So, Justin Trudeau says one of his major policy priorities is to “put more money into education and training”.  As with all Liberal policies these days, it’s short on specifics, though whether that’s because he wants to participate in policy-making, or because he has either no clue/intention of giving Tories a target to shoot at, is unclear.  With the Liberal policy convention underway, it’s an opportune time to think about how a future Liberal government might deliver on this promise.

One thing Trudeau pere knew very well is that education is a provincial responsibility.  Period.  If you can find it, read PET’s 1957 essay, “Grants to Quebec Universities”, in Federalism and the French Canadians, which begins with him saying: “I agree with Duplessis on this”, and mostly consists of him savaging the rationales centralists offer for Ottawa’s intrusion into provincial jurisdictions.  In office, Trudeau killed the direct federal university funding scheme that St. Laurent created, and replaced it with block grants to provinces (then known as “Established Programs Financing”, now known as the Canada Health Transfer and the Canada Social Transfer).

Let’s start by assuming that Justin is closer to his father’s views on this than are most Liberals: what tools would he then have for spending on education and training?  It’s a shorter list than you’d think.  As far as K-12 education goes, there’s practically nothing.  At best, you could boost provincial budgets by offering an infrastructure program to build/repair schools, thus taking those expenditures out of provincial hands.  That’s politically tricky – Alberta, BC, and Ontario, with their growing suburban youth populations, would scoff at most of this – but it is do-able.

At the university level, the most obvious way to get money into universities and colleges would be to pump more money into the CST, and fully designate it as being for PSE.  The problem, of course, is that there there would be absolutely no accountability over this – provinces could spend the lot on a weekend bender with Charlie Sheen if they wanted to – but it would be simple, quick, and most provinces would probably feel the need to make a show of spending some extra money on PSE as a result.  The other two traditional areas of federal expenditure – research and student assistance – would be easier realms in which to create identifiable boutique programs.  Hopefully, Trudeau would refrain from this, though.  An over-large institutional focus on research doesn’t obviously help “education” (there might be a separate case for research in and of itself, but we shouldn’t pretend they are one and the same, and one certainly shouldn’t be funded by initiatives for the other), and as I noted yesterday, there’s already too much boutiquery in student aid.

Skills training may offer some of the most interesting terrain for policy initiatives.  Axing the Canada Jobs Grant, and putting the money back into programs provinces actually seem to think work, would be a crowd pleaser, as would an infrastructure program for colleges to deliver better skills training.  Most ambitious of all would be to work with provinces on a top-to-bottom overhaul of apprenticeships, starting by decoupling federal support to apprentices from the EI system – a feature that perpetuates our deeply unfit-for-purpose system of block release training.

In short: there are some good options, but apart from skills training they aren’t very headline-worthy, and won’t appeal to many Liberals.