Just finished academic/admin day and looking at budget headlines.
Can anyone help me parse the international student stuff? The headlines (cuts of 60% plus) look like it would be further carnage for the higher ed sector.
But, maybe the *target* is being cut but the *actuals* are already there?
Other Canadian budget observations:
There are lots of cuts to strategic innovation and industry funds. Those ones were obviously ineffective
There are lots of new strategic innovation and industry funds. These ones will definitely work
We're cutting $s to low-income 18 year-olds to access education, but we still have half a billion a year to make student loans interest-free for early-career 20-somethings "to help with the rent"
AS DUMB AS A BAG OF HAMMERS.
budget.canada.ca/2025/report-... While there are a couple hundred mentions of Indigenous people, it's all genuflection - little substantial. Look past this fiscal year, and it's all zeroes... where do they think we're going?
My take on Carney's long-awaited and (to my eye) somewhat underwhelming Climate Competitiveness Strategy. www.theglobeandmail.com/business/art...
Here's the biggest PSE story you haven't heard yet: the Canada Student Grant for low-income students is being cut from $4200/year to $3000/year as of next August. It's implicit in the budget tables but the government is too chickenshit to actually say so directly.
Sigh.
Seriously?
Hot takes on climate implications of the 2025 Cdn budget. On one hand, lots of emphasis on investment in the low-carbon economy of the future, and using GHG reductions/$ as a standard for public investments. On the other, embrace of and subsidies for LNG as clean energy. \1
It does feel like the data break is likely to be the most substantive impact perhaps followed by how much more unpleasant summers are going to be for the civil service now.
The @cleforum.bsky.social webinar series looks fantastic again this year. First up is Jason Hicks from @uvic.ca on October 3. The full list can be found on CLEF's website:
clef.uwaterloo.ca/webinar/
Email clef@uwaterloo.ca w/ “CLEF webinar” in the subject line to receive reminders and invites.
No other way to slice it: this is incredibly fucked up.
I've made it out to Lund for my first World Economic History Congress. Excited to see lots of new economic history work from outside of the North American circuit. #wehc2025
Why do nation-building projects always have to be about hewing wood and drawing water?
Why can't nation-building plans be about knowledge or science?
A lot has changed in the world, so my colleagues and I at the @fordschool are opening up a special emergency admissions cycle for folks who want to start a Masters of Public Policy this fall.
Deets are here: fordschool.umich.edu/masters-prog...
I hope to see you in class in September!
Registration for the CLEF conference (April 25 & 26, Toronto, in partnership with @stone-centre-ubc.bsky.social) open until April 15.
Join us for a keynote lecture by @imarinescu.bsky.social
and papers on wide variety of labour topics: stonecentre.economics.ubc.ca/clef2025/
Applications are invited to participate in the 3rd Annual AEA CSQIEP Mentoring Conference to be held July 30-Aug 1, 2025 in Chicago! The conference supports late-stage economics PhD students who are queer-identified or working to support queer-identified economists. Apply asap, deadline Apr 11.
📉📈
NEW POST: Canadians aren't being asked to meet the moment
emmettmacfarlane.substack.com/p/canadians-...
At a time when Canada needs MASSIVE investment to transition away from the US, to build new facilities and transpo towards our ports, to rebuild our military, to build HOMES, to rebuild science and post-sec ed... to see the two main parties jump on *tax cuts* for their campaigns is depressing.
I agree with Emmett. One party is promsing a 1 point cut to the lowest income tax rate; the other 2.25 points. Neither has proposed a credible way to pay for it.
We need to see credible plans for big economic challenges and big defence/security threats.
Hope that will be coming soon.
🚨 I am looking to hire 1-2 pre-docs at the University of Toronto.
Some things you could work on: forecasts of research results, guaranteed income, evidence-based policy, AI.
For more info and to apply: evavivalt.com/2025/03/pre-...
Deadline: March 31.
#predoc #econ_ra @econuoft.bsky.social
On top of this, by Trump turning this into a question of Canadians’ very existence as a country, rather than just an economic hit, he has guaranteed Canadians won’t relent.
It is obvious to me that Trump has whatever the opposite of leverage is against Canada right now.
That is a fun new fact that I definitely didn't know.
One day, we'll look back on this as just Step 1 of removing women from any position of public authority.
No one is making a fuss, because it's just women, so Step 2 will be easier.
The broligarchs have already stated repeatedly that they regard women's right to vote in America as a "mistake."
Biting Vermont diss
If the Great Resegregation proves successful, it will restore an America past where racial and ethnic minorities were the occasional token presence in an otherwise white-dominated landscape. It would repeal the gains of the civil-rights era in their entirety. What its advocates want is not a restoration of explicit Jim Crow segregation—that would shatter the illusion that their own achievements are based in a color-blind meritocracy. They want an arrangement that perpetuates racial inequality indefinitely while retaining some plausible deniability, a rigged system that maintains a mirage of equal opportunity while maintaining an unofficial racial hierarchy. Like elections in authoritarian countries where the autocrat is always reelected in a landslide, they want a system in which they never risk losing but can still pretend they won fairly.
The attacks on DEI are a pretext for a much more radical agenda of reversing the gains of the civil rights movement, an objective the Trump administration is pursuing with zeal. A Great Resegregation. www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc...
You love to see it.
HANG IT IN THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF CANADA!!!!
Vance and others close to him are setting up the intellectual basis for American withdrawal from and hostile rivalry towards the EU based on the claim that a democratic Europe has betrayed an authoritarian vision that Vance presents as the epitome of "Western" civilisation.