So, did anything happen last night?

Kidding.  Of course it didn’t.  We’re in for another minority parliament led by Liberals who will claim to have listened to Canadians, look to make Parliament work, etc. right up until the moment, 18-24 months from now, when they go back to the polls yet again looking for a majority. 

So, what does this mean for policy in Canada and specifically our favourite areas of higher education, science and innovation?  Well, I don’t think you can make any straight-line predictions based on the Liberals’ manifesto.  The thing you need to understand about Liberal Party of Canada promises is this: they aren’t meant to be taken literally.  Seriously, don’t do it.  They put almost no serious into crafting them – hell, the drafting of this one seems not to have started until the writ dropped, which is why we had the hilarious spectacle of Trudeau insisting this was the most important election of a generation/in the history of Canada/since the early Cretaceous period and yet have no idea what he was campaigning on until about halfway through.  This is a rather unhinged way for a governing party to behave, when you think about it, but there it is.

The best way to think of a Liberal manifesto is as a kind of semaphore to the electorate (Editor’s note: I had to look that one up too).  The breadth of issues covered by the promises and the wonkiness of the language used to describe them signals to the electorate that Liberals are smart and have a plan.  The specifics of that plan are irrelevant – they’ll change them as they go along and gather better ideas.  At best, the plan tells you “these are the issues Liberals will pay attention to once elected.”  So, you need to pay attention to the headlines under which Liberal promises are rolled out, but not the actual specific wording of the promises.

Let me give you an example.  Back in 2015, the Liberals promised to abolish the monthly education tax credits and use that money to expand the Canada Student Grant Program.  They abolished the credit in 2016 and allocated half the savings to grants, saying they would do the other half later, once the full effect of the tax credit abolition kicked in (the full effect could not happen in year one because of the carry-forward provision).  But they did not make good on the second half of the promise by 2019.  If you’re a non-Liberal, you could certainly have made the case that the Liberals didn’t fulfill their 2015 promise.  But what Liberals could say was: “yeah, but we also added a couple of billion in skills funding and heyyyy look at this NEW promise of increasing grant funding for our second term, which more than meets the terms of the original promise”.  That is to say, “look, we’ve shown we care about policy in this general area, give us a goddamn break on the details”.

It is worth asking if the details don’t matter at all, why include them in the first place?  Why not just say “we’re going to spend a couple of billion on X” and not provide any details since they are going to change anyway?  This is, in fact, what Liberals used to do, pre-1993 and the famous “Red Book”.  But then in the 90s “wonk” became cool, and since Liberals like detail they largely judge the quality of their platform on its length.  Basically, the detail exists to show that the Liberal brain trust is smarter than other parties’ brain trusts, that only Liberals are the true front-of-the-class kids.  It’s emphatically not because they believe the details matter: if you don’t like these specifics, they’ll come up with other equally smart specifics.

This is the polar opposite of the traditional Conservative approach, which is to make very specific promises and keep to them no matter what, even if they are really poor.  So, for instance, back in 2006, the Conservative attempt to compete on the student aid side was to offer a $60/month “textbook tax credit”.  It worked exactly like the education tax credit.  A less literally-minded government would just have added $60/month to the education tax credit and be done with it.  But nooooo: the Tories had to re-design the tax form so to include another line underneath the education tax credit labelled “textbook tax credit” – exactly the same but worth only 15% as much.  Because they’d promised it, you see, and people had to see that promise made = promise delivered.

That worked pretty well for Harper, who wasn’t fond of making a lot of promises.  It’s really not clear how the hell this was going to work for Erin O’Toole, who made something in the neighborhood of 1,000 specific pledges in his 170-page manifesto.  One suspects that the sheer volume of promises would have made it difficult to adopt a promise made/kept approach and that an O’Toole government might have been (and still might one day be) a bit more Liberal in its approach to enacting promises.

Anyways, back to the question of what all this means for our sector.  And I think the answer should be a dual one of both cautious optimism and hurry-the-hell up and give them alternate ideas to implement quick.  For instance, on student aid, everyone should be both applauding their vision and at the same time begging them to drop their wasteful student loan interest program and go back to their more targeted 2019 platform.  On research, applaud their desire to invest in making Canada more innovative while explaining that their ideas need to be tossed into a blender and transformed into something else.  I’m not just talking about the fatuous DARPA promise (billions for a solution to a deeply ill-defined problem); the promises on commercialization and the vaccine moonshot fund are deeply underbaked, too (I recommend a quick read of the very good Vaxxers: the Inside Story of the Oxford AstraZeneca Vaccine and the Race Against the Virus by Sarah Gilbert and Catherine Green, two of the key scientists involved: it’s pretty eye-opening about how science funding for vaccines work.)

In other words, we’re about where we were five weeks ago: a government that is moderately well-disposed to postsecondary education science and innovation and is generally not too dogmatic about which specific measures it should take.  The emerging danger, if there is one, is that a party that wins three straight election starts to think it is smarter than it actually is and that we may be returning to the late-Harper phenomenon of the Prime Minister’s Office (or the Finance Minister’s) thinking that it knows how to run science better than the scientific establishment.  Anyways, see you back here in two years.