Fiscal Destruction: Kenney Government Wages War on Alberta’s Universities and Colleges

With last week’s budget, the Kenney government affirmed its commitment to radically undermining Alberta’s postsecondary education system. The response from the leaders of Alberta’s postsecondary institutions?

The University of Calgary’s President, Ed McAuley, supports the drastic cuts, saying that “This government was elected with a large plurality on an austerity mandate, and the University of Calgary recognizes its responsibility in helping to deliver on that mandate.”

University of Alberta President David Turpin at least takes the position that the Kenney government’s plan to cut the University’s budget by an additional 11% in 2020-21, hard on the heels of a 6.9% “in-year” cut in 2019-20, is “difficult news”. Unfortunately, Turpin’s statement also makes it appear as if the Government is simply requiring the University to make changes already in progress “in a much shorter time frame of three years” and that we will be able to “maintain our responsibility to our students and to Albertans to deliver world-class teaching, research, and innovation” regardless.

All of this gives the public the false sense that everything will be just fine. That’s certainly what a Saturday tweet from the Ministry of Advanced Education’s press secretary Laurie Chandler seems to confirm. When professor Lise Gotell pointed out that it will take “generations” for us to recover from “this mindless assault” on “what we have all built”, Chandler used Turpin’s statement as a retort. The implication is that the Ministry feels that Turpin has given the government the thumbs-up to go ahead and cut the University’s budget without regard for the devastation it is wreaking.

While McAuley’s and Turpin’s statements are quite different, they are both a very serious problem. Universities should not provide cover for the government’s political agenda when that agenda puts the future and well-being of the province’s universities and colleges at risk. The leaders of all of Alberta’s postsecondary institutions need to come clean with the public about what budget cuts of this magnitude to their budgets are really going to mean, starting with higher tuition for students, fewer course offerings, a worse faculty-student ratio, and the closing of research facilities and programs. Contrary to what McAuley claims, the public did not give the Kenney government a mandate to treat our postsecondary institutions like piggy banks they could smash to fund other aspects of their political agenda.

Minister of Finance Travis Toews claims that all the Kenney government is doing is “freeing up” our postsecondary institutions to be “more entrepreneurial”. But that is not the role of our postsecondary institutions. Their role is to educate students and to advance knowledge. These are public goods that strengthen society and need to be supported with proper public funding. For the Kenney government to cut the University of Alberta’s budget by 11% in 2020-21 after the unprecedented and totally unjust cut of 6.9% mid-budget year cut of 2019-20 is for it to engage in a full-frontal attack on the institution. The cuts to other postsecondary institutions in the province may not be so deep, but the entire system is under attack. Our postsecondary leaders need to give the public honest accounts of the impacts. How many people are going to lose their jobs? How will those job losses affect the ability of the institutions to perform their functions? Where will we see a reduction in our research and teaching capacity? And how will the University of Alberta’s world-class performance and standing be affected by the various ripple effects of these brutal cuts?

Every time you hear someone claim that all of this is to be understood as an exercise of good fiscal management it might help to remember the roots of our modern conception of the “fiscal”.

In ancient Rome, the “fiscal” was the name given to the properties of the state, or rei publicae, public things. For centuries, across the middle ages and into the early modern period, good sovereignty was conceived as a protection of the “fisc”, or the safeguarding of public things, and the distribution of their wealth to the people of a realm. As the “fisc” was regarded as sacred, the most popular medieval and early modern iconography of it shows good sovereigns, modelling themselves on Christ, holding and squeezing a sponge to symbolize their distribution of the fisc’s shared wealth. The implicit idea was of Christ/the sovereign as the “gardener” watering the realm, a concept with which Shakespeare, whose work I teach, often plays as he represents contests over what constitutes good governance, and what is bad.

From Alciato’s Emblems (Paris, 1542), http://www.emblems.arts.gla.ac.uk/alciato/picturae.php?id=A42a062

The Kenney government’s fiscal management is doing the opposite. It is squeezing public goods and public services to diminish the public sphere.

Let’s think about it in relation to what it is doing to the one postsecondary institution in the province that is in the “top 100” worldwide. On the one hand, the Government is decimating the University of Alberta’s budget. On the other hand, it is simultaneously introducing, at breakneck speed, “performance-based funding,” slated to kick in next month. Under a “performance-based funding” scheme, an institution is punished with loss of funds if it fails to meet a set “metric” or “indicator”. The actual metrics are themselves a problem as they mostly involve imprecise and inappropriate measures, such as whether an institution succeeds in getting students jobs in an existing labour market and how much they are paid. These indicators are determined more by the economic climate than anything else. Not one of the Government’s planned “indicators” has any capacity to assess the quality of either research or teaching at any of our postsecondary institutions. The government is introducing them simply so that it will have mechanisms to judge the institutions’ performances with the objective of withholding further funds.

Here’s an example of how these two attempts to “manage” postsecondary are already intersecting at the University of Alberta, to dire effect. The Government has informed us that it will use as one of its “performance indicators” the amount of money that the University brings in from external funding agencies. But because the Government has already cut the University’s funding by 6.9% in the middle of the last budget year and is now cutting it an additional 11%, the VP Research’s office is engaged in a “restructuring” of its “Grant Assist Program” which will impair its ability to support the University’s researchers in the social sciences and humanities in securing such funding. Holy irrationality, Batman! This is like telling farmers you’re going to compensate them according to their crop yields and then tearing bags of crop seeds out of their hands in order to dump them in a nearby oil well. When it designates the total amount of research funding that the University receives as a metric for measuring the University’s success and then cuts the budget that provides professors with support in securing that funding, what is the Government doing but setting up the University to fail?

When you hear the Kenney government claim that it is “restructuring” the University or any other of the province’s postsecondary institutions for their own good hear the truth: the government is casting about for excuses for itself not to meet its fiscal responsibilities to these institutions. When they say they want to shrink the “Government’s share of the economy” what they mean is that they are disinvesting in the very public goods that Albertans need for our individual and collective futures.

Tragically, they are doing so at the very moment in which Alberta should be aggressively anticipating and doing everything it can to contribute to a green future. There is growing global recognition that we must abandon industries that are destroying the climate as quickly as possible. Yet in the face of an existential threat to humanity, the Kenney government would have Alberta double-down on the past. And so it is busy cutting funding to the very institutions that should be helping to drive the Green Revolution so that it may spend our money instead on continuing investments in oil and gas.

They themselves have supplied the metaphor for what they are doing.

The government has invested $30 million in a “war room” to target environmental activists (those who, in Kenney’s view, tell “lies” about “our world-class energy industry”). At the same time it has refused to give the University almost exactly the same amount of money that had been budgeted for the year for “deferred maintenance” issues. What responsible homeowner doesn’t fix a leaking roof or repair an aging furnace and pipes — preferring instead to give away money to people who live elsewhere? This is exactly what the Kenney government is doing. They began their term in office by giving away almost $5 billion of Albertans’ money to foreign-owned oil and gas corporations; have invested tens of millions of dollars in the “war room”; and now want Albertans to pay the price for their lack of judgment with cuts to our services and our institutions, including one of the most prestigious in Canada, the University of Alberta. What is this but “war” upon Alberta’s public postsecondary institutions — war upon our “fiscal” goods?

All of this, as the Parkland Institute report released Friday notes, is part of a high-stakes roulette game in which the Kenny government is betting the current and future well-being of Albertans on “fiscal projections [that] depend on a number of assumptions, perhaps the biggest of which is the hope that three new pipelines (Line 3, Trans Mountain expansion, and Keystone XL) will be built and start operating in the next three years,” despite the fact, as the budget document admits, “all three pipelines still face several regulatory hurdles”.

This isn’t how responsible fiscal managers act. This is the kind of gamble in which reckless children engage.

The essential first line of defence against Kenney’s “war” on Alberta’s postsecondary education system lies with the leaders of Alberta’s postsecondary education institutions. They need to stop kow-towing to the government and act like the adults in the room by calling out the actions of the government for what they are — the creation of havoc with institutions that Albertans have built across generations. These institutions need to be treated for what they are, precious public goods, fiscal goods. Whatever their own political allegiances, Alberta’s postsecondary institution presidents need to put the fiscal well-being of their institutions and the long-term well-being of the people of Alberta ahead of short-sighted political agendas.

Let’s have no more pussyfooting around — no more claims that we have no choice but to concede to the government’s “austerity” agenda, and no more false reassurances that we’ll still somehow be “world class” no matter what blows the Kenney government delivers. Tell the public the truth, please, in plain and unvarnished form, so that Albertans can rally themselves to do what our neighbours to the north, in Alaska, did last year, when they rejected their government’s attempt to cut state funding to their university by 41%. The Governor of Alaska wanted to do that in a single year; the Government of Alberta is attempting to do the same by stealthier means, across four years, with a series of budget cuts complicated and deepened by the introduction of “performance-based funding”. Like the Governor of Alaska, the Kenney government needs to be stopped. It has no right to ransack our public postsecondary education system in order to finance their gamble with our future. It is time for our postsecondary presidents to show why they are so handsomely compensated. With that compensation comes a moral responsibility — the responsibility to tell the truth to the public when a government is waging war against the institutions in their custody. They should all be rising to the responsibility of saying that the attack is not to be tolerated — not on their watch.

Postscript: For clarity, it is the bad sovereign that is featured in the Alciato emblem — the one who wastes the contents of the sponge rather than ensures just distribution of ‘fiscal’ goods.