Colleges and universities are cutting jobs, closing programs, and shutting down campuses. The federal government can stop it, but hasn't.
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Colleges and universities are cutting jobs, closing programs, and shutting down campuses. The federal government can stop it, but hasn't.
In March, the Algonquin College officially approved the suspension of 30 programs and the closure of an entire campus. In Alberta, Bow Valley College let go of 103 staff members to bridge a massive budget gap. Out West, B.C.'s Selkirk College suspended 14 intakes and cut over 40 positions, while in Quebec, Concordia University slashed its budget and refused to renew 63 faculty contracts.
None of this is happening in one province. None of it is happening to one kind of institution. It's happening everywhere, at once, to the public system that trains Canada's health care workers, early childhood educators, skilled tradespeople and more.
The question isn't whether Canada's post-secondary system is in crisis. It is. The question is why the federal government, which has both the money and the room to act, is treating a nationwide collapse as somebody else's problem.
For decades, provincial governments steadily pulled back their share of college and university operating budgets. Institutions were told to make up the difference with tuition, with international student fees, which aren't capped the way domestic fees are in most provinces. Public funding fell from 67% of total revenue in 2008 to just 48.5%. International students, many of them paying four to five times the domestic rate, became the financial load-bearing wall of the entire sector.
Then, in early 2024, the federal government abruptly capped international student study permits and narrowed the Post-Graduation Work Permit. The policy change was sudden, the enrolment drop immediate, and the financial consequences are now working their way through every corner of the system.
The result is one of the worst round of job losses and program cuts the Canadian post-secondary sector has ever seen.
This isn't an Ontario story, though Ontario is the epicentre. At least 10,000 positions have been eliminated or are on track to be eliminated at Ontario colleges alone, with Conestoga, Fanshawe, Centennial, Georgian, and Mohawk each shedding hundreds of jobs.
But the same pattern is showing up everywhere:
Entire teaching departments are disappearing. Okanagan College closed its Modern Languages department. NSCC in Nova Scotia cut horticulture, professional photography, baking and pastry arts, and cosmetology programs at specific campuses.
These aren't superficial cuts. They are the specific programs that teach specific things to specific students in specific communities. Once they're gone, they don't come back quickly, or often at all.
Here's the part that tends to get lost: post-secondary education is the supply line for nearly every occupation Canada says it's short of.
The federal and provincial governments are pouring money into housing targets, hospital capacity, the skilled trades, clean energy, and defence procurement. Every one of those plans assumes a workforce that colleges and universities are supposed to train. When a college suspends its practical nursing intake, or a polytechnic lays off trades instructors, those workforce plans quietly start to fail, just with a two- or three-year lag.
The economic footprint of the sector is real. Canada's universities and colleges generated about $61 billion in GDP in 2025, and despite making up only around 2% of the economy, they perform roughly 34% of all the research and development done in Canada. That's a higher share than any other G7 country. But the more important number is the one that doesn't show up in GDP tables: the share of Canada's skilled workforce that walks out of a public college or university classroom every spring.
Post-secondary graduates earn substantially more over their careers than workers without a credential and the jobs they move into are the ones Canada has decided it needs more of. When those training pipelines narrow, the whole downstream plan narrows with them.
The standard response from the federal government is that post-secondary education is a provincial responsibility. That's true as a matter of constitutional jurisdiction. It's also beside the point.
Ottawa already plays a significant financial role in post-secondary: student grants and loans, the federal research granting councils, the Canada Social Transfer (a chunk of which is nominally meant for post-secondary but carries no conditions), and direct research funding. In 2024, that added up to roughly $10.2 billion, less than .35% of Canada's total GDP. Meanwhile, Canada just met its NATO target for defence spending, which is 2 per cent of GDP.
The federal government has found billions for EV battery plants, semiconductor fabs, and oil and gas incentives, all justified in the name of economic strategy. None of those investments will pay off without the workers that public colleges and universities produce.
And Ottawa has a clear legal and fiscal playbook for acting in an area of provincial jurisdiction: it did it for health care with the Canada Health Act, for child care with the recent federal-provincial agreements, and for dental care funding. The tools exist. What's missing is the political decision to use them for post-secondary.
The layoffs and program closures happening right now are a direct consequence of a federal policy change. The federal government needs to inject emergency operating funding into public post-secondary institutions to stop the bleeding before another academic year's worth of programs, jobs, and student services are lost.
This funding must be targeted: it should protect programs, front-line staff, and student services — not capital projects, not executive compensation, not administrative growth. And it must come alongside a commitment to longer-term reform, not as a one-time patch.
Emergency funding buys time. It doesn't fix the underlying problem, which is that Canada has no stable, predictable, accountable mechanism for federal investment in public colleges and universities.
We need a dedicated federal post-secondary education transfer, funding that flows from Ottawa to the provinces specifically for post-secondary, with the scale required to actually reverse decades of public investment erosion in the sector. That money needs to supports a system that is publicly administered, accessible and affordable to students, and high quality across the country.
This is the same basic model Canada uses for health care. It works.
The institutions making cuts right now are not bluffing, and they are not going to recover on their own. Programs that close this year will be gone for years. Instructors who are laid off will move on. Small-town campuses that shut their doors usually don't reopen. And the students, workers, and communities that depended on them will pay the price, as will every federal plan that assumes a steady supply of trained workers at the other end.
The good news is that none of this is inevitable. The federal government has the money. It has the legal authority. It has precedent in other sectors.
