Higher education on the chopping block in New Brunswick |
St. Thomas University campus in Fredericton. Photo courtesy St. Thomas University/Facebook.
In a development that left our campuses and those of our colleagues across the province—indeed, the country—in disbelief, it has been revealed that Susan Holt’s Liberal government in New Brunswick is contemplating slashing 10 percent of the province’s higher education budget while simultaneously freezing tuition.
It is a move that can only be characterized as a major assault on some of the most venerable institutions on the continent, and one the government cannot claim to have a mandate to enact, given it was nowhere to be seen in its election platform.
Stunning proposals also include privatizing Mount Allison University and merging—which is to say subsuming—St. Thomas University into the University of New Brunswick.
The cuts alone would amount to as much as $50 million from the budget of the province’s four universities, manufacturing a needless crisis.
This issue is not purely economic. Despite being routinely ignored—colloquially deemed “the drive-through province”—New Brunswick is an important territory both to Canada and to the world. For the country’s third-smallest province, New Brunswick business leaders have ranked among the country’s richest. The province is also an important site of resource extraction, both today and in the past. Yet the wealth generated there has never been fairly shared with the province’s residents.
The undervaluation of New Brunswick may be a little-known reality for most Canadians, but it is a story residents of the province know all too well. Defunding, closing, and, remarkably, decertifying our post-secondary sector would mean that this problem will never be ameliorated, and New Brunswick—and Canada—will be worse off as a result.
As recently as September 2024, the Conservative government of Premier Blaine Higgs touted a $500 million surplus. Now the Holt government has somehow announced a $1.3 billion deficit.
Yet somehow, funds are still being found for the private sector. In a move that reeks of nothing more than disaster capitalism, $54.3 million has been allocated to seven companies for tariff relief, including $45 million to Saint John’s east-side Irving Paper. In doing so, the province appears to reward a firm that laid off 140 workers just last year, transferring wealth from a functioning public sector to a failing private one.
Notably, universities in the province are currently thriving. In the most recent Maclean’s national university rankings, Mount Allison is listed as the country’s top-ranked primarily undergraduate institution. Similarly, in Time magazine’s inaugural university rankings, UNB placed first in Atlantic Canada and 14th in the nation, ahead of Ontario behemoths like Western, Queen’s, and Ottawa. Some argue that small liberal arts universities, like St. Thomas, are best positioned to adjust to artificial intelligence and teach the next generation of students. Slashing funding to these institutions when they are thriving is, to borrow an athletic metaphor, an own goal.
New Brunswickers already suffer from neglect of their universities. The province lacks research in the social sciences and humanities that would support public policy, a legacy of Liberal Premier Frank McKenna’s cuts in the 1980s and 1990s.
Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council invested much less in New Brunswick than in other provinces: a third of the amount it gave to researchers in Nova Scotia on a per capita basis, and half on a per student basis.
This underfunding has serious consequences for the economy and social cohesion of the province. Local governments and the province itself are dependent on outside consultants for policy advice, often relying on local bigwigs from landowning families. In one case in 2013, the provincial government relied on environment and energy policy advice from a pro-business consultant who misrepresented his credentials.
Most remarkably, as higher-ed expert Alex Usher recently observed, these proposals won’t actually save any money for the budget. Merging STU and UNB will lead to higher wages for faculty and staff (not that we’re complaining about that); privatizing Mount Allison with a whopping start-up endowment will take a huge bite out of the budget. These are the proposals of saboteurs, not problem-solvers.
Significant backlash to the proposals has prompted some backpedaling from the Holt administration, including claims that the STU–UNB merger and Mount Allison privatization plans are off the table. However, Holt did not retreat on the broader budgetary issue, instead noting, “I think it’s responsible for government to look at a $450 million expense and find ways to do it better, to do it differently, to get better outcomes for our province.”
Those words offer little reassurance, particularly from a government that has so far shown a troubling inability to grasp the stakes. One is left to wonder whether the looming spectres of merger and privatization were ever more than a distraction from the main priority: sweeping cuts.
Regardless, the good news is that it isn’t too late to reverse course. The budget is set to be tabled on March 17.
There’s still time for Holt’s Liberals to remember that investing in education was at the very heart of the mandate they were given by the people of New Brunswick. That includes higher education.
Nathan Kalman-Lamb is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of New Brunswick.
Kristi Allain is a Professor of Sociology and Canada Research Chair in Physical Culture and Social Life at St. Thomas University.
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