Amidst a US Brain Drain, the Parties Pledge Little for Universities

Much like public school and health care, responsibility for funding post-secondary education is mainly a provincial and territorial affair in Canada.

“But the federal government plays a role in a couple of ways,” said Emmett Macfarlane, a political science professor at the University of Waterloo.

That includes direct and indirect funding transfers to the provinces and territories; awarding research and infrastructure grants to schools; capping international student visa approvals; and determining how much colleges and universities can depend on the tuition of international students to subsidize domestic students’ education.

So far the post-secondary promises from the two largest parties consist of a Conservative Party of Canada commitment to “target woke ideology” in university research, and promises from both the Conservatives and the Liberals to invest in skilled-trades apprenticeship programs, with the Liberals promising up to $20 million in college capital funds (split among 213 public colleges) and up to $8,000 per apprentice, and the Conservatives offering up to $4,000 per apprenticeship and to expand the union training and innovation program.

The emphasis on apprenticeships focuses more on one segment of college students than on educational institutions themselves, and leaves universities and their students out altogether.

As anyone paying attention to what’s happened to public post-secondaries since the federal government cut and capped international student visa approvals last year would know, that’s a problem.

Tuition and government funding are the two main post-secondary revenue sources, Macfarlane told The Tyee.

That means the money has to come from somewhere. As domestic tuition increases are unpopular with students and families and an increase in government funding doesn’t seem to be forthcoming, educational institutions are facing budget cuts and layoffs just to keep their doors open.

Since last year universities and colleges across Canada have been slashing programs, laying off faculty and even closing campuses to deal with the drastic reduction in funding from international student losses.

The rise in international student enrolment, which peaked at over one million students in Canada in 2023, coincided with a decrease in provincial post-secondary funding across Canada.

Nationally, average provincial post-secondary funding dropped from 84 per cent of institutions’ operating revenue in 1988 to just over 50 per cent today.

Here in British Columbia, the provincial government provided 68 per cent of operating funds to its public post-secondary institutions in 2000. It covers just 40 per cent of operational funding today, according to the BC Federation of Students.

“The system has been drained of funding for the last 15 to 20 years,” said Michael Conlon, executive director of the Federation of Post-Secondary Educators of BC. “And international students were the backstop.”

“We’re in a crisis,” Conlon added.

Last month the Federation of Post-Secondary Educators of BC put out a press release estimating that up to 10 per cent of faculty positions in the province are at risk of being cut due to budget shortfalls.

“Everyone likes to pretend like this wasn’t inevitable,” said Mark Diotte, president of the Kwantlen Faculty Association at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Metro Vancouver.

“But it surely was. Every audited financial statement in the last 10 years said this was our single biggest financial risk.”

The Tyee reached out to the Conservatives, Liberals, NDP and Green Party for their post-secondary election pledges. Only the Green Party provided responses.

The NDP asked The Tyee to hold this article until after their platform was released, adding it wasn’t fair to expect them to share this information before other parties released their platforms. But they could not say when their platform would be released.

The parties’ silence is not comforting for the future of Canada’s colleges and universities, Macfarlane said.

If the federal government continues to fail to increase its investments in post-secondary education, “we are taking one of the best university systems in the world and slowly allowing it to crumble,” he said.

How the feds fund post-secondary

One of the ways the feds fund post-secondary education is via the Canada Social Transfer, the third-largest federal block transfer to the provinces and territories, which is also supposed to cover social programs and early childhood development, learning and child care.

Unlike the Canada Health Transfer, which has increased “quite a bit” over the last 15 years, Macfarlane told The Tyee, the Canada Social Transfer has “risen at a much flatter rate over time” — not enough to offset the financial impact of capping international student visa approvals.

“I think a lot of people would argue it’s overdue for a big funding boost,” he said.

The federal government also invests in research universities through the tri-council agencies: the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.

That includes research grants for graduate students and the 2,285 Canada Research Chairs at universities across the country, investing up to $311 million annually in these post-secondary faculty positions and research-related infrastructure “to advance research that leads to groundbreaking discoveries and innovations across health, engineering, sciences, social sciences and humanities,” according to the federal innovation, science and research ministry.

This tri-council funding makes the federal government “the primary funder for most university faculty for the pure, general basic research we do; to fund infrastructure for labs; and to do a lot of funding for graduate students and post-doctoral fellows in the country,” Macfarlane said.

If the Greens win

In an emailed statement to The Tyee, Rod Leggett, the Green Party of Canada’s senior adviser in strategic communications, said that if they are elected, the Greens would tie increased investments in federal post-secondary transfers to metrics like the number of tenure-track faculty hired — responding to increasing post-secondary reliance on temporary faculty — and institutions’ faculty-to-student ratio.

Leggett said Canada must receive similar funding levels to other Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development countries such as Turkey and Norway in order to remain competitive and free from outside influence.

“Without proper government supports,” Leggett wrote, “Canada’s educational system will be... increasingly dependent on corporate dollars for research held by corporations and not in the public domain, for fundraising in universities for big buildings to bear rich people’s names on plaques, not for sustainable and reliable funding.”

The Green Party — which is currently polling at two per cent nationally, behind the Bloc Québécois, NDP, Conservatives and Liberals — would re-examine the path to citizenship for international students, Leggett’s statement read.

That would include re-establishing “reasonable work hours” for international students, who saw their weekly work hour cap increased to 40 hours per week from 20 in 2023, until it was again reduced to 24 hours per week last year.

As part of their desire to ensure students are “not being exploited in a diploma factory” and that schools have established connections to their communities, the Greens would pressure institutions to account for chronically absent students.

They would also tie visa approvals to available housing in the area, ensure students considering coming to Canada receive accurate housing availability information, and “support initiatives that help international students succeed while reducing pressure on local housing,” Leggett wrote.

Conlon of the Federation of Post-Secondary Educators of BC said a decline in trust of U.S. institutions will see some international students come back to Canada.

Conlon added that he would like to see the next federal government have a better plan for them than last year’s arbitrary cuts.

“I think Canada needs a more comprehensive, thought-out process about what we want from immigration and what the international student market will look like,” Conlon said.

Post-secondary institutions facing ‘severe’ budget cuts

Where the federal government has shown little interest in increasing post-secondary investments, the provinces have been actively decreasing their operational funding for decades.

In Ontario, which has the most universities and colleges of any province or territory, provincial funding for public institutions’ operational budgets has been stagnant for 20 years, Macfarlane said.

“Which means in real dollars, it’s actually been cuts,” he said.

“On top of that, Doug Ford cut tuition by 10 per cent and then has frozen it ever since.”

The result is almost every public post-secondary institution in the province is facing “severe” budget cuts in the form of cancelled programs and laid-off staff, Macfarlane said.

After Ontario, B.C. had the second-highest population of international students in the country prior to the implementation of the visa cap last year.

In B.C., as provincial investment decreased, international student tuition rose to cover the gaps. As of 2022, international students were paying tuition rates 528 per cent higher than for domestic students, whose tuition increases are capped at a maximum two per cent rise annually.

Vancouver’s Langara College, which had one of the highest rates of international student enrolment in B.C. prior to the visa cap, announced a potential major restructuring last fall.

Its faculty association told media last month that 200 people have lost work at the college, while Langara reported that 21 administrator positions were cut.

At Kwantlen Polytechnic University, which has campuses across Metro Vancouver, 70 faculty members were issued layoff notices this spring, mainly in the business department.

Those 70 people were permanent faculty members, Kwantlen Faculty Association president Diotte told The Tyee.

An additional 40 faculty members took early retirement incentives, Diotte said.

“We haven’t been able to track how many non-regular faculty have lost their jobs, because their contracts just end and then they’re never hired again,” Diotte added.

While the visa cap is reducing the number of international students allowed at Kwantlen, Diotte said processing delays at Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada mean the university is seeing even fewer international students than the cap allows.

Diotte added he wanted to see more programs added to the list approved for the post-graduation work permit, which allows international students to work in Canada for a limited period of time in “in-demand” jobs after graduation.

“It’s very Ontario-centric, from our perspective. Some of the in-demand jobs in B.C. in human resources, accounting, economics, those don’t qualify. So that’s causing students to go elsewhere,” said Diotte.

Not a normal election: Macfarlane

Given that Canada is currently locked in a trade war with the United States — and that some U.S. academics are fleeing to Canada — Macfarlane thinks the United States’ loss could be Canada’s gain. We have an opportunity to build a “knowledge sector” economy here at home, Macfarlane said.

But we can’t do that without increasing post-secondary investments, he added.

“We’re not going to attract American talent if we’re firing people,” he said.

Macfarlane suggested increases in research funding and the Canada Social Transfer as potential solutions — with the understanding the new transfer money must go towards post-secondary education.

“While the U.S. completely guts research funding, we could be attracting a lot of talent here, even just through research dollars,” Macfarlane said. Canada is “kind of a laggard in research spending,” he said.

Two weeks into the federal election campaign, the lack of conversation about post-secondary investments is a symptom of a larger concern, said Macfarlane.

“None of the leaders seem to, despite some of their rhetoric, recognize that this is not a short-term problem with Trump that is just going to go away,” he said.

“Instead of a real warlike commitment to shifting our economy and even our military and politics away from the United States, we’re seeing things like ‘Oh, we’re going to give you a one per cent income tax cut,’ as if it’s a normal election.”