“For Canada to compete in a more precarious world, we need to stop treating our post-secondary institutions as credential vending machines.”
In our op-ed in The Hill Times, BHER CEO Val Walker and Chief R&D Officer Matt McKean argue that higher education is not a side file: it’s infrastructure for adaptation, resilience, and growth at a time when Canada faces converging pressures: stagnant productivity, demographic shifts, declining trust in institutions, and affordability anxiety.
Right now, though, our post-secondary systems are being asked to transform without the policy signals, funding, or flexibility to succeed.
We argue that Canada needs to:
- Treat post-secondary education like infrastructure: planned, funded, and maintained with the same seriousness as transit or broadband.
- Align funding with outcomes and differentiated institutional strengths.
- Scale what’s already working, including work-integrated learning, upskilling through continuing education, research and innovation, regional talent pipeline development, etc.
- Invest in stronger, more strategic collaboration between business + higher education.
“The risk of inaction isn’t just economic. It’s generational. If we continue to underutilize our higher-education systems—to treat them as background infrastructure rather than levers of national renewal—we’ll leave talent on the table, ideas in the lab, opportunity on the margins, and trust in institutions, further eroded.”
Read our latest report, A Smarter Path: the case for postsecondary education reform, in partnership with John Stackhouse at RBC Thought Leadership.