At first, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Nova Scotia government talked about funding cuts, but not about "quality control." With declining trans-fer payments, the government claimed it had little choice. If health and education were to survive as public services there would either have to be tax increases or funding cuts -- or both.

It cut.

Then the tone changed. The government (under both Cameron and Savage) decided that it, and it alone knew best. It was time not just to cut but also to rethink health, review social services and rationalize universities.

From that moment the history of "rationalization" in Nova Scotia became an illustration of a fundamental truth in public policy analysis. If you're government, if your outlook is all about accounting (but not about the real business of health, social services and education), and if you're in a hurry -- then you will make policies whose consequences are unintended, unexpected and occasionally disastrous.

Over the past 10 years the provincial government and the Nova Scotia Council on Higher Education have written a new chapter in the history of the "Department of Unintended Consequences." It's a long and colourful chapter all about the government's tremendous desire to move abruptly from cuts to control.

The consequences? In 1997 the entire public sector in Nova Scotia leaves behind a half-decade of wage rollbacks and freezes. The entire sector will bargain hard -- and not just for money, but to restore proper levels of public service in health, social services and education. Hundreds of contracts will have to be rewritten and reconceptualized. The disputes may well be intense and negotiations difficult. Yet Nova Scotia has the services of only a half-dozen conciliation officers. We add this to "the chapter."

Meanwhile, as the cuts deepen, university tuition fees in Nova Scotia have risen and continue to rise. Too many students find themselves working full-time as they try to complete full-time programs of study. Is this "all about raising the quality of Nova Scotia higher education"? The voters have not been fooled, and the government's popularity has declined steadily all through the cuts and the rationalization exercises. Add more sections to "the chapter."

The overall cuts have produced unseemly brawls among university presidents (an intended consequence? -- if presidents are fighting one another, they are obviously not fighting the government).

The "rationalization" exercise in educa-tion, computing and business has led to new charges on the public purse: teaching facilities for massively and unexpectedly enlarged programs, office spaces for displaced professors, not to mention the cost of early retirement incentive programs for still others, and the immense amount of time devoted to bureaucratic exercises.

But beyond the money, rationalization and wage-freezes have produced a governance crisis. Government actions have ignored academic senates, and used boards of governors as pawns.

Students and their families have realized very little, if any, benefit from these 10 years of cuts, control and rationalization. The consequences are a weakened university government, undermining of participatory decision-making by professors and researchers, increasingly unaccountable leadership in the universities and reduced access to higher education.

In all of this, the first and last defence for faculty members has been their associations and unions. The typical professor hopes for the day when proper funding is restored and when autonomous self-government has become strong again. But in the meantime, the negotiation of fair safeguards for individual and collective rights has fallen to our associations and unions.

And, in one of the most unexpected of all consequences, the Nova Scotia government has managed to show, as few of us could, how academic freedom and collective bargaining are surely linked.