The Ford government has unveiled three-quarters of a billion dollars for STEM programs at colleges and universities across Ontario in a bid to insulate the economy through more local skills training.
On Tuesday, the government said it would spend an extra $750 million on post-secondary programs teaching science, technology, engineering and mathematics. The funding could unlock 20,500 new seats.
Minister of Colleges and Universities Nolan Quinn said the funds would help to protect the provincial economy and local workforce from the threat of economic turbulence caused by the U.S.-Canada trade war.
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“Our government is working to protect Ontario by building a more resilient economy that can withstand whatever comes our way, including tariffs and economic uncertainty from the U.S.,” he said in a statement.
“This investment will expand training capacity at our world-class publicly funded colleges and universities, connecting students to good-paying jobs and securing our world-class workforce for decades to come.”
The money will be available to all post-secondary institutions that have signed 2025-2030 operating agreements with the province.
Ontario’s struggling college sector has been pitching itself as a key part of the province’s response to tariffs levelled on Canadian imports to the United States.
Post-secondary institutions have been battered financially over the past year after the number of international students was dramatically cut in January 2024.
Colleges, in particular, had come to rely on international students for roughly one-third of their revenue and have been forced to cut programs and close campuses since the number of new students in the country was capped.
After the Progressive Conservatives won the recent snap winter election, post-secondary and business leaders wrote to the government urging them to spend more on education as a tariff response.
A coalition of public unions made the same plea at Queen’s Park last week.
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