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By David Sorensen
Veteran political reporter Jeffrey Simpson has trained his eye on the insatiable demand for health care funding, a topic the Globe and Mail columnist will explore when he delivers the Galbraith Lecture on Memorial’s St. John’s campus later this month. The lecture is titled Health vs. Higher Education: Must Higher Education Lose Out?

Mr. Simpson’s thesis, explained in a column in the paper Oct. 3, is that the insistence on increased health care spending – calls governments have been answering with growing health budgets – is leaving precious little new revenue for other government services, including postsecondary education.

If anyone stands up in the audience afterwards and says “we’ve got to drive our fees down here in Newfoundland” I’ll just stand up and say I don’t agree and here are the reasons why.

In an interview with the Gazette, Mr. Simpson said that leaders in postsecondary education have resisted pointing out that this spending is taking money away from higher education.

“I’m basically saying to them, unless and until you’re willing to engage this debate, you’re going to continue to be steamrollered the way you have for the last 30 years,” he said. “You can refuse to join the debate or you can ... keep speaking about the need in isolation for more money for universities but that argument has been tried for 30 years and failed.”

Mr. Simpson will also have some pointed comments to make about tuition fees. A former member of Queen’s Board of Trustees, he said he’s long argued for higher fees as a way of ensuring the excellence of Canadian colleges and universities. He said increases across most of the country in the last decade are likely sufficient, however, he thinks tuition fees in this province could rise.

“If anyone stands up in the audience afterwards and says ‘we’ve got to drive our fees down here in Newfoundland’ I’ll just stand up and say I don’t agree and here are the reasons why.

“If governments want to keep the fees very low and want to reimburse the universities not just for the foregone fee increase revenue but increase the monies to the universities in real terms for other purposes, fine,” he said. “But they don’t do that. So universities have the worst of both worlds. They don’t get the fees, they get reimbursed for something approximating the amount of money for the fees but they don’t get anything more.”

There is a worldwide trend towards higher fees, he said. Britain and Australia have embarked on a major increase in the fees coupled with an income contingent loan program. Meanwhile, universities in continental Europe without tuition fees are declining in quality.

“Read the literature about the continental European countries, read the laments, the serious laments … from the universities in Germany and France and Holland that are losing massive numbers of faculty members to the United States, Britain and elsewhere and the very sad state of their universities,” he said. “So you can’t have it both ways. You can’t have free education and have universities that are going to be world competitive.”

Mr. Simpson will deliver the Galbraith Lecture in the Cook Recital Hall on Wednesday, Oct. 20, at 8 p.m. A reception will follow. Mr. Simpson will also speak to history and political science students on Oct. 21 on the U.S. election (“I change my mind about who the winner is going to be about every two or three days.”) and will hold two other public lectures while visiting Memorial.

Mr. Simpson, the Globe and Mail’s national affairs columnist, has won all three of Canada's leading literary prizes – the Governor-General's award for non-fiction book writing, the National Magazine Award for political writing, and the National Newspaper Award for column writing. In January 2000, he became an officer of the Order of Canada. He has been awarded honorary doctorates of laws from the University of British Columbia, the University of Western Ontario and the University of Manitoba.

Mr. Simpson has been a member of the board of trustees at Queen's University; the board of overseers at Green College, University of British Columbia, and the editorial board of The Queen's Quarterly. He has been vice-chairman of the City of Ottawa Library Board and was awarded the William Watkinson Award for outstanding contributions to the Canadian Library community.