Our country's future is education, not health care

Our country's future is education, not health care (Globe and Mail, Sept. 11, 04)
By JEFFREY SIMPSON

Dear First Ministers,

As Prime Minister and chairman of our meeting next week, I am charged with setting our agenda.

Therefore, I am writing to propose that we discuss postsecondary education rather than health care since, as political leaders, we must look beyond the present to the problems of tomorrow.

Health care, as we all know but dare not say publicly, is largely, although not exclusively, about the problems of yesterday and today.

Postsecondary education, by contrast, is about today and tomorrow.

Unless we create a better-educated work force and a better-equipped national research capacity, we will be unable to improve our country's productivity. On this everything else rests, including financing the future demands of social programs such as health care.

Statistics Canada has estimated that provincial governments are spending 37 per cent of their budgets on health care -- it's as high as 43 per cent in Ontario -- compared to 6 per cent for colleges and universities. Ottawa, too, is plowing far more money into health care than postsecondary education and research. In rich provinces such as Ontario and Quebec, the ratio of health care to spending on colleges and universities is 7 to 1.

This cannot continue if we want a better and more prosperous future. In the United States, our biggest competitor, government investments in public four-year universities rose 25 per cent in real terms from 1980 to 2004, whereas government spending in Canada dropped 20 per cent. I am not talking about Harvard or Stanford, but about public universities. Much of the productivity gap between our two countries stems from this investment gap.

True, your governments have reinvested in universities in the past two years to expand enrolment. It has been growing by 4 per cent to 5 per cent a year. In some provinces, disbursements to the universities have increased to accommodate this rise. But there have been very few, if any, investments in improved quality.

This week, I have been receiving letters, as you have, from parents whose children are sitting in first-year classes of 500 to 1,000 students. This is just one indication that the quality of education is something we must address.

The federal government has done its job, but it is willing to do more. As finance minister, I worked with the fellow who was then prime minister to create many programs that have injected more than $10-billion into the research capabilities of our universities. In some cases, these federal moneys were matched by provincial funds.

Sadly, the provinces have been relying for a decade on higher fees to help universities cope with their budgetary problems. The result, as you know, is that fees, on average, have tripled since 1990, with some exceptions such as Quebec, Manitoba and Newfoundland. Student debt burden has correspondingly increased.

This shift in the burden of financing higher education is a dirty secret
-- namely, that your budgets have been ravaged by an insatiable health-care system that has defied what we euphemistically call "reform."

Health care has grabbed so many marginal dollars that your governments have been unable to fund other vital obligations, among the most important of which is preparing the young people of tomorrow.

If we were to agree to pour yet more billions into the system, we would presumably create favourable headlines for ourselves. But we would be continuing the pattern that has led us to our current predicament whereby so many other government programs suffer. It is up to us, as courageous political leaders, to explain this tradeoff to our publics.

Our incessant health-care debate is becoming the equivalent of the constitutional follies of the 1970s and 1980s. You are tired of the debate. So am I.

Let us agree to de-dramatize all future discussions about health, and ban such words as "moral covenant," "national identity," "the fight of our lives" and "fix it for a generation."

There was a health-care deal in 2000, and another in 2003. Now we are supposed to negotiate one in 2004. We have had four provincial task forces, one Senate study and one national commission. We have spent tens of billions of additional dollars without anyone, to the best of my knowledge, seeing major improvements in the system.

I suggest to you that even $500-million spent by Ottawa on universities for, say, hiring new faculty, if matched by your governments, would do much more for universities than an extra $1-billion thrown into the maw of the health-care system. It would certainly do more for the country's future, if not our political careers.

I propose, therefore, that we discuss, among other topics: accessibility to higher education, effective student aid, increases in base-budgets funding, closing the funding gap with public U.S. universities, incentives for universities to reform their unwieldy self-government arrangements, reduced class sizes, commercializing research, improving the quality of undergraduate education, and preparing for the wave of faculty retirements.

A detailed agenda awaits your arrival in Ottawa on Monday. I look forward to discussing our country's future together.

Sincerely,

Paul Martin