The Conservative government in Ottawa wants to funnel cash to the country’s universities but it wants to have a say in how the money is spent.
This is a curious change for a party elected not so very long ago with a supposed commitment to limiting federal spending in areas of provincial jurisdiction.
This is curious too since the provincial government objecting to the scheme is not the most chest-thumpingly independentist/sovereignist/autonomist one, but rather the supposedly demonic one in central Canada.
Ontario – of all provinces - doesn’t like the strings attached to the Ottawa cash.
Education is an area of exclusive provincial jurisdiction under our constitution. Over the past 40 years that exclusivity has eroded in practice to varying degrees largely due to the federal decision to spend its cash in universities. Many reasons are advanced for the spending and some of them are persuasive.
For the most part, however, the federal government has not usually reserved for itself, as it wants to do in this case, the right to approve or disapprove of a project even though half the funding involved will come from either the provincial government or the university.
If the federal government wants to support research and development across Canada it may do so. However, it should do so without restriction. The money ought to be available to anyone – within or without a university – who can do the work.
On the other hand, if the federal government merely intends to funnel cash to a particular area of research, restricts the work to universities and then proposes to control the whole affair, it has crossed into an area where Canadians should not allow them.
How odd that no one seems to find this whole thing objectionable.
No one that is, except the Government of Ontario.
-srbp-