OTTAWA — As the United States government escalates its attacks on world-class universities like Harvard, the head of the Council of Ontario Universities says Canada has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to snatch researchers and teachers from the U.S. but his members are hamstrung in attracting the best of the best.

“We are open. We just don’t have the resources to attract them,” Steve Orsini told The Logic in an interview. Now the chief executive of the Council of Ontario Universities, Orsini is formerly Ontario’s top civil servant and an ex-deputy minister of finance. Today’s academic research is tomorrow’s commercial products and industrial improvements, he said. 

President Donald Trump’s administration has slashed grants for scientific research, attacked Ivy League universities like Columbia and Harvard (including, this week, its ability to educate international students), and used immigration rules and to go after campus activists, including scooping a PhD student off the street without warning over a year-old op-ed.

Canadians have done a little high-profile poaching. The University of Toronto’s Munk School has raided Yale for some big-name humanities and social-science scholars, for instance.

Others, especially in the life sciences, have shown “tremendous interest” in moving to Canada, Orsini said. The catch is that their work can be expensive. They need high-end facilities and lab teams.

“It requires funding to attract the researchers themselves, and then to fund the research they’re engaged in,” Orsini said.

Universities across the country have been cutting instead of growing. Quebec has discouraged out-of-province students from its English-language universities, including McGill, in the name of promoting French. British Columbia’s schools, like many across the country, are struggling with the federal government’s cuts to permits for international students, whose higher fees filled some of the gap.

Ontario’s universities, like its colleges that are oriented more toward practical and technical training, have been struggling with the international student cap, plus a provincial tuition freeze since 2019.

These struggles make it especially tough to roll out red carpets for top talent looking for alternatives to American schools.

The Ontario government’s May 15 budget included a $150-million-a-year boost for seats in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) programs and some money for research infrastructure (like lab equipment), but not to core budgets.

A 2023 report commissioned by the province said it should give universities and colleges more money and let them hike tuition fees, while increasing financial aid and pursuing efficiencies. The panel called that its “foundational recommendation.” Premier Doug Ford’s government is promising to overhaul its funding formula this summer. That doesn’t help them now, however.

The federal Liberals promised a new “Canadian sovereignty and resilience research fund” to lure professors and graduate students squeezed out of the United States, and Orsini said Ontario’s universities are very eager to see it made real.

The 2024 federal budget boosted funding for academic research after the Liberals let inflation gnaw at grants and the programs that help cover living expenses for promising early-career researchers. Orsini said he hopes to see a dedicated effort like the Canada 150 research chairs program, which was specifically intended to draw world-class talent to Canadian universities.

“We believe now is the crucial time to attract those scientists and researchers from the U.S. to Canada, and also to repatriate some of our best and brightest that have moved to the U.S.,” he said.

Meanwhile, at the college level in Ontario—where the same tuition freeze has been in place since 2019—the federal cap on international students is hitting even harder.

Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters (CME) sent the Ontario government a pre-budget letter, with the Ontario’s colleges and universities, saying the Trump administration’s tariffs, the pre-existing productivity crisis and impending retirements have its members desperate for highly skilled, well-trained workers from post-secondary institutions that are underfunded to provide them.

“Industrial mechanics or machinists or complex programmers or people that understand and repair robots, or electricians to be able to connect these things and keep them running—these are the things that are really in short supply,” said CME’s chief executive, Dennis Darby, in an interview.

He’s talking about now, he said, not warning about the future. He’s been to factories where new equipment is on the floor but doing nothing, he said.

“I walk into the plants going, ‘So why is that robot not being used?’ And the manager will say, ‘Because we don’t have anybody with the skills to do it,’” Darby said.

Manufacturers expect the situation to get worse.

“In every sector, we’re going to need people that can install, maintain and repair much more complicated equipment than their fathers and grandfathers, or grandmothers and mothers, ever saw in a manufacturing plant,” Darby said.

Much of Canadian industry is used to competing with American industry to sell to Americans. If Canada wants to reorient its exports across oceans, to Europe or Asia, its industries must compete with those regions’ companies. So Darby was happy to see a billion-dollar commitment in the Ontario budget for skills development programs.

“Some of our competitors in Europe and Asia [have] a ton of government support for constantly re-skilling workers,” Darby said. 

The Ford government is pinning a lot on the new funding formula it plans to develop. Overall, Bianca Giacoboni, a spokesperson for Nolan Quinn, Ontario’s higher-education minister, told The Logic provincial funding for Ontario colleges and universities is higher than it’s ever been. 

What looks like a $1.4-billion annual budget cut to Ontario’s post-secondary institutions between now and 2027 is really an artifact of how all the lost revenue from international students is booked, she wrote in an email. 

Ontario put $1.3 billion into the sector over three years, starting in 2024, Giacobani wrote, in what was billed at the time as a move to stabilize them.

That money runs out before the last year of the latest budget’s forecast, but the provincial government intends to revise its funding formula, she wrote. The forecast shows spending based on current policies, but expect those to change—and the financial numbers along with them.

“From our colleges and universities to hospitals and research institutes, Ontario is building one of the most innovative workforces in the G7,” she wrote.