Post-secondary education report will be released within days: minister

A report on the future of New Brunswick's post-secondary education system will be released in a matter of days, says Post-Secondary Education Minister Ed Doherty.

Doherty shortened the timeline on the release of the report, which was leaked to a New Brunswick newspaper and saw details published on Thursday, from weeks to days on Friday.

"The government's response to the report will be released in the next few days," Doherty said.

New Brunswick's Opposition party stepped up demands that the government release a report on the post-secondary education system after some of it was leaked.

It is more urgent than ever that the government release the document immediately, Conservative MLA Margaret-Ann Blaney said in the legislature on Thursday.

When a governmental report or recommendations get leaked to the media, the minister should be rushing to make that document available to the legislature and the public, said Conservative MLA Paul Robichaud on Friday.

The report was commissioned by the government last year in an effort to quell controversy over a proposal to merge some of the province's community colleges and universities.

A New Brunswick newspaper published some details of the report on Thursday, indicating that the document recommends a $466-million investment to create new levels of bureaucracy in the province's post-secondary education system.

It also suggests creating two "consortia of applied learning and training."

Blaney said the recommendation sounds very close to the polytechnics institutes that were originally proposed by the government.

Doherty said the details published in the newspaper were not a complete view of the contents of the report.

More work needs to be done on the document, Doherty said.

But the paper will not lead to any changes on the province's post-secondary campuses for the coming fall, Doherty said. Big changes will also not be implemented in the fall of 2009, the minister said on Friday.

The details available so far suggest that not much attention has been paid to making post-secondary education more affordable, said Duncan Gallant, president of the New Brunswick Student Alliance.

It seems the report pays a lot of attention to creating bureaucracy and will do very little to help students, Gallant said.