Doug Ford has learned a hard lesson after starving Ontario’s colleges and universities

Posted on February 12, 2026 in Education Policy Context

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TheStar.com – Politics/Political Opinion
Feb. 12, 2026.   ByMartin Regg Cohn, Political Columnist

A funding crisis can be a funding opportunity — a teachable moment, as they say on campus.

Now, Doug Ford’s Tories have learned a hard lesson in education: Starving Ontario’s public colleges and universities of cash will only bleed the provincial economy of the skilled workforce it needs in uncertain times.

Belatedly — better late than never — Ford’s Progressive Conservative government is stepping up to shore up postsecondary education. On Thursday it announced a $6.4-billion cash infusion over the next four years to make up for the last seven years of cuts, freezes and shortfalls since Ford took power.

Back in 2019, the premier played Santa Claus by imposing a 10-per-cent tuition cut, but then played Scrooge by freezing those rates in place without making up for the lost cash flow. Instead, the government urged postsecondary institutions to recruit and rely on high-paying foreign students to shore up their balance sheets, which stoked immigration imbalances that ultimately forced Ottawa to scale back student visas.

Those political and fiscal miscalculations created a perfect storm in postsecondary education: Funding shortfalls; tuition cuts frozen in time despite an inflationary spiral; and the sudden loss of foreign windfalls that kept campuses afloat.

None of it added up, least of all the tuition freeze enacted by a populist premier who wouldn’t pony up his share of the funding pie.

At every opportunity, I’d ask Colleges and Universities Minister Nolan Quinn — a former Dairy Queen franchise owner — how long his DQ outlet could sell frozen Blizzard treats if head office imposed a perpetual prize freeze on top of a 10 per cent cut, while facing the same inflationary increases in wages and electricity that hit every campus.

Quinn and Finance Minister Peter Bethlenfalvy always kept their oaths of cabinet confidentiality and solidarity — never saying a word against Ford’s postsecondary blind spots. That said, their body language always spoke volumes — and they were clearly making the case behind closed doors in cabinet.

As recently as Tuesday, the finance minister stuck gamely to the script when he appeared at the Democracy Forum I hosted at Toronto Metropolitan University, fielding questions about the funding crisis without giving the game away: “There’s more work to do, without question, and we’re looking at everything,” he told our campus audience, deftly if mysteriously.

Just 48 hours later, Bethlenfalvy joined Quinn at a Thursday’s news conference to announce the government was changing course. Message received?

“I was just at TMU … at the Democracy Forum and they didn’t miss an opportunity to tell me again how important the university and college system is to Ontario’s long term economic growth and competitiveness,” Bethlenfalvy told reporters. “If we want a strong Ontario tomorrow, we need to strengthen our postsecondary institutions today.”

Give Bethlenfalvy and Quinn credit for fixing a mess they inherited from their cabinet predecessors and the premier who created it. The funding crisis was a foolish own goal, but it would be churlish of me not to give the government some grudging praise for coming to its senses after writing countless columns on the issue.

This week’s boost will not come close to making colleges and universities whole, but a half loaf is better than the premier’s half-baked ideas on postsecondary funding. Tuition can now rise by up to two per cent a year, but for too long the government ignored the initial five per cent increase recommended by its own blue ribbon panel in 2023, alongside fresh funding.

It also comes against the backdrop of a growing political scandal wrought by Ford’s newfound love affair with construction unions, many of which supported his re-election campaign after the government bankrolled their skills training programs. The $2.5 billion program sounded good on paper, until Labour Minister David Piccini turned a blind eye to the paperwork submitted by some of those unions (which didn’t pass muster with his own civil servants and the provincial auditor general).

Ford’s fondness for seat-of-the-pants apprenticeship programs diverted his government (and its money) from the big picture needs of a highly skilled workforce. When Bethlenfalvy boasted of new nukes generating tens of thousands of jobs in construction and engineering at our TMU Democracy Forum, I countered that you can’t just cook up ad hoc classrooms for machinists or physicists in friendly union halls — the province’s 44 public colleges and universities are already set up to do precisely that.

Ever since the U.S. president turned his sights on Ontario’s industrial heartland, the PC government has paid lip service to the vital role of colleges and universities, but without the corresponding funding. Now, it is putting at least some of its money where its mouth is.

(Disclosure: I’m a senior fellow at TMU’s Dais, which hosts the Democracy Forumat Toronto Metropolitan University, and a senior fellow at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy.)

https://www.thestar.com/politics/political-opinion/doug-ford-has-learned-a-hard-lesson-after-starving-ontarios-colleges-and-universities/article_b486b018-5ff1-43ae-af1d-42ae515a53f0.html?source=newsletter&utm_content=a04&utm_source=ts_nl&utm_medium=email&utm_email=0C810E7AE4E7C3CEB3816076F6F9881B&utm_campaign=pol_hl_30545

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