As we move inexorably towards a fall election (21 October, in case you’d forgotten), it is time to try to evaluate how well the present government has done on skills, science and higher education and how its record stacks up against its main competitor, the Conservative Party.  We obviously can’t do a manifesto analysis now because the Conservatives don’t have a manifesto yet (though frankly, this recent set of policy speeches by Andrew Scheer are less than encouraging).  However, while we don’t have a crystal ball about what the Conservatives might do, we do have a 100% accurate record of what they did do while in office under Stephen Harper, and comparisons with the current government are entirely possible.  So today, let’s do that.

The trick here is figuring out how to compare a 10-year government against a 4-year government – especially when that 10-year government hit a global financial crisis three years in.  If you look at the broad swathe of the Harper government, what you see are three good-times surplus budgets (2006-2008), two holy-crap emergency massive deficit budgets (the 2009 and 2010 budgets), and then five Keynesian counter-cyclical budgets to bring finances back to rough balance (2011-2015); plus there was the confounding fact that the first five budgets were introduced in the context of a minority government while the last five were all products of a majority.

So, here’s what we’ll do: we’ll compare the Trudeau record on science, education and skills of the 2016-2019 budgets, with both the early-Harper budgets of 2006-2009 and the late Harper budgets of 2012-2015.  If you’re an optimist about the Conservatives, you can use the former as a benchmark, and if you’re a pessimist you can use the latter.  All figures given are what the permanent increase in budget costs would be and the number of years to full implementation are given in brackets.  When aggregating amounts, I do not consider funds allocated inside the quadrennium but which are spent afterwards (so, for instance, promises made in 2018 to increase the budget in 2022 don’t count); not do I count new funds spent in a quadrennium but which were allocated prior (so Trudeau does not get credit for CFREF money announced by Harper).

Ready?  Here we go.

Harper 2006-2009

If you genuinely think the Tories did nothing but cut education and science, then you have completely forgotten the first four years of their rule.  This, recall, was when wheat was $10/bushel, oil was $100/barrel, gold was $1000 (sometimes $2000) an ounce, the Canadian dollar briefly touched $1.10 US and everyone’s cup was running over.  And the Tories did not hesitate to spend.  There were billion-dollar investments in campus infrastructure in both 2006 and 2009 (2009 for recession-countering purposes, 2006 was “just because”).  There were major increases in apprenticeship support in 2006, a huge and permanent increase in student aid spending in 2009 (to replace the one-off Canada Millennium Scholarship Foundation) and tax credits.  Graduate scholarships were exempted from taxation in the 2006 budget and graduate scholarship amounts were increased in every budget after that.  Granting council/indirect costs budgets increased by about $100 million in each of the first three years; and there was an enormous amount (about $1 billion) in various one-off increases in spending.  And in 2007, the Tories allocated a permanent $800 million increase in the Canada Social Transfer to post-secondary education.

Add all of that together and you get permanent new base-budget commitments of $2.27 billion, plus over $3.8 billion in one-off investments.

Harper 2012-2015

In contrast to the 2006-2009 period, the 2012-2015 Harper era budget are filled with hilariously small initiatives.  The budgets of these years were a lot thinner, and a good deal more of the investments in research were on the private-sector side (e.g. for things like the Industrial Research Assistance Program).  2012 was notable mainly for allocating $100 million per year over five years to the CFI, though only starting in 2014 (so we only count two years).  Budget 2013 had a big ($165 million) one-off to Genome Canada and a smaller allocation of $37 million for co-operation between post-secondary institutions and the private sector.  Budget 2014 saw a little bit of extra money ($46 million) going to the granting councils; the big news in this budget was the creation of the Canada First Research Excellence Fund which, in theory, was worth $1.5 billion over a decade, but for our purposes only counts as $50 million because that’s all that got disbursed in our period.  Small changes to the Canada Student Loans Program and the introduction of Apprenticeship Loans came to another $20 million.  The 2015 Budget announced something like $1 billion for academic research, but apart from about $70 million for Canada’s High-Speed research network and for Canada’s contribution the Thirty-Meter Telescope in Hawai’i literally none of it was spent in inside this quadrennium.  It also announced about $100 million in enhancements for Canada Student Loans (reduced parental contributions, increased grants) but none of it came into effect in our period and was subsequently cancelled by the Trudeau government.

Add all of that together and what you get I believe is about $60 million in permanent expenditures, plus about $50 million for CFREF (which is not quite a one-off but not quite recurring either) and another $400 million in one-offs. 

Trudeau 2016-2019

The Trudeau research record is the most straightforward, so let’s start there. The granting councils got a permanent $95 million boost in 2016; in 2018, following he Naylor Report, the government announced about $3.2 billion worth of investment over five years (which implied a $942 million increase to base budgets), in research – mainly to CFI and the tri-councils – but less than half of that increase (about $440 million) was actually implemented within the period.  So, by our accounting that’s a $530 million increase in research base funding. 

The big “one-off” under Trudeau was the $2 billion spent on the Strategic Infrastructure Fund, which to all intents and purposes was a carbon copy of the Harper Government’s 2009 fund but because of the way we are comparing the programs across years, they get to count the full amount rather than just half.  There have been a number of other one-off expenditures, but they amount together to less than half a billion.  

The big skills investment – apart from the Canada Training Benefit, which was announced in 2019 but doesn’t count for this exercise because it does not come into effect until afterwards – was a $500 million/year increase in transfers to provinces through the Labour Market Development Agreements.  Student Aid is a trickier one to calculate: between the 2016 increase in the Canada Student Grants, the 2018 changes to make CSLP better for working-age adults and the 2019 decision to retroactively reduce loan repayment rates, permanent increases in funding to Canada Student Loans Program were in the region of $900 million per year; but since this was mostly paid for by kyboshing education tax credits, the net increase was actually close to zero.  There has also been an effective increase of $90 million in the funding for First Nations students.

By my count, therefore, the Trudeau years have yielded an increase of about $1.2 billion in new base funding increases (more like $2.1 billion if you want to maintain the elimination of tax credits shouldn’t count) plus maybe $2.5 billion in one-offs.

Bottom Line

By any fair reading, the early Harper years were pretty good to higher education – in many ways better than the Trudeau years.  Equally, by any fair reading, the late Harper years were pretty godawful; yes, the last two budgets contained some significant goodies, but they were projected many years out.  If you want to denigrate the early Harper period, you could say it was merely the product of a booming economy and minority governments; if you want to boost the late Harper period, you could point out that restraint in spending is natural in the aftermath of huge expansionary budgets like those of 2009 and 2010 – it’s exactly what Dr. Keynes would have ordered.