Can We Have Equality of Opportunity, and Excellence, Too?

Introduction:

Christmas has come a little early to the Empire Club. When we planned this year's program, we decided we wanted to hear from experts in the fields of education, law, politics, communications, the environment, the economy, business, the church, the family, students, sport.

And so today we have speakers in all these fields.

From education: The Principal and Vice-Chancellor of McGill University, one of our finest universities.

From law: A professor, an expert in securities legislation, a former Dean at the University of Western Ontario, and a former professor from Queen's University.

From politics: The pre-eminent lion tamer of Leadership Debates in both federal and provincial elections.

From communications: An author, a commentator and an arbitrator. On the environment: A man who was asked by the Prime Minister to set up a national round table on environmental and economic issues. From business: A director of Spar Aerospace, Southam Inc., Seagrams, Canada Trust and Emco.

From the church: A man who recently received his Doctorate in Divinity from the Montreal Theological College.

On the family: A married man with five daughters between the ages of 13 and 20. We know what he was doing during the 70s.

On students: A man who attended Harvard, Cambridge and Queen's, graduating with honours from each.

From sports: A marathoner who has been known to abandon boring meetings in favour of a run.

And before they all get up and leave this meeting, I had better get these experts up here. They are, of course, all one man-Dr. David Johnston AB, LLB, PhD and an Officer of the Order of Canada.

David Johnston:

You do me great honour by inviting me to speak to you today. If it is true that a man is known by the company he keeps, then I am flattered to be included among your roster of speakers, from Winston Churchill to Margaret Mead to Indira Ghandi and Prince Philip.

As I consider why you have asked the Principal of McGill, and former president of the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada, to speak today, I choose to think it's because, for you, the hottest topic on the national agenda is higher education in Canada. If post-secondary education is not of gripping interest to you, I'm afraid one of us may be at the wrong luncheon.

Believe it or not, however, there are more and more Canadians who are convinced that improving our postsecondary education system is the most critical challenge facing this country, the cornerstone of our nation's economic and social well-being. "Even more important to the future of Canada than any of the wars we have fought," according to prominent Canadian businessman Maurice Strong.

In this secular age of ours, can it be said that universities are, as a former Principal of McGill once put it: "The soul of modern civilization?"

What a lot we demand of our community colleges and universities. A well-informed, skilled workforce, a guarantee of higher wages and improved standards of living, a permanent passport to an intellectually enriched and spiritually satisfying way of life, a model of high idealism and practical learning.

Before we consider whether these demands are entirely fair, I would like to refer for a minute to the title of my talk. Two years ago, an article in The Globe and Mail deplored "The stifling paralysis of will" which it saw as choking the education debate in Canada. And what is the so-called education debate? It's an old debate and an important debate and it's time we got everyone to start taking sides up front and out in public. It's a debate about values; it's a debate about jurisdictions; it's a debate about priorities - and ultimately it is indeed a debate about the future of Canada.

And let me insert a question which foretells much of what I wish to say today. Why was the education debate so conspicuously lacking in the recent federal election?

One way of considering this debate is to look at it in terms of a single deceptively simple question, the question that serves as the title of my talk today. Can we have equality of opportunity, and excellence too? This question is in no way a rhetorical question. And you would be surprised at how many respected Canadians would answer a flat no. No, we cannot encourage everyone who qualifies to attend university or college, and still hope to offer a diploma or degree that's worth more than the paper it's printed on.

The implications of such a negative reply are awesome for the future of Canada. But before we leave this room today, I urge each of you to examine the question from your own context and whatever conclusion you reach, act on it.

Perhaps it's old experience as a labour arbitrator, but I wish to postpone giving you my own answer to this question and instead ask you a few more questions that will, I hope, lead you to understand the dimensions of the present situation in higher education across the country today.

Last March former Secretary of State David Crombie uttered this stirring declaration: "Canadians have the talent, the brains, the imagination and the energy to achieve anything they put their minds to. All they need is a fighting chance:'

What does that mean, a fighting chance? What are we waiting for? If we have all this energy and talent and imagination and brains, why is Canada's education system in such a fix? Why is Canada last among the top seven industrial nations for the percentage of scientific researchers per 1,000 population? Why is our productivity level 40 per cent lower than the Americans? Why have our universities' capacity to support research dropped to below 56 per cent of what it was in 1970?

Why is it on the day that Dr. John Polonyi was to learn of his Nobel Prize he was advising a bright Canadian graduate student to seek his career in the United States because the funding for research is four or five times greater there?

Why has Canadian investment in research and development actually declined, as we discovered a few weeks ago, to 1.38 per cent of the Gross Domestic Product despite Prime Minister Mulroney's pledge to double R & D spending to 2.5 per cent of the GDP in his first term of office? Nowadays every newspaper in the country carries stories about the importance of being able to compete in the high-tech environment of the 21st Century. Leading industrialists, academics and politicians seize every opportunity to warn against the perils of an uneducated workforce and an uncompetitive society, particularly as we enter into a new era of free trade. Yet wherever we look, our colleges and universities are facing overcrowded classrooms, outdated equipment, impoverished libraries, aging professoriates, and budgets so tight even accountants weep.

Why have those Canadian universities which have greatly expanded their research base never been poorer, finding themselves in the unbelievable position of having their excellence rewarded by ever smaller operating revenue?

Why is it that Ontario's fine universities, such as Toronto, Queen's and Waterloo are attempting to offer teaching programs at a level of the great universities of the World - Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, Oxford, Cambridge - and yet must do so with one-fifth the income per student of those institutions? Why are we in this muddle?

We are in it because while we Canadians support the principle that anyone who qualifies and wants to study should have access to higher education, we haven't done anything to protect the excellence on which our greatest institutions have built their reputation.

I suggest to you that with its 270 universities and colleges and its $10-billion post-secondary education budget, Canada has already done more to encourage equality of opportunity for the individual than, perhaps, any nation in the world and surely better than any nation in history. Nonetheless participants at the historic National Forum on Post-secondary Education in Saskatoon last October agreed that even more has to be done to improve access, more for women in nontraditional fields, more for the disabled, more for immigrants, for minorities and for the aboriginal peoples. There is probably no university head in the country who does not support the principle of broad access to post-secondary education. And yet there is one compelling pair of statistics that strikes at the heart of this conviction.

In the past 10 years alone, figures compiled by the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada show that there has been an increase in enrolment of 30 per cent. And by how much have our operating budgets gone up? Not 25 per cent; not 15 per cent; not 10 per cent.

With a 30-per-cent increase in enrolment, our budgets have gone up a mere 1.6 per cent and these have been years, for the most part, of relative affluence.

In Quebec, of course, we face a particularly exasperating situation. With our tuition fees frozen at the level they were 20 years ago, the percentage of operating revenue they represent is at a preposterous 9.2 per cent. In Ontario they are at 20.4 per cent, a more realistic figure. McGill chancellor and former chairman of Bell Canada Enterprises Jean de Grandpré has a point when he says that it costs more to send your child to day care than to put your son or daughter through medical school.

And students know they're not getting the high quality of education they were taught to expect and deserve. Only a month ago the chairman of the council of Ontario Universities, Harry Arthurs, acknowledged in The Globe and Mail that more students are looking at universities outside Ontario, principally, it seems, because of "concern about the quality of university education available at home."

How did this situation arise? The answer, l suggest to you, is painfully, poignantly clear: We are expecting far too mach for far too little.

Can we have equality of opportunity, and excellence too? I have my own reply ready, and it is - characteristically, perhaps, for a lawyer - a "yes-if" answer.

Yes, if we can get Canadians to talk about education with the same passion and conviction that they recently showed over free trade.

Yes, if we support the federal government's efforts to establish centres of excellence chosen by academic peers, to launch national scholarship and bursary programs, and to increase funding for science, engineering and the humanities. 0 Yes, if we stimulate the private sector to endow more chairs, invest more in research and development, take concrete initiatives to support quality teaching.

Did you know that Canadian corporate giving as a percentage of before-tax profits has actually declined quite substantially in recent years? In 1969, for example, donations were reported at.74 per cent of before-tax profits. In 1985, the average had dropped to .43 per cent, one-quarter the level of U.S. corporations.

Tuition fees, too, must reflect a more realistic cost-sharing approach to education. Because we Canadians support the notion of broad access to educational opportunities, that doesn't mean we believe these opportunities should be achieved without effort of sacrifice or appreciation. It is quite possible for us to devise sensitive loan and bursary schemes to ensure no qualified student is denied access to university and still expect that student and his or her family to have greater ownership of that education through higher tuition fees.

Yes, we can have both access and excellence, if we insist that the spirit of co-operation so evident at the Saskatoon Forum a year ago replaces the federal-provincial wrangling which in the past has been such a smokescreen for inaction.

Moveover, Canada's universities and colleges are no passive partners in this great enterprise to improve our postsecondary system. The strategy, it seems to me, that they can best adopt to achieve and maintain distinction, is to cherish diversity. Diversifying their programs so that individual students can better tailor their choice of courses to their own unique requirements. Building on areas of traditional strength, welcoming a variety of approaches to learning, including self-directed learning, and work-study programs. Trying to incorporate in their approaches what journalist Lise Bissonnette calls "Le Nouveau Classicisme " An integrated system embracing both the traditional virtues of the liberal arts and the new demands of a technologically-advanced society. We must accept that universities per se are not necessarily as institutions the be-all and end-all of higher education. We need to diversify what we actually do - we need an MIT and a Cal Tech, as Walter Pittman of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education pointed out last spring, and some smaller liberal arts institutions closer to Oxford and Cambridge colleges.

We also need diversity in our faculty and student body more closely matching our multiprismed society and our increasingly frontierless world. Expanding language offerings, studying the geography, history and culture of other climes, encouraging international students to come to Canada - these are all ways Canada's post-secondary institutions can master strategies of distinction to achieve the excellence they yearn for.

There are now, for example, 35,000 international students enrolled at Canadian colleges and universities and the consensus is clearly that international students contribute enormously by enriching Canada's cultural and academic environment and by creating important links between Canada and the rest of the world. Indeed we are competing with other countries to attract such students.

There's a lovely quote I'd like to share with you about the importance of diversity, from a speech by the late Rene Dubos, the renowned American microbiologist and ecologist.

Diversity is at the origin of many conflicts and it tends to make the world of things and world of men inefficient and inconvenient. But I believe that in the long run diversity is preferable to efficiency and convenience, and perhaps even to the serenity of absolute peace. Without diversity, freedom is but an empty word, persons and societies cannot continue to evolve. Human beings are not really free and cannot be fully creative if they do not have many opinions from which to select.

Or to quote a much more ancient prophet: "To know one is to know none."

Yes, we can break free of the quagmire in which our postsecondary system appears to be floundering. We can shake off this stifling paralysis of will I referred to a few moments ago. We can give young and young-at-heart Canadians from coast to coast a chance to move beyond their high school education. Yes, we can do this and still have strong claims to excellence. But we have to recognize what Quebec entrepreneur Serge Saucier told the Montreal chamber of commerce recently:

"La mediocrité a long terme coiite plus cher que la qualityé:' Mediocrity in the long run does cost more than quality, and to produce knowledge requires investment, investment of money, of passion, of intellect, of purpose.

We can achieve anything we want, if we want it badly enough. Make up your own minds about what you want, for yourselves, your children, your society. And act on it.

The appreciation of the meeting was expressed by John A. Campion of Fasken & Calvin and a Director of the Empire Club of Canada.