The Ontario Provincial Government has chosen former premier Bob Rae to prepare a comprehensive review of post-secondary education in the province. An initial discussion paper is being prepared for later this month, and by early 2005 what the Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities calls “a comprehensive review of the design and funding of Ontario's post-secondary education” will be completed.

According to a ministry press release, Rae will “lead consultations with students and their parents, university and college partners and members of the private and public sectors to develop an accessible, affordable and accountable, high quality post-secondary education system with a sustainable funding framework” and make “recommendations on design, funding, accountability and performance measurement, as well as the role of international students.”

What this will mean is unclear. So far, all that there is to go on is a web site the government has launched (www.raereview.on.ca). On it are listed a set of principles that will guide Rae’s review, and that give some indication of the general landscape it will paint.

The first of these is accessibility, which is defined as the principle that “post-secondary education should be available to all qualified individuals regardless of their socio-economic status.” This is an excellent principle, and an excellent principle to have as the first principle, no less.

The second principle is quality, i.e. the belief that “post-secondary education should effectively assist students to develop the knowledge, skills, and competencies needed to succeed in a knowledge-based economy and a democratic society.”

The first thing to note is that in a better world, quality should really be the first principle of public education. Accessibility should really be a no-brainer, as President Patterson so symptomatically loves to say: it shouldn’t have to be listed as a principle, on principle. But there it is.

The second thing to note is that quality is, as its name indicates, a quality, a soft value that is by definition difficult to define. My idea of the kind of education appropriate to a democratic society could conceivably differ from Bob Rae’s or President Patterson’s. One citizen’s Oxbridge is another citizen’s DeVry.
The third principle, collaboration, is a bit suspect. It sounds like a nice word, and certainly there have been some very successful collaborators in history (like the Norwegians in World War Two). But collaboration in governmentspeak often means someone getting swallowed up by someone else. Collaborators collaborate in their own redundancy.

This is especially the case since the next principle, such as it is, is sustainability – another nice word that really means cheapness, or, as the ministry describes it, the principle (ugh) that “education should be affordable and sustainable given the fiscal realities of the province.” Ontario is a rich province in a rich country. We can afford public education. That’s reality, not a principle.

And finally, there’s accountability. This is the only principle that’s actually an imperative: “post-secondary education institutions and government must answer for their results and the manner in which their responsibilities are discharged.” Answer to whom? To students? To other post-secondary institutions? To the private sector? To the general public? Exactly who is the dominatrix here?

Some of these questions will presumably be answered in the discussion paper. What we do know at this point is that Rae is a public servant of exceptional skill and integrity, and that he, in contrast to previous education reformers in Ontario, is literate.

Rae is a lawyer and holds a number of degrees. This, in addition to the fact that he has written books, indicates that he can and does read, and will have no difficulty understanding the written material and composing a report.

This provincial government clearly has some respect and concern for education, given that the man they’ve chosen to review it actually has a significant amount of education himself. Call me elitist, but I think this is a good thing. Rae is of course famous for having accidentally won the 1991 provincial election when the previous premier called a sneak election. In his determination to reverse the blunder and return his New Democratic Party to the opposition benches, Rae immediately embarked on a bold and unprecedented ‘offend everyone’ agenda.

Having already offended the province’s business community simply by being elected, Rae expressly targeted his most dedicated supporters, public sector workers and university students, violating collective agreements and gutting funding for student aid in an attempt at undercutting his party’s meagre sources of solid support.

The ‘offend everyone’ plan, coupled with a worldwide recession throughout the early 1990s, was an unqualified success, making the NDP increasingly unpopular across the political spectrum. Taking no chances, Rae aligned himself strongly with Brian Mulroney, Canada’s most hated prime minister ever.
His final moment of triumph was the 1995 election, when the NDP was soundly defeated by Mike Harris’s Conservatives. Having freed his party from the burden of governing for a generation, Rae resigned to grateful applause.

If the former premier applies the same keen strategic intellect and can-do spirit to his review that he displayed as leader of the NDP, public education in this province will never be the same.

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