Two big issues facing post-secon­dary education are funding and how that funding is allocated.

Although post-secondary educa­tion is a provincial responsibility, the federal government plays an important role in funding. In the mid-1960s the federal government initiated a system of block-grant transfers to the provinces, but without explicit conditions for provinces to account for their spending. Since then, post-secondary education has been losing the funding battle to health care. And, with no accountability mechanisms in place, it is impossible to know how much of the transfer funding reaches colleges and universities.

While it is impossible to allocate responsibility exactly between the levels of government, it cannot be an accident that the inception of federal block funding, especially the amalgamation of funds for health, social services and post-secondary education in the 1990s, coincided with a steady rise in tuition, both ab­­solutely and in relation to government funding. Since the 1990s tuition fees have more than doubled.

The change to unconditional federal funding is also associated with increased variation in tuition, with higher fees in the Maritimes, and, by a wide margin, the lowest fees in Quebec. Particularly disadvantaged by higher tuition are low in­come families and Aboriginal students. One step in the right direction is this year’s announcement of a new income-based student grant program.

Underfunding is also responsible for a decline in the proportion of full-time academic staff. In their 2008 report on trends in higher education, the Association of Uni­versities and Colleges of Canada found that in the two decades be­fore 2006, full-time equivalent en­rollment grew by more than 50 per cent, compared with an increase of 18 per cent in the full-time university faculty complement.

Canadian universities receive $8,000 less in funding per student than four-year public colleges and universities in the U.S., resulting in larger class sizes and a student to full-time faculty ratio ranging from 19.4 in Newfoundland to 27.0 in Ontario.

During this transformation of the base funding for college and undergraduate university education, the federal government strengthened and dramatically changed the re­search landscape. Funding for the Canadian Institutes of Health Re­search was significantly increased — coinciding with a transformation of the old Medical Research Coun­cil — as was funding for the Na­t­ural Sciences and Engineering Re­search Council. Funding for the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council increased somewhat, leaving it with much lower per researcher allocations.

At the same time the government increasingly promoted research through the Canada Research Chairs program (and now the new Canada Excellence Research Chairs program) and it increased reliance on sponsored research and public-private partnerships, especially via joint funding from the Canada Foundation for Innovation and the new Centres of Excellence in Com­mercialization and Research program. Naturally, those partners begin to shape the national research agenda.

Targeted funded has been exten­ded in the allocation of new funds for the three federal granting agencies. In the 2008 budget, the federal government provided funding to NSERC targeted at research in the automotive, manufacturing, for­estry and fishing industries and tied SSHRC’s funding to studies involving the social and economic development of the north and other en-
vironmental impacts. CIHR funding is restricted to research on health priorities. Over time, and with base funds fixed, directed research puts a squeeze on research that doesn’t “fit” government priorities and, more generally, threatens curiosity-driven research.

So what should we demand from federal policy? First, at the structural level, we need the broad grants for post-secondary education to the provinces to be removed from the Canada Social Transfer and placed in a separate fund. The current practice of lumping post-secondary support in the “social transfer” category prevents public debate over the federal financing of higher education.

We would like to go further with a Post-Secondary Education Act. As envisioned by CAUT, the Act would establish a federal obligation for core funding, based on national guidelines and the principle that education should be nonprofit and available to all who qualify academically,
regardless of means. Also, it would mandate collegial governance and academic freedom throughout the post-secondary system. Clearly we need a debate about the inadequacy of federal spending on higher education, but it’s hard to have such a debate when the contribution can’t be measured!

On the research side our concern is that more and more directed research is gradually displacing academically-directed research. The usual mechanism is to freeze existing funds (resulting in inflation-induced real declines) while all “new money” flows to government-identified priorities. We need the government’s commitment to funding for core academic research and not policymakers’ goals.

At the same time, in a world of limited resources the government must rectify the dramatic disadvantage of social sciences and humanities research funding, relative to health, science and
engineering.