Achi news desk-
From the exam marking trenches to the ivory tower executive rooms, Premier Danielle Smith has injected nervousness throughout Alberta’s post-secondary sector.
It seemed initially that the intention of his Bill 18, the Provincial Priorities Act, was to make his government a stopgap or gatekeeper whenever the federal government and mayors made deals without provincial involvement.
It then became clear that the Smith government would apply the same scrutiny to the higher learning sector, and the prime minister’s comments. make it clear she had federal research grants and notions of ideological “balance” in her targets.
“When the Alberta government states that it wants to align research funding with provincial priorities, it risks painting research coming from Alberta’s post-secondary institutions as propaganda,” wrote Gordon SwarsProfessor of mathematics at the University of Alberta and president of the academic staff association.
“Students are caught up in the UCP’s perpetual war against Ottawa,” said James Steele, head of the University of Calgary Graduate Student Association.
Bill Flanagan sang on his University of Alberta the president’s blog Wednesday: “I will continue to do everything in my power to advocate for a regulatory framework that does not impair our ability to secure federal funding and operates in a manner consistent with the university’s core commitment to academic freedom .”
Academia, collective thinking: what is Smith going to do?
She doesn’t even seem to know, yet to reveal any clear direction.
Campus improv night
Several signs, in fact, suggest that the UCP government initially did not think the post-secondary kingdom was playing a big part in this Bill 18 drama — at least, not until journalists started asking last week how it could those entities controlled by a state to cease. up in the inspection of the bill.
Consider the following:
- Higher Education Minister Rajan Sawhney did not participate in the April 10 news conference; only Smith and Civic Affairs Minister Ric McIver did.
- The premier did not mention post-secondary once when announcing the programme; it only came to light when a reporter asked about it, and Smith spoke of curiosity about social science research.
- When Sawhney was approached to discuss this the next day, his comments suggested no conflict or limits on federal grants to researchers, contrary to what the prime minister would apparently say later.
- When Smith began speaking in more detail in interviews on April 12, he made extensive reference to a Nova Scotia business professor’s criticism of the system, which appeared in an Edmonton Journal column that day.
If this policy aspect meant more thought, one would imagine that there would be a body of evidence or stories beyond that morning’s newspaper. Smith quoted one political scientist’s survey that indicated many more teachers who identified with the Canadian left than right-wing ones – mentioned in the same column in the Journal.
This week, he presented that article in the legislature.
A few days later, in her 38-minute debate speech on the bill, she quoted extensively from that passage, but also presented a second anecdotal point—another article.
This one came from the National Post in 2021, the protests of a McGill University chemistry professor who was denied a science research grant because the “woke” grant agency expected him to include diversity and equity in his hiring of an assistant. Not mentioned by Smith – a peer review committee gave that agency to the same scientist, Patanjali Kambhampati, and Grant $144,565 last year.
For those keeping score at home, those are two articles about out-of-state teachers that make up almost the entire public justification for Smith’s proposed university policy.
Now, journalists love to imagine that they have huge influence in high offices, and I guess they inflate their self-importance too often (or maybe it’s just me). But it is likely that most journalists, and more importantly most citizens, do not expect or intend for articles or columns to form not only the backbone but the entire skeleton of the political decision-making process.
But even if Smith cobbled together her justification from news clippings after she introduced Bill 18, there is at least a sense of where her complaints lie. And if it is not clear which path she will take with this legislation, she has indicated what the desired destination is.
She has made it clear that she believes that more conservative research would bring more academics and then like-minded students. “If we had a real balance in universities, then we would see that we would have the same amount of conservative commentators as we have liberal commentators,” he told the CBC. Power and Politics.
This week Smith offered two possible paths he could take. One uses this provincial oversight bill to track all federal research grants to determine which portion goes where – although the awarding agencies already publish everything online, so many academics have recently noted to the UCP.
“The other way is that we could also set up our own research programs to make sure that we provide that kind of balance,” Smith added.
A UCP government, in this idea, would create a new body to support ideologically focused research that Smith does not feel is being given a fair shake by the non-partisan peer review committees that abolish agency grants, at arm’s length from the Liberal. a government or governments of various stripes that have overseen these agencies for over a century.
Do you believe that this is far-fetched and heavy-handed, for a party government to set up their own shop to carry out research in the public interest?
It has already happened during the UCP government – twice.
Former premier Jason Kenney gave dual mandates “energy war room” to advocate for oil and gas research, to do work that he felt was lacking elsewhere; Smith has hosted this program.
At the beginning of April, Smith announced the new Crown corporation for research and expertise on addiction recovery – to strengthen, sharpen and spread elsewhere the kind of response to the drug crisis in which her government has already invested heavily.
The constitution places post-secondary education squarely in provincial jurisdiction, but the federal level has long led the way in supporting research projects.
The province supplementing federal research funding could be a good thing, said Richard Sigurdson, former dean of arts at the University of Calgary. Emphasis on he could
“It would only be great if the state government provided arm’s length, non-partisan funding,” he wrote in an email while on academic administrative leave in Berlin. “There can be no interference with institutional autonomy or academic freedom.”
If the government adopts this approach and establishes its own research body in the style of the Fraser Institute — a conservative think tank where Smith himself used to work — expect a lot of controversy. But it might be less messy than actually using Bill 18’s gatekeeper function to interfere with federal agency grants, something the Quebec government is not doing, despite long having the inter-provincial powers that Alberta now plans to emulate .
‘fire a shot’
Alex Usher, a long-time analyst with the consultancy Higher Education Strategy Associates, does not expect the Smith government to interfere with agencies’ research grants.
But he still expects a fight that universities will not like.
“While the UCP government may not be specifically targeting tri-council grants, they are firing a shot at the state’s universities, warning them that they will be expected to show ‘ideological balance,'” Usher he wrote on his website.
“God knows what this will mean in practice, but my view would be low-level skirmishing and attempts to micro-manage for the remainder of the UCP’s time in office, along with attempts to [wage] culture war [over] weird research projects in what the right likes to call ‘complaint studies.’”
The premiership’s recent rhetoric doesn’t make it clear that it knows what it will mean in practice, either. The Bill 18 debate seems to have become a starting point, perhaps due to a combination of fluke and widely written legislation.
Now the premier has been thinking about it, and finding articles to read. So a whole sector will be left to wait, wonder and worry.
48:33Alberta is seeking power to veto deals between feds and municipalities
April 11, 2024 – Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has introduced legislation that would force municipalities, schools or agencies that want to enter into an agreement with the federal government to first secure provincial approval. Calgary Mayor Jyoti Gondek tells us what this means for her city. Also, the Prime Minister of France, Gabriel Attal, is visiting Canada on his first trip outside of Europe. He tells Power & Politics that he does not want the security of France and Europe to depend on the outcome of the US elections.
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