can probably govern as if it had a majority for the next eighteen months or so.  It is unlikely to govern for much longer than that: Canada has never had a minority government last longer than thirty-two months (Pearson/Trudeau from November ’65 to June ’68).  This means this government has a pretty short time-perspective.  If PSE organizations are going to pitch them ideas, they need to be ones that can feasibly be implemented before mid-2022. 

I suspect the main issues the government is going to have to deal with over that period is regional alienation in the west and the pipelines/environment.  They’ve effectively decided to make Chrystia Freeland, by some distance cabinet’s best performer in the last parliament, the Minister of Internal Diplomacy to handle all the contentious files which require formal or informal agreements with provinces.  Normally this is a Prime Minister’s job, but the thinking seems to be that Trudeau Derangement Syndrome is sufficiently advanced in the west that having someone else do the job might take some of the heat out of the negotiations.  But that’s also going to create a dynamic which I suspect may not be favourable to higher education.  With Freeland wielding so much power on so many files, the likelihood of our sector getting much play is pretty low.  It might be different if either Saskatchewan or Alberta had a big “ask” on higher education that could get thrown into the political mix, but Alberta in particular seems intent on reducing any commitments to post-secondary education, so this seems unlikely.

Turning to cabinet, British Columbia MP Carla Qualtrough was named Minister for Employment, Workforce Development and Disability Inclusion, which is the chunk of Employment and Social Development Canada dealing with PSE and Apprenticeship.  Her mandate letter is here, and there is little of note in here beyond what was in the Liberal election platform: implement the major promises on student aid (doubling the grants program, improving repayment in various ways), continue the implementation of the Canadian Training Benefit, do some minor stuff around apprenticeships (increase overall numbers by about 3-4%) while giving it a big name (The Canadian Apprenticeship Service), etc.  In dollar terms, the student loan/grant piece is massive to the point where it’s unlikely the government will want to spend much beyond this in the current term.  But, you know, that’s fine – the proposed student aid changes are terrific and just achieving that will be more than any previous government has done.  Let’s not get greedy.

Indigenous Services went to downtown Montreal MP Marc Miller.  One interesting instruction in his mandate letter is to “Ensure that First Nations, Inuit and Métis students have the support they need to access and succeed at post-secondary education.”   This…is vague.  Budget 2017 and Budget 2019 together increased the budget for the Post-Secondary Student Support Program by $65 million over its 2015 levels (which IIRC was a smidge over $315m/year) and pledged about $500 million over ten years for Métis and Inuit students.  The budget also committed, over the next five years, to “engage with First Nations on the development of long-term First Nations-led post-secondary education models”, which seemed to indicate a newfound willingness to look at how to fund First Nations institutions, not just First Nations students.  The language of the mandate letter, however, does not look encouraging in that respect.

Over to the Industry portfolio, there are two bits of big news.  The first is that the government has decided to eliminate the Science sub-ministry entirely (shifting Kirsty Duncan over to be Deputy House Leader) and merge it back to where it was with the rest of the Industry portfolio (and to whose ministry the Science Minister reported anyway).  The second is that somehow, Navdeep Bains kept this now-expanded portfolio, which I take to mean the Liberals actually think superclusters were actually a success.  Which, you know…wow.

So, three things.  One: don’t expect a lot of new thinking on industrial policy in the next couple of years, because if Bains is there, the kow-towing to tech-bros strategy is unlikely to change.  Two: don’t read too much into ditching the Science ministry.  Stakeholders might have appreciated having someone in Ottawa who would listen to them, but half an hour once every few months with a Minister who actually has the power to move things along is probably better than hour-long monthly meetings with a junior minister who can’t.

(Quick aside here: much of the concern about losing a Science Minister has less to do with the Ministry than the Minister as in much of the country, Duncan herself was quite popular and credited with delivering on the Fundamental Science review.  Let’s just say this view was not widely shared in Ottawa, where more credit was usually given to Bill Morneau and where Duncan’s publicity-seeking was more obvious and less appreciated).

Third, Bains’ mandate letter needs to be read with caution.  The obvious thing to freak out about is the 100% complete lack of anything to do with funding research or granting councils; but as I pointed out back here, Canadian governments almost never start their mandates intending to do anything on research – it’s something that almost always comes up mid-mandate.  What is worth freaking out about is the sheer number of priorities Bains has been tasked with: it’s hard to imagine him giving PSE much of a look-in.  One suspects that the result of this will be that the PSE orgs in Ottawa may focus their attention more than usual on the Finance Ministry.

Personally, I’m not super-optimistic on the research front.  There is room for a little more spending on tri-councils, if the science community can persuade the government to ditch the CFREF program before a third round of funding starts in 2021-22 and shift that money over to the councils.  The thing is, the U-15 on the whole really like CFREF (they would like it more if they could find a way to permanently exclude upstarts like Laurentian from winning occasionally, but whatever), and in the absence of a united front from the higher education community, government is likely to go with the status quo.  But science activists across the country might want to spend the next month or two making trouble in Senates across the country to influence their institution’s policy on this. 

Anyways, should be an interesting 2-3 years.