Changing University as we Know It: Bill-12 and the State of Post-Secondary Education in Nova Scotia
/On March 26, 2025, the Nova Scotia provincial government passed a new education bill titled Bill 12. Premier Tim Houston’s Conservative party passed the bill with the aim of improving the sustainability of post-secondary education in Nova Scotia through increasingly direct government interference. The bill focuses on four main areas of improvement:
The new legislation gives degree-granting powers to the Nova Scotia Community College (NSCC)
It looks to dissolve existing university boards and replace them with new boards that could be up to 50% government appointed.
It gives new powers to the Minister of Advanced Education, Brendan Maguire, to direct Research NS funding towards predetermined research priorities at his discretion.
The legislation amends Bill 100, which was passed in 2015 to protect universities against bankruptcy, to allow the government to require institutions to create recovery plans in order to not lose their existing funding.
This bill’s impact has been grossly underreported to students at StFX. An article by Alex Usher (Higher Education Strategy Associates, 2025), which I recommend every StFX student to read and will be attached below, breaks down each area of amendment and expands on the worries this new bill has created. My article will narrow the focus towards the impact of this bill on current academic programs and research and looks to unpack why educators and institutions are concerned about its prospective fallout. I talked with Dr. Mathias Nilges, professor in the English department, about what this bill means for the province and the StFX community. “Bill-12 is sort of a tricky thing,” he says. “On the face of it, it has four discrete parts, not all of them necessarily unusual or immediate cause for concern. Say for instance, adding government appointees to StFX as board of governors. This is a new thing at StFX [but] a very common thing in other provinces. So, one argument might be that it just brings us in line with what’s done elsewhere…but what it opens the door to, under current conditions, I think is the problem.”
For Dr. Nilges, there are two main concerns over this bill. The first lies in its demand for a program rationalization and review. According to StFX’s 2025-2027 Higher Education Agreement, this review “involves reducing or discontinuing programs with low labor market need, low utilization, high program costs and those that no longer align with the institution's strategic priorities.” (St. Francis Xavier University, 42) In other words, post-secondary institutions will need to undergo review processes to assess the value of academic programs in relation to current labor market needs. Dr. Nilges worries about the accuracy of this kind of review strategy. “If you completely instrumentalize the account of what we do in the department, you reduce it to the simplest terms that don’t quite capture what we actually do…It’s a kind of change of valuation in the conversation of academic knowledge.”
This review means that academic programs will have to defend their right to exist based solely on cost and labor market needs, an argument that grossly underrepresents the value of these programs for education and research. And if they are unable to produce a strong enough account, entire programs and degrees may disappear. “The worry is exactly that [this] is what’s going to happen here. The end result usually is maybe there were immediate benefits on cost savings, but over the long term, it comes at a high cost” cautions Dr. Nilges. Usher writes that this review will allow the government to “require institutions to put forward recovery plans on pain of losing existing funding”, potentially in order to have the ability to “force [institutions] to restructure.” The range of revitalizations may be minor or major, but because of the shaky nature of the bill we have no way of truly knowing just how severely the province and StFX will be affected.
The second concern, Dr. Nilges states, is that “the scale of academic research and the time of academic research doesn’t map onto the quick-changing needs of the labor market.”
He notes that “you have research in the environmental sciences that’s absolutely going to be crucial for everything we do – including the labor market – decades from now. The research products that require decades, you can’t shift them around.” When the government attempts to oversimplify academic research using terminology fit only to describe the ever-changing state of the labor market, what results is not a strategy for cost-effectiveness but rather a gross reductive metric of the role of academia in society. This bill, therefore, not only risks slashing certain programs and degrees but also has the potential to change how universities operate as a whole.
Yet where our attention should really be directed towards is the overreach of party politics in academia. “[When] we instrumentalize what higher education should be, attaching it to fulfilling labor market needs, then we tend to forget about the crucial parts that traditionally made universities so incredibly valuable…as drivers of social innovation and progress. Entire fields of knowledge become instrumentalized and unrecognizable,” says Dr. Nilges. “The range of educational opportunities cannot depend on the rapidly shifting, at worst incoherent preferences of the government…In a time of anti-intellectualism, when people find it easy to be rustled up against universities, [a bill like this] is a great object” to the slash-and-cut agenda, says Dr. Nilges. Yet it fails to accurately portray the value of post-secondary institutions not only in terms of academia, but economically and culturally as well.
With this new legislation Bill 12 attempts to create a lane for governmental control of educational opportunities, a concern that should alarm not only post-secondary educators but students as well. “The independence and freedom of higher education is absolutely crucial, and the damaging incursion of party politics into academic research and teaching is as self-serving and short-sighted as it is damaging for us” says Dr. Nilges. StFX students, as well as those of other institutions across the province, need to keep a close eye on this legislation’s effects on our schools and programs. As Bill 12 begins rolling out across the province, we at the Xaverian Weekly will continue to report on this developing story.
Alex Usher’s article on Bill-12: https://higheredstrategy.com/nova-scotias-bill-12/
StFX’s 2025-2027 agreement – p.42-45: https://novascotia.ca/lae/HigherEducation/documents/agreement-stfx-2025.pdf
