It's a great question. Lest I be a bit provocative here, I understand fully well why higher education is led at the provincial level in a federal system. However, I feel that it's a very powerful tool, a national instrument of power, and needs some grand strategic direction.
For instance, it's amazing, I find, that every university is trying to grapple with AI standards and rules at the moment. It's a waste of productive time for all universities to be doing this individually. There's the research security strategy. Again, these are central issues that require a powerful framework and don't need to be differentiated at the provincial level like other things do. I feel we can project our higher education capacity. In my view, it's a time, with post-Brexit Britain and a probable return of Trumpian politics to the south, that Canada should be attracting the best in the world.
In order to have frameworks that can operate in a higher education environment in a digital- and data-driven world, which requires alignment with immigration systems and so on, there need to be discussions regularly at a central level.