At 4 PM EST, Finance Minister Bill Morneau will rise in the House of Commons to deliver his fourth budget, and the last one before a federal election in the fall.  What can we expect from the budget on the big PSE-files?  Here’s a quick rundown.

Transfer Payments: Status quo.

Research: My guess is that there are small goodies in this budget, if only to give them an excuse to reprint everything they did last year in this year’s budget (I tried explaining this as a rationale to a foreign reporter last week and the had no idea what I was talking about.  A nice reminder that in other countries, budgets aren’t a subset of communications documents).  Some possibilities for what we might see: an announcement about how the new tri-council fund will work, some kind of new niche research fund announcement (yes, yes, the feds allegedly endorsed the Naylor recommendations kyboshing these, but that was last year), an inflation adjustment to CFI/granting council budges over and above the increases announced last year.  Or it could be bigger.  This area always throws up surprises.

Canada Student Loans: There are a bunch of ideas floating around right now, but my sense is the government may want to focus on this in its re-election manifesto rather than in the budget.  The likeliest “simple” (as in, simple to implement) tweak would be an increase in the size of the Canada Student Grant which, in Ontario at least, would be portrayed as backfilling where that nasty Doug Ford has chosen to attack students.

International Education: This is a tricky one.  Clearly, the government wants to do something on this front, hence the announcement of a new strategy in the fall update.  But as far as I know that strategy isn’t ready yet.  So, do you use the budget to announce money for a strategy which does not yet exist?  Sounds silly, but don’t rule it out. 

Post-Secondary Student Support Program:  Back in Budget 2017, the Government of Canada put an extra $50 million per year into the PSSSP, the program which transfers money to individual First Nations bands.  At the time, this was announced as a temporary measure – meaning that they had had plans to re-jig the whole program (which presumably meant changing distribution mechanisms as well as increasing funding) – and the extra funding was to expire in two years.  Well, those two years are up and so far as I know there is nothing resembling a consensus on changing the program (Bands really like being able to control who does or does not get the money and don’t necessarily see the need to review the mechanism, they just want more money).  Best guess: the can gets kicked down the road on reform, and the $50 million – possibly a bit more – gets re-upped for another year or two.

Other Indigenous PSE issues.  The Government has already committed money for an Indigenous language strategy, which probably has to engage post-secondary institutions at some level.  More importantly, AFN has been having discussions throughout the year for the federal government to come to the table with some kind of support package for Indigenous post-secondary institutions, on a basis similar to that undertaken by Ontario.  Could we see something along these lines?  With the feds having some post-Wilson-Reybould troubles on the Indigenous policy front, I think it’s possible.

Individual Learning Accounts (ILAs):  It’s no longer a secret that budget will introduce some kind of ILA program.  My guess is, though, that the press call that whatever is on the way is a clone of the Singapore program is off-the-mark.  I’m pretty sure there is a time element to it as well, so the way I suspect this will play out, if you recall my blogs from last week, is part-Singapore and part-France.  Given the lack of consultation on program parameters to date, the more detail you see tonight, the worse the program will be.  Here, less is more.  (Note: this is going to be a major market opportunity for institutions).

Work-Integrated Learning: Oh, who knows?  Various groups have been lobbying hard for something here, but I think this one is where the Privy Council Office puts its foot down on the whole constitutional thing, meaning that anything which could be construed as promoting curricular change in undergraduate degrees or college programs is off-limits.  So that leaves: i) shoving money into MITACS on the grounds that their various internships are research-related and ii) employer subsidies like the Student Work-Placement Plan.  My guess would be the latter, possibly (hopefully?) broadened beyond STEM.

I’ve probably mischaracterized some of this afternoon’s announcements, but I suspect that what you see above has at least covered nearly all the areas of policy that are going to get a boost (there’s always one total curveball).  Overall, my guess is colleges are going to be happier than universities, though I doubt anyone will have actual cause for complaint.

I suspect what may be most interesting tomorrow is how the opposition reacts.  Neither the Conservatives nor the New Democrats have yet started releasing any trial balloons with respect to their manifestos for the fall election, and neither leader Singh nor Scheer had anything even vaguely resembling policy on skills and post-secondary (except for Scheer’s irritating free-speech promise which has now been mostly overshadowed by Premier Ford having beaten him to the punch).  It would be a hopeful sign if in their critique of specific budget measures we see evidence of actual alternatives.  Also, if the ILAs are in fact announced, watch for the NDP reaction, since Guy Caron campaigned on essentially this idea during the NDP leadership campaign. 

Subscribers can expect something quite long from us in their in-boxes ‘round midnight tonight with all the details from Ottawa.  Bye ‘til then.