As Alberta staggered under a third surge of COVID-19 in May 2021, Premier Jason Kenney announced a province-wide, two-week school closure. Immediately, up rose the chorus that has accompanied [...]
Jason Kenney arrived in Alberta provincial politics with a laser focus on reforming K–12 education, and one of his primary targets was curriculum—what students learn in school. During the first [...]
Erika Shaker, the national office director of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, says yes. The cost of tuition shouldn’t be an entrance fee to a decent life. Most jobs that pay a [...]
Canada has too many disengaged citizens. Voter turnout is the simplest measure of this. For federal and provincial elections over the past decade, one-third of us have simply skipped out [...]
University labs and classrooms became participants themselves in a massive natural experiment during the pandemic. COVID-19 remade university life, forcing students and professors to retreat from [...]
The Kenney government proclaimed in fall 2019 that Alberta’s post-secondary institutions were “overly dependent” on government funding—which is an odd thing to say about a public good. Then it [...]
Shelly Wismath, the Dean of the School of Liberal Education at the University of Lethbridge, says yes. The term “liberal arts” comes from the Latin liber, meaning free, and originally [...]
Betsy DeVos would be thrilled to have a [school] system like yours,” says Diane Ravitch, research professor of education at New York University, about Alberta. Donald Trump’s secretary of [...]
AV: You’re one of only two remaining MLAs from the Klein era. Yeah, I’ve actually seen six premiers. From 2004 until 2015 was quite an unstable government situation. They were changing ministers [...]
AV: What do you see as the purpose of post-secondary education? It serves two purposes. The first is to create well-educated citizens who are prepared to engage in public discourse and [...]
Hugh Mackenzie
The economist and research associate at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives says yes.
Free tuition would redress a massive intergenerational inequity created over the past 30 years. In 1990–91, average university tuition in Canada was $1,464; adjusted for inflation, that would be $2,541 in 2019–20. Today the actual average ...
On a sunny autumn afternoon, pedestrians walk up to the edge of Edmonton’s 115th St, where steel girders separate the road from the edge of the hill. The view is tremendous: overlooking the lush Victoria Park golf course and the gorgeous panorama of the North Saskatchewan River valley. Most people ...
In 1965, Quebec, eager to be master in its own house, decided it wanted to have its own pension plan and not be part of the new Canada Pension Plan. Quebec’s population was younger than the Canadian average, and the province had a high birth rate. The province believed its ...