I am a professor of basketweaving. Not actually. I’m an anthropologist. But I feel sure my field is the kind Ontario Premier Doug Ford had in mind when he advised students not to choose “basket-weaving courses” because “there’s not too many baskets being sold out there.”
Ford was putting his mouth where the money now is. He was responding to student alarm that, at the same time as Ontario is lifting a seven year freeze on domestic tuition, student aid in Ontario is to be radically rebalanced. Previously, a qualifying Ontario student might get up to 85% of their aid in the form of a grant. That proportion has been reduced to 25%, with the rest coming as a loan.
Premier Ford’s logic is clear. The prospect of significant debt on graduation should encourage incoming students to look at labour market demands—or whatever they calculate these will be several years hence—and select their programs accordingly. Only those able to fund their studies independently should be allowed to choose based on such feckless motives as intellectual or craft affinity. Cementing the view that the postsecondary system should be directed to short term market principles, the new student aid framework revealed on February 12th came with an announcement that Ontario will add $6.4 billion and 70,000 new seats in “programs that align with student and labour-market demand.”
Ontario’s public postsecondary education (PSE) system needs additional money, no question. As with PSE institutions right across Canada, Ontario’s public universities and colleges had been using income from international student tuition to offset chronic public underfunding to an extent that became devastatingly clear when that revenue stream was abruptly and significantly reduced by new federal caps on international student visas starting in 2024.
Thousands of jobs have been lost, and scores of programs suspended or cancelled. The Ontario Public Sector Employees Union, OPSEU, reported 10,000 layoffs and 600 program closures in public colleges in 2025. But Ontario is hardly alone. In British Columbia the Federation of Post-Secondary Educators registered hundreds of lost jobs. Saskatchewan Polytechnic has cut 120 positions. The Manitoba government recently announced it will close the Manitoba Institute of Trades and Technology, while the Nova Scotia Community College expects layoffs of 3% of staff in light of provisions in that province’s 2026 budget.
If the college sector was hit hard and early, public universities have not been spared retrenchment. York University made headlines last year when it announced the suspension of enrolment in 18 programs, most of them in the liberal arts. But others have followed, including the University of Calgary, the University of Winnipeg, and Memorial University of Newfoundland. Hiring freezes are now widespread. As always, precariously employed academics are especially vulnerable. Even academic staff who have been rehired repeatedly on an annual basis may find that management has opted to “let contracts come to an end and not renew them… Not to fire people but to allow their contracts to play out.” This too, fits a market model where risk is externalised to workers, who can be readily shed as conditions change.
Privatization and marketization
Ontario’s move to reduce grants in favour of interest-bearing loans raises the question of how much new public funding is really being added to its system. Here, too, we see a wider trend. As Canadian Association of University Teachers Executive Director David Robinson observed, operating funding at Canadian universities comes from two main sources: provincial grants and student tuition. Historically, government transfers made up the lion’s share of funds for the core academic mission. In the last decade, he noted, the balance of funding has shifted such that “total university income from direct government sources was lower than income from tuition fees and nongovernment revenue sources,” If a share of tuition income comes indirectly from government in the form of grants to students, the trend remains clear.
At the same time, even as provincial governments move away from direct support for public postsecondary, they are increasingly ready to intervene more-or-less directly in institutional missions. Increased dependence on tuition and other forms of private funding is one widespread mechanism to encourage reorientation to market principles. These can be reinforced by tying funding to various government-set “performance indicators” or through conditional funding.
Thus Nova Scotia’s Bill 12, An Act Respecting Advanced Education, empowers government to withhold funding from universities that do not align with the social and economic priorities of the government of the day. Passed in 2025, in the words of the Association of Nova Scotia University Teachers, this legislation gives the provincial government “unprecedented authority over university governance, research priorities, and institutional decision-making.” Alberta showed similar ambitions with Bill 18, its Provincial Priorities Act, which had originally proposed to empower government vetting of federal research grants to university researchers for alignment with provincial government priorities. Thanks to hard political work by Alberta’s academic staff unions, the most concerning provisions for university researchers were removed from the legislation as ultimately adopted. But academic staff in the province remain concerned about the Alberta government’s apparent interest in the handling of academic freedom, and its focus on narrow labour market outcomes.
Federally, the Canadian government largely maintained existing commitments to research funding in its 2025 budget, a broad positive in an era of cuts. But new funding was targeted to industry, and Canada earmarked $1.7 billion for international research talent attraction. As I will discuss below, in the absence of an accompanying plan to stabilize the system, the latter program may exacerbate current inequities.
What do we stand to lose?
In short, Canada’s system of public postsecondary education is being hollowed out through chronic underfunding combined with a marketized orientation that values postsecondary education primarily as a pipeline to train students for specific jobs: a service to be delivered according to a mandate of efficiency and accountability to short-term goals.
What do we stand to lose? Even in less extreme situations, layoffs and hiring freezes mean academic staff face intensified workloads, continually being asked to do more with less. But doing more with less always means doing less with less too: fewer and bigger classes mean less time for research, but also less contact time with students and lost chances to nurture and inspire. The consequences of this thinning out of the educational experience will be counted not only in the loss of fulfilling student-teacher relationships, but also in terms that should recognizable even to the most market-driven of premiers, as potential in need of encouragement—maybe even the potential to create a tech giant—is left fallow.
But when institutions lose programs or close campuses, it can leave entire regions and communities with no access to whole fields of study. We saw this scenario play out in an extreme form with the restructuring of Laurentian University a few years ago.
On Premier Ford’s logic, that’s no big loss if the affected programs fall into his basketweaving category, since students wouldn’t likely get a job in philosophy, anthropology, or gender studies on graduation anyway. But these programs offer something different. In conventional labour market terms, they offer enduring capacities that are only going to become more important and that enable people to work well in a wide range of areas.
They also offer the capacity to see the world in a different way. This can matter in unexpected ways. Financial Times editor, Gillian Tett, who wrote a PhD thesis on Muslim marriage practices in Soviet Tajikistan, was among the first to predict the 2008 global financial crisis. She credits her training in anthropology with its holistic and relational orientation for her distinctive approach to economic and financial analysis. As federal health minister in 2020, Patty Hajdu said her BA in anthropology from Lakehead University helped her navigate the challenges of the early pandemic, which required rapid social recalibration and affected every aspect of human interaction. Would Hajdu, returning to university as a single parent living in Thunder Bay, have found her way to her academic passion for anthropology if it was not available at her local campus?
It is not only individual students who lose if such “basketweaving” programs become available only to those with the mobility and financial wherewithal to access a handful of surviving programs. Fields that offer critical perspectives on the world we have, indeed, that let us see that this world could be otherwise, are vital both to democratic health and livable futures.
Historically, a distinguishing strength of Canada’s postsecondary system has been a broad equality of educational opportunity in the sense that wherever in the country you studied, you could rely on getting a widely-recognized high quality education. Underfunding combined with privatization and marketization threaten that in the ways discussed above. Under current circumstances, the federal focus on attracting international talent asks us to welcome new colleagues into a system under severe strain. It also risks new kinds of inequities and divisions, as opportunities go disproportionately to a handful of research-intensive institutions and units, while the rest fight for crumbs.
What’s needed now is a coherent national strategy to stabilize our system, encompassing a commitment to retain and nurture Canadian talent and to welcome international students and scholars for sound educational reasons, not as a compensatory revenue stream. Canadians are rightly proud of our public K-12 system, funded by taxpayers and free at the point of delivery. And while we are not there yet, the multilateral framework that brought a new focus on building out accessible quality Early Childhood Education across Canada is a welcome move in the right direction. It is now time for a federal-provincial strategy on public postsecondary education: essential infrastructure in this nation-building era.
