The Collapse of Student Testing in BC High Schools is a new study that finds participation in B.C.’s provincewide student assessments has dropped, and at the same time, fewer students are meeting the proficiency standards in numeracy and literacy (with one out of every two Grade 10 student failing).
British Columbia’s Coming Debt Boom in Historical Context is a new study that finds over the next three years, the BC government plans to add a total of $35.6 billion in new debt (adjusting for both inflation and financial assets). This compares with additional debt of $9.9 billion after the pandemic and $17.8 billion after the financial crisis of 2008/09.
Measuring Ontario’s Prosperity Gap at The Metropolitan Area Level is a new study that ranks employment incomes in the largest 107 metropolitan areas around the Great Lakes region for 2019. It finds that London (93rd) and Windsor (99th) are right near the bottom and are $10-12,000 less than median employment incomes in Detroit, Buffalo and Cleveland.
The Report Card on Quebec’s Secondary Schools 2023 ranks 468 public, independent, francophone and anglophone schools based on provincewide test results in French, English, science and mathematics during the 2021/22 academic year. In this year’s ranking, 45 schools showed statistically significant improvement while 38 schools experienced declining performance.
Measuring British Columbia’s Prosperity Gap at the Metropolitan Level finds that the median income for workers in Seattle dwarfs the median income for workers in Vancouver, underscoring a general prosperity gap between B.C. and its regional neighbours.
There’s time to get off the resource revenue rollercoaster: Re-establishing the Alberta Sustainability Fund is a new study that finds with spending restraint, Alberta can re-introduce a rainy-day fund worth $9.8 billion by 2025/26 that could help insulate the province’s budget from swings in resource revenue.