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People, Processes, and Policy-Making in Canadian Post-secondary Education, 1990–2000

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Abstract

Policy-making in Canadian post-secondary education is rarely the subject of intensive, systematic study. This paper seeks to identify the distinctive ways in which Canadian post-secondary education policy decisions were constructed and implemented, and to posit an analytical framework for interpreting policy-making process in post-secondary education. Our focus is on post-secondary policy initiatives between 1990 and 2000. During this period, the federal government, under Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chrétien undertook some unprecedented initiatives in the post-secondary education field. The paper discusses aspects of the 1993 election campaign, the Income Contingent Repayment (student assistance) proposal in 1994, the federal deficit cuts of 1995, the return to fiscal surplus in 1997, and the introduction of the following federal plans: the Canada Foundation on Innovation, the Canada Research Chairs Program, and the Millennium Foundation Scholarship Program. The paper concludes with the presentation of a conceptual framework designed to enhance understanding of the public policy-making process in post-secondary education and, potentially, other policy fields.

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Notes

  1. Interviewees cited directly provided their permission to be named; anonymous interviewees are designated in parentheses by ‘Interview(s)’.

  2. See Government of Canada (1994). Agenda: Jobs and Growth. A New Framework for Economic Policy, published by the Department of Finance under Paul Martin's signature in 1994, and released initially as the Purple Book in 1993. See also AUCC's 1995 response: ‘Notes for a Presentation to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Finance Regarding BillC-76, The Budget Implementation Act’, http://www.aucc.ca/publications/reports/1995/budgetact_05_09_e.html.

  3. The other presidents in attendance were David Strangway (University of British Columbia), Rod Fraser (University of Alberta), Jim Downey (University of Waterloo), Peter George (McMaster University), Bill Leggett (Queen's University), Michel Gervais (Laval University), Bernard Shapiro (McGill University), and Claude Lajeunesse, the President of the AUCC.

  4. A second ‘Canada Millennium Scholarship Fund Advisory Group’ was also created, and it included individuals from the community college and university sectors. Susan Peterson from the Department of Finance chaired the group and officials from the HRD, the PMO, and the Privy Council Office also participated (O’Leary Interview, 2009).

  5. In its 2001 report, the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology criticized the CRC allocation because it favoured the large, research-intensive universities at the expense of smaller institutions, notwithstanding the 6% quota assigned to the latter. In his testimony before the committee, Robert Giroux acknowledged the political challenge that the AUCC faced ‘The distribution of the research chairs was based on the university's success in the past in granting council funding … AUCC made strong representations at the time to have a different distribution so that some of the chairs that would have been going to the more successful universities would be going to the smaller universities. We have succeeded partially, maybe not as much as we could, but there has been a redistribution of the chairs towards the smaller universities on that basis’ (Whelan et al., 2001, 95).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. York University, Toronto, M3J 1P3, ON, Canada

    Paul Axelrod, Roopa Desai-Trilokekar, Theresa Shanahan & Richard Wellen

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  1. Paul Axelrod
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  2. Roopa Desai-Trilokekar
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  3. Theresa Shanahan
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  4. Richard Wellen
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Correspondence to Paul Axelrod.

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Axelrod, P., Desai-Trilokekar, R., Shanahan, T. et al. People, Processes, and Policy-Making in Canadian Post-secondary Education, 1990–2000. High Educ Policy 24, 143–166 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1057/hep.2010.29

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