Last week, the Governor-General delivered the Speech From the Throne (SFT). I argue it is a very ominous document for post-secondary education. 

Since March, the Government of Canada has spent about $250 billion on various types of direct and indirect support for Canadians.  Very roughly, a third of that went to the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB), other third went to the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy (CEWS), and the balance went through three or four dozen targeted programs, among the largest of which was the Canada Emergency Student Benefit, which clocked in at over $5 billion.  On top of that, there is another $85 Billion in something called “Tax Liquidity Measures,” which isn’t really a cost but a deferral, and depending on how you count it, another $300-700 billion in various forms of liquidity support to business.  Plus, GDP fell 13% in the first six months of the year and we’re still about 700,000 jobs short of where we were in February.

This doesn’t mean we are broke.  The deficit scolds who are making facile comparisons to the mid-1990s apparently haven’t noticed that interest rates are way lower than they were twenty-five years ago, and the carrying cost of an equivalent level of debt is about a third of what it was back then.  So, we have room to keep borrowing.  In fact, with rates at less than 1% and effectively no chance of them going any higher for the next few years, it would be foolish not to borrow more.  But at the same time, normal constraints haven’t disappeared.  At some point over the next decade, deficits are going to have to return to close to zero, or at least below nominal GDP growth (although the prospects for growth are so awful that this number is going to be close to zero anyway), otherwise we really will be in trouble.

The question is: how do we get there?  Well, not only does the SFT not tell us, it goes in the opposite direction by promising significantly higher spending in a number of areas.  And not just temporary, get-us-through-another-COVID-winter stuff: big, long-term stuff.  Boosts to old-age security.  Some kind of national standard for home care.  A national Disability Inclusion Plan.  A “significant…investment to create a Canada-wide early-learning and childcare”, a “national universal pharmacare program”, the inevitable (Green-ish) infrastructure program, etc.   None of these are necessarily bad ideas (though a fair bit depends on details and execution), but a government choosing to move forward in these areas all at once, whilst simultaneously trying to put the government on a sound long-term financial footing is, barring an unprecedented set of stonkingly large tax increases, going to be strapped when it comes to other priorities.  Like, say, post-secondary education.

For instance, there is zero in here about backstopping institutions that might get into trouble as a result of COVID.  No talk of any kind of general transfer increase.  Nothing on science.  Hell, not even a supercluster in sight.  Nothing, in other words, which might help to generate the sustainable productivity growth that realistically is the only way we can fund this whole thing.

(One can take the view that since this is the third or fourth time that Liberal governments have proposed pharmacare and childcare, and that neither the lineup of mainly Tory provincial governments nor the Trudeau governments’ fairly weak record of negotiating with provinces inspire any confidence that this time will be any different. The chances of these proposals turning into real policy is close to zero, in which case there might be quite a lot of money floating around. There is some truth to this, but put it this way: if the problem is that Ottawa has lost the basic knack of making a federal system work, it’s not clear anything they do in the post-secondary field is going to work very well, either).

Now, while science, innovation and growth are all ignored, there is still a big piece on “skills,” which will get some very excited but which frankly makes me nervous.  Here what the throne speech says:

We have an opportunity to not just support Canadians, but grow their potential.  Working with provinces and territories, the Government will make the largest investment in Canadian history in training for workers.  This will include by (sic):

·       Supporting Canadians as they build new skills in growing sectors

·       Helping workers receive education and accreditation

·       And strengthening workers futures by connecting them to employers and good jobs in order to grow and strengthen the middle class

What to make of this word salad I have literally no idea, though the word “accreditation” in a federal document should make all thinking people shudder.  “Connecting people to employers” has some unfortunate echoes of the Canada Summer Student Grant: one can only hope the actual plans which emerge are more developed than the half-baked set of ideas that led to the WE fiasco.  The rest of it…well it could be anything.  The best possible interpretation here is that the feds are signalling a substantial expansion of the Canada Training Benefit introduced in 2019, which was a great idea if perhaps too small to cause much in terms of behavioural change, either among adult learners or Canadian post-secondary institutions.  Second best would be something like a replay of the 2017 budget and its focus on skills (see here), which was big and relevant but not showy. 

Beyond that…look, I worry about Ottawa’s decision-making capacity these days.  The local wonk class got drunk on the idea of creating a half-dozen new national programs every week at the height of the pandemic.  CSSG apart, most of them worked ok.  That, I think, has given the relatively small group of policy wonks around the Prime Minister and Finance Minister an elevated sense of their own abilities.  But when it comes to playing in areas of provincial jurisdiction, my impression is this government is out of its depth with really no idea how to play the hand it has been given.  Twenty years ago, the federal Liberals had the wit to develop and live by something called the Social Union Framework Agreement (SUFA,) which set some ground rules for how to achieve collective ambitions in realms which were of national interest but provincial jurisdiction.  The current lot seem to have no idea that this approach even ever existed.

In sum: the government seems focussed on expanding social rights to the exclusion of any thinking about growth and innovation.  That’s not good for post-secondary education. Judging by provincial reactions to the SFT, it seems the feds are already blundering wildly in areas of provincial jurisdiction.  That’s almost certainly not good for post-secondary education.  And to the extent it has ambitions around “skills”, they seem inchoate. 

That last one isn’t fatal: we still have a couple of months to see how the feds intend to put skin on the bones of the cryptic SFT commitments, and there are some encouraging potential directions the feds could take.  But on the whole, I have a hard time reading the post-COVID federal landscape as anything but discouraging.