I don’t know about you, but I find all the writing about the Trudeau legacy pretty goddamn annoying. Weeks and weeks of columnists yelling “resign!” followed by weeks and weeks of the same columnists yelling “he didn’t do it fast enough!” All true; all deeply boring. But since this is basically the blog of record for the sector, it would be weird to let the man leave without an assessment of his effect.

So here goes:

The early years

A lot of people were probably more excited about Trudeau’s win in 2015 than they should have been. The Chretien/Martin regime of the late 1990s and early 2000s was the most pro-science /education in Canadian history. In comparison, the Conservative government of Harper government seemed pretty bad, even though its record on funding postsecondary education was much better than it usually got credit for (its attitude towards government scientists was a different matter entirely). A lot of people assumed that a new Liberal government was just going to reset to the status quo ante, even if that was never really very likely.

It is worth recalling that , in the 2015 election, the Liberals were the party that promised the least, financially in terms of postsecondary education. Sure, in opposition, Trudeau mused about higher education a fair bit, which made him seem progressive without actually requiring him to do anything (remember his idea of targeting a rise in postsecondary attainment rates from 50% to 70%? Me neither until I started going through my files—it was never going to happen). But basically, he was coasting on the reputation of the previous Liberal administration.

There was one great move early on, with respect to phasing out (untargeted) education tax credits and investing the proceeds in income-targeted student grants, a measure which allowed some provinces (like Ontario and New Brunswick) to at least temporarily (until vindictive Conservative governments came to power) re-arrange their aid programs to deliver targeted free-tuition programs for lower-income students. This saved the government money over the course of the Liberals’ first term (it was meant to be revenue-neutral, but that depended on an increase in spending in the 2019 budget which didn’t happen until the COVID emergency—see below).

The Liberals did a lot of other stuff in that first Trudeau term; just not much that was either coherent or lasting. On research funding, the government asked former U of T President David Naylor to advise them on how to run research councils, and when he did they proceeded to take about two-thirds of his advice on the actual amount of funding and well under a quarter of what he recommended in terms of how to manage that funding (it totally ignored the bit about giving up its boutique funding programs, for instance). On its prime innovation strategy—the so-called “superclusters,” which still exist, now devoid of any regional dimension—which the deeply problematic techbro-loving Minister of the era, Navdeep Bains, would create a set of “made-in-Canada silicon valleys”, well…you can read about them here, but they are so embarrassing it’s probably better to pass over them in silence.

There was a lot of money thrown at Skills Training in Budget 2017 and most of it seemed reasonably sensible, but it’s hard to work out how much good any of it did. This government—unlike the Martin/Chretien Liberals—really doesn’t like evaluating its own spending. And certainly the government never really followed this up or turned it into something coherent. An attempt to create a national training benefit in Budget 2019 which seemed like a promising idea at the time but has basically dissolved into thin air because there has been little attempt to promote the program(s). Steps were taken towards better funding for indigenous postsecondary education, but that effort subsequently got bogged in the details.

And this is pretty much the story of Liberal policymaking in general in postsecondary education (and arguably a lot of other policy fields, too): lots of good ideas, not very good at sustaining the attention necessary to execute them properly and make them work. This is what happens when you govern according to the 24-hour news cycle and not the long-term success of the nation.

The COVID Years (Second term)

Less than six months after being narrowly re-elected in 2019, COVID arrived. Broadly speaking, the government’s initial instincts were pretty good: do anything to keep the economy going while we figured out how to live with the virus and waited for the vaccines to arrive. In higher education, that meant pouring a ton of money into an emergency student aid benefit (the Canada Emergency Student Benefit) than turned out to be actually necessary (see my take on what really happened during covid and emergency benefits). I’m not particularly inclined to see this as a failure: hindsight is easy, but given how crazy everything was in spring 2020 I’m inclined to give them a pass on one-time cash handouts. Same with the backstopping of university research expenditures in this period.

What was less forgivable was the tendency to view the brief shift of the Overton Window towards government intervention either as something semi-permanent or as an invitation to extreme hubris. The decision to double the Canada Education Student Grant from $3000 per year to $6000 per year for 2020-21 was probably justifiable: extending it for another two years and then abruptly cancelling it in the 2023 budget was probably not. And then of course there was the WE Charity/Canada Student Summer Grant fiasco. Hubris combined with a lack of execution will kill you every time.

Post-COVID (Third term)

The Liberals narrowly won the 2021 election and then basically went to sleep until the summer of 2023 when it suddenly dawned on them that they were hated by pretty much the entire country, mainly because of inflation but especially housing inflation which was blamed (with some justification) on a rapid influx of international students, particularly (but not exclusively) to Ontario Community Colleges. The influx was not the Liberals’ fault in the least—for this you can blame some combination of a decade or more of provincial underfunding and some truly wild-ass empire-building by a handful of college Presidents—but they were somewhat slow to react. Somehow, they got tagged with responsibility for the problem, and so their Immigration Minister, Marc Miller, set out to solve it.

And so in January 2024, with all of the wit and wisdom that comes from occupying the strategic intersection between arrogance and ignorance in which official Ottawa perpetually resides, by gum, the Trudeau introduced a solution (actually two: there was a second policy package in September which was designed specifically to screw with the college sector). It was a national solution to an essentially regional (southern Ontario) problem, and it hammered postsecondary finances across the country. Some of it was necessary; much of it was not. My estimate of the changes are in the range of $3-4 billion range, with job losses in the tens of thousands. And to a considerable extent, it was the violent, sudden change in international policy combined, deliberately adopted in a manner which was contemptuous of the sector, which is how this Government will be remembered by the sector.

Meanwhile, the feds went on an epic bout of fumbling the research and innovation files. In election 2021, Trudeau promised a Canadian version of DARPA. Budget 2022 turned that into a new Canada Innovation Corporation, which was then basically punted into the long grass because, well, Trudeau couldn’t focus long enough to figure out how to make it work. Then, Inflation ate away the entire value of the big Naylor-induced research package of 2018. That led to a new research package in Budget 2024 worth $1.8 billion (88% of which does not come online until after the next election, it’s so anyone’s guess how much of it ever materializes), accompanied by a raft of new ideas from a panel chaired by Frédéric Bouchard about how to manage curiosity-driven research. The money has now been allocated (in theory), but the feds are not close to working out changes to management. All was supposed to be revealed in the 100% unlamented Fall Economic Statement, but again the Liberals punted. Couldn’t make a decision.

(Simultaneously, the government utterly botched the roll out of the Strategic Science Fund. No one has ever written about this and I’m not going to tell tales out of school—at least not today—but trust me, this was a time-wasting fiasco of enormous proportions.)

The Verdict

At the end of the first term, I compared the Trudeau record with that of the Harper government, and noted that the difference wasn’t as big as you’d think—probably more about vibes than about money (I got some snotty “how dare you” comments from Liberal partisans on that one). And I think that’s still my verdict. The Trudeau government wanted to be known as “pro-Science” and “pro-education.” It just didn’t want to put in the money or the sustained policy attention required to actually be effective. Sometimes the casual inattention to policy details just made spending ineffective; sometimes (as in the case of international student visas) it hurt institutions.

Either way, the cavalier attitude to substance began to wear thin a long time ago. I don’t think many in the post-secondary sector will view the Trudeau era with much fondness.