I am unimaginably angry at how unserious Canada has become in the last 25 years. Around the turn of the millieemium, we had a chance to be a great country. We pretended we were richer than we are, and we squandered what little money we had of investing in things that matter. Since 2000, a number of things have gone badly wrong, including:

1) We let SUFA founder and we've now forgotten how to approach federalism properly.
2) We allowed public service atrophy, and so it can no longer make policy effectively (we should have moved in SG direction)

1/ A short history of Public-Private Partnership Arrangements at Ontario Colleges (or, why it's utterly ludicrous that the feds are taking the shit for all this student visa stuff) 2/ The first ones started around 2013: a couple of non-GTA colleges thinking they could more easily attract students if they had a campus in the GTA. Of course, they weren;t going to build their own: so they hit on the idea of sub-contracting their curriculum to private colleges.

1/ After 3 days of tweeting (in part) about international students I have come to the conclusion that Ontario's public colleges are master strategists. Not because of the way they make money off their PPP arrangements with private colleges. No, I'm talking about the comms job. 2/ There is a substantial percentage of the Canadian population which loses its mind when it hears "private" and "education" in the same sentence. And so when they hear that the Toronto "campuses" of certain Ontario colleges are PPPs, they immediatey glom onto the second P.

1/ I have a theory about how the feds lost control of the student visa file. It stems from something that happened at a GAC consultation I was at a few wks ago, in which a GAC official expressed surprise/consternation that unis were using PGWVs as a recuitment tool. 2/ "This university President stood up at a recruiting event in Dubai and said "study at my institution and you can stay and live in Canada", the GAC official spluttered. "That's not right! That's not what the program is for!"

Swear to God this is true. My jaw was on the floor.

1/ The real problem with the federal approach to student visas/housing is that if you listen to them, it's genuinely unclear what problem they think they are trying to solve. This is going to lead to some truly crap policy-making. 2/ Obviously the proximate cause is the housing affordability crisis. But to a substantial degree the housing/student visa nexus is an ON/BC/NS problem: why create national policy that will sideswipe institutions elsewhere?

Who thinks they know what duties of "member" of the Trudeau Foundation are? No googling.

(hint: "Members" are not Directors. They are the product of a very weird era in Ottawa budget making and currently only exist in a half-dozen or so orgs, to my knowledge at least) OK, I'll tell you. When the feds started "endowing" organizations left right and centre (CFI, Millennium Scholarships, Trudeau Fdn), mainly as a way to get rid if surplus money at the end of a fiscal, they had a standard way of setting up an accountability structure.

1/ Dear God, this nonsense again. Buckle up. Apparently I have to explain AB government budgeting practices to the damn minister. 2/ AB carries all institutional balance sheets on its own (a practice it is committed to ending, at least as far as unis are concerned). If you add up all institutional budgets, yes there is a significant increase for next year - $444M by my count.

1/ While RU army commands some serious artillery that can do a lot of damage, and its infiltration teams have worked reasonably well (as in Crimea), its performance to date in UKR has generally been very bad. Bad logistics, bad training, bad air cover. 1994 Grozny bad. 2/ I have seen some commentary to the effect that RU has better troops in the rear echelons, that the first ones in are just probing, etc. But this seems implausible. Every piece of evidence suggests Putin thought he would win a quick war - so why would he hold back the best?

1/ "Divisiveness" is, as Emmett Macfarlane rightly points out, not of itself an argument against any policy. Leaving aside the fact that mandates command huge public support, If division were a disqualifying argument, we'd have no free trade agreements, no same-sex marriage, etc 2/ Where Ibbitson & co. have a point is that the LPC's use of mandates as a tool in election campaigning was probably unhelpful and 'more divisive than necessary'.

But say they'd adopted same policy w/out an election - do people think the YOW occupation would not have happened?

1/ Provincial governments get an incredible bargain from universities: nationally, they only contribute a bit more than one in every three dollars (37%) a university receives. True across most institutional comparison groups. 2/ The fact is, students (international and domestic) are now contributing almost as much to the running of universities as are governments (significantly more in the case of Ontario). This is a deliberate policy choice made by govts of all stripes.

Genuine question: is there a single area of public policy where Canada has its shit together? Look, first of all federalism is entirely dysfunctional at this point. We had a pretty useful model of federalism in the late 90s called SUFA and since then both Conservatives and Liberals have ditched in favour of "fuck you federalism", where consultation is largely verboten.

1/ So here's the thing about "affordability" or "pocket book" framing in Canadian politics. With the excpetion of housing (which I will come back to in a second), it is pretty much all a steaming pile of crap. And we will live to regret all of it. 2/ The right-wing version of this is to defund public services in the name of putting "tax dollars back in Canadians' pockets". Sometimes it's reducing public expenditures on specific services, sometimes its preventing institutions from charging properly for their running costs.

Would Canadians rise in revolt at the horrors of "for-profit medicine" if they knew 90% of physician billing goes through (gasp) corporations? Do they think of dentists and optometrists as some deadly fifth column "bringing for-profit health to Canada"? Five provinces in Canada have private MRI clinics: BC, SK, QC, NB, and NS. No obvious partisan divide in that list: all parties can come down on either side of the issue. Despite being in govt since 2015, LPC has never made an issue of any province doing this.

1. This is not going to make the headlines anywhere, but the changes to Canada Student Loans (now Canada Student Financial Assistance) Program's Repayment are probably the biggest thing to hit student aid in 20 years. Massive. 2. Old rules: repayment threshold is 25K, payments max out at 20% of marginal gross income above that. If you made 50K, you could still be asked to pay up to $5000/year in repyaments, or $416/month (most ppl don't have enought debt to be asked to pay $416/mth, but some would)

Let's go a bit further on this. The knock on the Libs is that they waited too long on a China/Canada co-production option that eventually went sour. Would Cons have done same? Maybe their China-skeptic view would have won out - but they talk a lot about "Made in Canada" so...? But let's for argument's sake that Cons would have pulled the plug a few weeks earlier and started negotiating earlier. Would they have prioritized speed of delivery, as UK did? Or would they have prioritized value-for-money in the deal, as EU did?

1/ @robleone said something earlier today I found interesting, basically (I am paraphrasing a bit): what is your counterfactual for the federal & provincial govts? What do you think an opposition party would have done differently? Useful tool for thinking about biases I thought. 2/ Anyway in the spirit of getting into it a bit, I thought I would do this myself (so others can see my biases, too). It's a bit tricky because some if it comes down to personalities/skills of individual Ministers and we don't know who those would be, but anyways here goes:

To anyone who wants to push the "@laurentianU spent too much on infrastructure" line: LU took on about $80-90m in long-term debt for construction over past decade. $80M at 3% over 25 years is about $4.5M per year in carrying costs. On a $200M budget this is trifling. To anyone who wants to claim @laurentianu was gutting academic programs, take a look at the change in total spending on academic salaries. Up 12% after inflation in the decade to 2018-19 (all figures in 2018 $s)

WHAT? WHAT!?!

Whoa.

https://twitter.com/krushowy/status/1356324406637821952

So about four years ago, @HEQCO started looking at the financial sustainability of the system. Laurentian did not look great then, but it didn't look *uniquely* bad.

A competent government would have done this in September. @sflecce and @fordnation =/= competent.

https://twitter.com/CityCynthia/status/1356272540709216264

A competent government would have done this in September. @sflecce and @fordnation =/= competent.

https://twitter.com/CityCynthia/status/1356272869676896257?s=20

What kind of murderous cretin headlines a piece this way? Study looked at 2 private schools which were able to seat all children at least 5 ft apart and conduct WEEKLY universal pooled testing. Applicability to public schools in Cda/US = ZERO.
cnn.com/2021/01/29/hea… Study is here if you want to read it: medrxiv.org/content/10.110…