Leading through uncertainty: Lessons from CICan’s Connections Conference

Sometimes the clearest insight comes not from hearing something entirely new, but from seeing a familiar challenge in a different setting. That was our experience in Ottawa at CICan’s Connections Conference, held under the banner 'Building a Strong & Secure Canada'.

As a Canadian team, we spent our time listening closely to college and polytechnic leaders from across the country, while also bringing an Australian perspective into the conversation, with Hamish Ride, who leads Nous' work within the college ecosystem (institutions, adjacent ministries, and advocacy groups).

What struck us early was how quickly the conversation moved beyond surface similarities. Yes, Australia and Canada are both contending with funding pressure, policy changes, skills shortages and shifting public expectations. But the context in Canada has its own flavour, different policy settings, different institutional histories, different pressures playing out in real time. That was what made the conference so valuable. It did not simply validate what we already thought. It gave us a clearer way to see it. 

As the conference unfolded, a bigger story came into focus. Canada’s post-secondary system is navigating a tough patch: fiscal pressure, a changing international student landscape, large national ambitions around infrastructure and defence, and, sitting underneath all that, a more searching question about what kind of economy the country is trying to build next. None of that is abstract. You could feel it in the room. 
 
What stayed with us, though, was not only the pressure. It was the response. Again and again, we heard colleges and polytechnics describe themselves not as stand-alone providers, but as practical partners in a wider ecosystem, working with employers, communities, governments and other institutions to turn need into capability. That felt significant. The language of partnership was not decorative; it was operational. Nor was leadership framed as something distant or grand. It showed up in the nuts and bolts: in access and mobility for students, in applied research that closes the gap between good ideas and real-world uptake, and in the sector’s knack for convening the right people around a stubborn local problem and actually getting on with it. 

By the end of the conference, four ideas kept surfacing in our notes and in our conversations with each other. They felt less like passing themes and more like signals of where the sector may need to go next.

Colleges and polytechnics are already deeply embedded in their local and regional economies, but the challenges Canada is now facing do not sit neatly inside institutional or provincial boundaries. They spill across them. If colleges and polytechnics are going to help meet national priorities at the pace required, they may need to act with even more confidence as system-shapers: collaborating more deliberately, reaching beyond familiar lines, and backing themselves as partners of consequence rather than simply delivery agents. In that context, partnership is not simply a good instinct; it is increasingly a practical response to the limits of institutional breadth and uncoordinated duplication. Australia offers a helpful proof point. A useful example is Wodonga TAFE, which now leads delivery within a national technical trades training arrangement for the Australian Defence Force. Australia still wrestles with coordination in a federated system, but the more interesting lesson is that some institutions have been willing to help create the opportunity, shape the partnership model and step into the space, rather than waiting for every jurisdictional question to be resolved first. That feels especially relevant in the current Canadian moment, where federal ambitions, provincial responsibilities and institutional mandates do not always align neatly, and where that misalignment can sometimes make it feel impossible to act.

This came up often enough that it was hard to ignore. Long waitlists. Low completion rates. Training and certification timelines that seem out of step with labour market urgency. On paper, apprenticeships are central to any credible workforce strategy in construction, infrastructure and industry. In practice, parts of the model appear to be creaking. That gap matters. If Canada wants to build at scale and at speed, then the apprenticeship pathway cannot remain a slow lane. Australia’s experience suggests that apprenticeship reform is not only about funding levels, but also about the intermediary structures that help employers participate, share risk and support completion; that matters even more when trade apprenticeship completion appears markedly higher there than in Canada, roughly 58.2 per cent compared with 32.3 per cent on the comparable measure.

Not just access, important though that is, but movement: how students find their way into a system, across it and through it without losing time, money or momentum. As credentials multiply and learner needs become more varied, pathways stop being a nice policy add-on and start looking like core system design. That also means paying closer attention to friction: the repeated handoffs, confusing advice and disconnected processes that quietly drain students’ time and confidence. Too often, students end up doing the work of stitching the system together themselves. DeRionne Pollard, Ph.D. spoke about students moving through systems with efficiency and dignity. It is a simple phrase, but a sharp one. It gets at something bigger than smoother administration. It asks whether systems are organized around institutional convenience or around human experience. In practice, the test is not whether an institution says student experience matters, but whether its operating model is designed around the transitions where students most often lose time and momentum, or whether those frictions are still being managed informally by students and staff.

Some of the most energizing conversations we had were with leaders across different parts of the college sector who were clear-eyed about what this moment requires. They acknowledged that the system is unlikely to snap back to an earlier equilibrium, but nor can it sit indefinitely in its current uncertainty. Provinces are revisiting funding and broader system settings. International policy remains unsettled. At the same time, the role of colleges and polytechnics seems to be expanding, not shrinking. The challenge now is to preserve the local responsiveness that gives colleges and polytechnics their legitimacy while equipping them to meet a broader set of national expectations. If colleges and polytechnics are genuinely being asked to play a larger role in Canada’s future, then system settings, reform priorities and leadership choices will need to catch up with that reality. Stability, in that sense, is not only about funding certainty; it is also about creating the conditions for institutions to make clearer choices about where they can go deep, where they should redesign, and where shared delivery may make more sense than carrying everything alone. That creates both opportunity and risk. Otherwise, we risk asking institutions to solve national problems with local improvisation alone.

From our vantage point in Canada, much of this felt both immediate and familiar. Hamish’s Australian perspective sharpened that comparison rather than flattening it. The policy environment is different, but the underlying questions are not. What does it take for a system to stay purposeful when the ground beneath it is shifting? How do institutions adapt without losing trust? And what kind of leadership is needed when the old model no longer quite fits, but the new one has not fully arrived? Those were some of the questions we carried forward. Our live jurisdictional comparison did not yield a neat template, nor should it have. What it did reveal was something more valuable: there are strengths on both sides worth borrowing, from how institutions build partnerships and shape pathways to how they respond to pressure without losing sight of purpose. The opportunity now is not to replicate another system, but to be more deliberate about what each can learn from the other.

Get in touch to discuss how colleges and polytechnics can respond to pressure without losing sight of purpose.

Connect with Nathalie Mejia on LinkedIn.

Prepared with input from Hamish Ride.