At a community celebration this past spring, Manitoba’s largest university announced its strategic plan for 2024-2029. With an emphasis on indigenization and actioning truth and reconciliation, the plan’s launch included an Indigenous witness ceremony with four witnesses, representing Elders, faculty, students and staff.

The completion of the University of Manitoba’s new plan, delayed because of the COVID-19 pandemic, wasn’t the only reason to celebrate. Two days earlier, the New Democratic Party’s majority government – led by Wab Kinew, Manitoba’s first Anishinaabe premier – released its first budget. The government promised a $43 million investment to support postsecondary students training for their careers, funding for child care centres in postsecondary institutions, an increase to the Manitoba Student Aid fund, as well as money for training new doctors.

“I think the mood is really positive,” says Michael Benarroch, president of UM. The institution saw a two per cent increase to its operating funding and $26.6 million for more medical doctor training seats. “A new government has come in that has been open to listening and to hearing our needs, and to working with us to improve the situation here in Manitoba.”

Faculty and students across the province share Dr. Benarroch’s optimism, following a challenging period for Manitoba’s five public universities: Brandon University, Université de Saint-Boniface, University College of the North, UM and the University of Winnipeg.

“It still feels like early days, but we’re optimistic that our concerns are being heard.”

“This is a sector that took seven years of pretty consecutive hits from the ministry,” says Alex Usher, president of Higher Education Strategy Associates, and co-author of the Manitoba College Review, a status report prepared for the Manitoba government in 2017. “I think what you get in the culture of institutions when it’s cuts year after year after year is that people go into a crouch and they get very defensive.”

That stance is now shifting. Under the NDP government elected last October, Manitoba has become one of the few provinces in the country actively investing in higher education. This overlooked Prairie province is also leading the way in reconciliation efforts, and the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation is housed at UM.

“This feels like a fresh start,” says Allison McCulloch, president of the Manitoba Organization of Faculty Associations (MOFA) and a professor of political science at Brandon. There’s been a recalibration, she adds, involving relationships between government, faculty and administration. “It still feels like early days, but we’re optimistic that our concerns are being heard.”

Tumultuous time

Rookie Winnipeg member of the legislative assembly, Renée Cable, was sworn in as Manitoba’s new minister of advanced education and training on Oct. 18, 2023. Her mandate letter outlined numerous priorities, including respecting universities as self-governing institutions, training more doctors and nurses, restoring international student health coverage, increasing funding for student bursaries and financial aid and repealing Bill 33, the Advanced Education Administration Amendment Act, to protect institutional autonomy.

Those priorities reflect the tumultuous time Manitoba’s universities faced under the previous Progressive Conservative government. Under the leadership of premiers Brian Pallister, Kelvin Goertzen and Heather Stefanson between 2016 and 2023, funding for postsecondary education decreased every year, with the exception of 2023.

In 2020, universities were told to figure out how to cut their budgets by as much as 30 per cent, to help the province survive the COVID-19 pandemic, a request that led to significant backlash and was ultimately scrapped.

“What we’re hoping to bring is some stability, so that institutions know what they’re doing year to year, and that students also know that when they come here that they can enroll in the programs they want to be in and that they’ll get quality education.”

“At the maximum 30 per cent cut in provincial funding, two of the four public universities could cease to be full universities; the third university (U de Saint-Boniface) may have been forced to merge with the University of Manitoba. If Premier Pallister had succeeded in enforcing the maximum budget cuts, Manitoba may have been left with just one public university,” wrote Scott Forbes and Jim Clark in COVID-19 in Manitoba: Public Policy Responses to the First Wave, in a chapter exploring the effects of the pandemic on the province’s universities.

A funding reprieve came in Budget 2023, titled Historic Help for Manitobans, which saw an 11.5 per cent increase in funding from 2022-23 to support postsecondary education and the labour market.

Funding challenges were not the only struggles universities faced. University autonomy was encroached upon under the previous government, says Dr. McCulloch, through policies such as Bill 33 and the possibility of performance-based funding. The former, Bill 33, involved a proposed amendment to the Advanced Education Administration Act to allow the government to issue guidelines on tuition fees or student fees charged by universities, and to allow the government to reduce funding grants if guidelines are not followed.

The possibility of a performance-based funding model surfaced in 2020, after an auditor general’s report said Manitoba must bolster oversight of the boards governing its public postsecondary institutions. A consultation process on what the government called “a postsecondary accountability framework” was launched in May 2022. But plans were ultimately dropped in April 2023 – marking Manitoba an exception, as provinces like Ontario and Alberta have gone ahead and adopted the controversial model.

“We have heard your concerns regarding linking performance-based metrics to funding,” then-advanced education and training minister Sarah Guillemard wrote in a letter to university stakeholders. At the time, the PC government said they were still looking into accountability measures for institutions but would not tie funding to performance-based metrics.

Another area of government interference involved the ability of university administrations to freely bargain with their faculty. In 2022, a judge ruled the Manitoba government must pay the University of Manitoba Faculty Association (UMFA) $19.4 million for covertly interfering with collective bargaining talks in 2016. That year, UMFA members were on strike for 21 days. Members went on strike again in late 2021 for five weeks, with the union calling for wage increases to address recruitment and retention issues. The provincial government appealed the ruling, but ultimately lost.

Feeling hopeful

Now, with the April release of the NDP’s first budget, a shift is underway. It includes a six per cent increase to advanced education and training, says Ms. Cable, to help the province recover from years of unpredictable funding from the previous government.

“What we’re hoping to bring is some stability, so that institutions know what they’re doing year to year, and that students also know that when they come here that they can enroll in the programs they want to be in and that they’ll get quality education,” Ms. Cable says.

Dr. Benarroch describes the investment in the operating side of the university’s grants as a positive, but adds there’s still quite a bit of work to do. He points to the need for greater investments from the province in research, as well as a plan to deal with the capital infrastructure needs of the aging university.

“The last seven years were difficult times … and this begins the process of reinvigorating the sector, but there are still a few things that we really were hoping to see in this budget that weren’t there.”

He would also like to see the provincial government continue to make Manitoba’s interests known in Ottawa. “We’re a small province, we’re not one of the wealthier provinces, and so sometimes we get forgotten,” he says.

Dr. McCulloch, with MOFA, sees the provincial budget as a step in the right direction, but agrees there’s more that can be done. “The last seven years were difficult times … and this begins the process of reinvigorating the sector, but there are still a few things that we really were hoping to see in this budget that weren’t there,” she says.

That includes stable, multi-year funding that gives universities certainty, allowing them to plan longer-term. Such certainty is especially important at smaller institutions, such as the only French postsecondary institution in the province, U de Saint-Boniface.

In a written statement to University Affairs, Sophie Bouffard, president of the U de Saint-Boniface, said the province increased the university’s core grant by two per cent in the April 2024 budget, and the university also managed to secure a one-time funding of $850,000 for deferred maintenance.

Another piece missing in the budget, says Dr. McCulloch, is restoring health care for international students. College and university students from abroad lost access to universal health care in September 2018, after it was rescinded by the government, a move expected to save the province $3.1 million per year.

Ms. Cable says she remains committed to restoring international student health care, adding not every priority could be accomplished in one budget. “Unfortunately, the previous Conservative government cut the coverage for students and it’s not as easy to put back together as we had hoped,” she says.

Despite the current absence of health care, Ms. Cable wants international students to know the doors are open for them in Manitoba. To that end, the province advocated for a bigger share of provincial attestation letters – a new requirement for undergraduate international students applying for study permits. Ms. Cable says Ottawa’s initial cap of 15,232 letters for Manitoba was increased to 18,652, though a letter does not mean a guaranteed spot for a student.

Tomiris Kaliyeva is the president of the University of Winnipeg Students’ Association and an international student from Kazakhstan, who moved to Winnipeg in 2021 to study international development and conflict resolution. Universities have been fighting for years to have health care for international students restored, Ms. Kaliyeva says, and it’s especially urgent now, given the affordability concerns students face. “Housing prices are rising and the prices for food, and it’s just hard to afford living, let alone also having to spend money on health care,” she says.

She adds the new government’s commitment to bring it back – even if the change hasn’t been made yet – has made people very happy. “I feel like since the NDP came in power, a lot, if not every university, has had hope,” she says.

Truth and reconciliation 

One of the larger goals in the province is to increase the overall number of students who successfully graduate from university. “High level, if I have one goal, it’s getting as many students as possible successfully through postsecondary education,” says Ms Cable.

She plans to do that by ensuring postsecondary education is affordable and accessible, and by looking at populations that haven’t participated as much, including the Indigenous population. Already, Manitoba’s average university yearly undergraduate tuition fees are below the national average of $6,211, sitting at $4,728 for 2023-24, according to Statistics Canada. Manitoba has also seen slow but steady growth in the overall number of university students in the province, from 25,000 in 2001 to 40,000 in 2020, according to HESA.

Still, increasing participation rates and graduation rates for all students has been an ongoing priority for multiple governments. The 2017 Manitoba College Review noted Manitoba’s participation and attainment rates in higher education rank near the bottom of the country, with 62 per cent of Manitobans between the age of 25-44 holding a postsecondary certificate, diploma or degree, compared to the national rate of 72 per cent. “In Manitoba, we need more students accessing and completing postsecondary education,” stated the government’s 2021 Skills, Talent and Knowledge Strategy.

“If you look at the values of us as a government, and where we see the opportunities for growth and really making Manitoba as good as it can be, it’s in ensuring as many people as possible are educated,” Ms. Cable says.

However, offering education to the Indigenous population goes deeper than getting them into classrooms. Reconciliation, decolonization and indigenization are priorities at institutions throughout the province. In 2016, for example, the University of Winnipeg became one of the first institutions in Canada to require every new undergraduate student to meet an Indigenous course requirement to graduate.

“Eighteen per cent of our population in Manitoba is Indigenous, and so the future of Manitoba is intrinsically tied to the future success of Indigenous populations within our province,” says Dr. Benarroch. He adds that having the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation located at UM helps guide the university’s path: first truth, then reconciliation, then decolonizing the institution.

“We’ve started on a journey, but we’ve got a lot of work to do,” he says. “I think that it’s one of the areas where we can make the greatest impact.”

Angie Bruce, UM’s vice-president, Indigenous, assumed the position in February 2024, following in the footsteps of Catherine Cook, the first-ever to hold the position in 2020.

“I think the move to create an executive level position really shows that the university itself was ready to truly action reconciliation and bring it to the forefront and thought it was one of its key priorities moving forward,” Ms. Bruce says.

That commitment carries through to UM’s recently released strategic plan, which Ms. Bruce says truly integrates indigenization and reconciliation throughout, rather than leaving those pieces to the side for one group to be responsible for.

“It signals that everybody has a part, which I think is quite critical. So it’s not just my team, or it’s not just the Indigenous faculty, it’s not just the Indigenous students or employees. We all at the university have a role to play in the spheres that we work.”

Mr. Usher, with HESA, has also taken note of the work by universities in Manitoba to better serve Indigenous populations and prioritize indigenization. “The traditional values of the academy and the values of decolonization and indigenization are not easy to put together. … It requires some give and take on both sides to make that work. So all credit to everybody in Manitoba, who’s done that work already. There’s still lots of work to be done.”