Dear Stephen, Michael and Jack,

Hi guys. Look, the next federal budget is going to have to be a doozy for cuts, given our fiscal situation, and everyone understands that Stephen would probably prefer to go to the voters and try one last time to get a majority before lowering the boom. That means it's more than likely we'll have an election in the fall - before October, if the Conservatives wish to avoid answering questions about the Auditor General's report on the effectiveness of the stimulus spending.

That makes this summer platform-writing time for all three of you. As a public service, I'm here to offer you all some free advice when it comes to drafting the bits of your platform related to post-secondary education (PSE) and innovation.

Let's start with the issue of access to education. 

First, scratch anything that vaguely resembles a policy on tuition fees. No credible research shows tuition to have a substantial impact on access, and, in any case, it is entirely a matter of provincial jurisdictions. 

Even policies like paying provinces to reduce fees (NDP policy from 1997 to 2006) or rebating fees to students (Liberal policy in 2006) have weird distributional consequences because they would involve vastly different subsidies to different provinces, based on existing tuition. 

Money in student aid is a slightly more promising idea because at least it's targeted.  But you might want to keep your powder dry on this one. Student aid costs are already set to rise significantly over the next few years as interest rates rise ... and the jury is still out on whether the recently-introduced Canada Student Grants are going to cost what was originally predicted or if the recession and lax eligibility criteria will blow the lid off costs. 

A closely-related idea to increased student aid is that of giving "completion grants" for apprentices, which if you really think about it, is a massive waste of money. The main reasons apprentices don't finish their training is because they can make too much money without completing (in boom times) or because they can't find get enough work hours to complete (in bust times). Either way, giving completers a couple of thousand dollars isn't going to change outcomes; in good times the incentives of work are simply too big for a couple of thousand dollars to matter, and in bad times, the incentive doesn't mean anything if they can't find work.

If it is access that's bothering you and you want to do something useful, then concentrate on individuals with the greatest challenges in reaching PSE: Aboriginal students and lower-income inner-city youth. And concentrate on the barriers that are most serious: inadequate academic preparation and weak academic motivation (the American GEAR UP program is not a bad model for how to do this in a federal system). These students will eventually need money, too, of course, but existing student aid programs are likely strong enough and generous enough to deal with that, so avoid the temptation to enrich student aid on that account.  Focus on the achievement and aspirations and you'll make a real difference.

If you absolutely must pour money into student aid, do yourself a favour and make sure it's cost-neutral; whatever you stick into student aid, you should take away from education and textbook tax credits. These cost a tremendous amount of money and achieve absolutely nothing.  Everyone knows they only exist because they are a cheap and convenient way for the federal government to shovel money to the middle class without having to deal with the provinces.  Cutting these would offend no one in the sector; if you cut them and redistributed the funds elsewhere in education, you would win plaudits.

Turning to research - well, what can I say? You more or less all agree on the essentials, anyway.  We have a granting council system that works pretty well (some of you seem to enjoy micromanaging the system more than others, but that's as may be), which could use a little more funding but isn't wildly out of whack. Everyone seems to like our human-capital increasing programs - the Research Chairs and the new Excellence Chairs, so don't mess with those.

The Canada Foundation for Innovation is a well-loved method of handing out funds for research infrastructure - though with operating budgets strained, you may find that universities aren't quite as eager these days to expand their operating costs with new buildings.  

The problem here, though, is one of using policy to buy votes versus using it to achieve something useful. We all know you love a ribbon cutting, and everyone in the sector does their best to satisfy you on that. But what the sector desperately needs are things that are unglamorous: more money for research overhead, reducing the paperwork burden on research grants - that kind of thing. If you can show the sector that you are serious about these kinds of things, they'll assume you're serious; if you insist on the ribbon-cutting stuff, they'll know you're just posing. 

But now let me turn to the most important question of all - one so important and basic that the sector itself is reluctant to face it head on. You know that we're facing a demographic time-bomb: The Canadian labour force will stop growing in 2016, while the number of over-65s is set to triple by 2030. This means taxpayers are going to have an increasing burden for pensions and health care. The only way to relieve that burden is to increase the productivity of Canadian workers. 

A lot of the productivity increase is going to have to do with changes in regulatory and competition policies, but it also has to do with education. We need to better understand how curricula can be altered such that graduates can generate the extra productivity we will need to generate the money required to maintain our standard of living. Long term, this isn't just the key issue: it's the only issue. And right now, frighteningly, no one has any idea how to approach the issue.

What I've just described must, I know, be terribly unappetizing for you politically - an issue where there are no simple answers and which, in any case, lies almost entirely within provincial jurisdiction. Nevertheless, any medium-term prosperity plan that doesn't get to grips with this issue is going to be doomed to failure. And the provinces are going to be struggling for answers, too - they may welcome a partner in Ottawa if the approach is handled sensitively.

The best solution here is probably a revival of an agency not entirely dissimilar to the Canadian Council on Learning (CCL).  Not CCL exactly, because that well has been poisoned. What is needed is something with a much narrower mandate (e.g. provides and tests a range of possible educational innovations that can raise productivity and growth rates) than CCL, which includes very significant participation of the provinces and educational institutions.   It should not presume to issue definitive "orders" about what works and what doesn't, but rather try to provide a variety of solutions that might work in different systems.  Finally, it should engage large numbers of stakeholders (especially schools, colleges and universities) in deep debates about the myriad ways in which curricula might be reformed.

In sum, what all three of you need to decide is whether your PSE policies are going to be about buying votes or about actually improving Canada.  The latter is much tougher to do, not least of all because of our country's federal nature.  But if any of you can actually get to grips with these tough problems, you'll get serious respect from the community.

Jack, Michael, Stephen: by your promises shall we know ye.  Don't disappoint us.