Decade of Education Finance: 1970-71 to 1979-80

Virginia Gillham is Associate Librarian in the Public Service Library at
the University of Guelph.

Everything you always wanted to know about educational funding in Canada is detailed in this rather weighty tome. Designed as a companion volume to Statistics Canada publication 81-560, which covers the 1960s, Decade of Education Finance: 1970-71 to 1979-80 summarizes, synthesizes, updates, and interprets data from several published and unpublished sources to present comparable information for the 1970s. The introduction makes it clear that this is considerably more than a summary of the annual publications.

The report is divided into four sections, under the following headings: all levels of education; elementary and secondary education; postsecondary education; and vocational education. Within each section, graphs, charts, and tables detail expenditures by both source and destination of funds. Relative percentages of support from federal, provincial, municipal, and private sources for education in various parts of the country are among the interesting details to be gleaned from this publication.

This information is updated on an annual basis by Statistics Canada Publication 81-208, Financial Statistics of Education.