Canada has quietly moved from the era of the health care review to the era of the review of postsecondary education. Having digested (or set aside) the recommendations of the Romanow and Kirby commissions, federal and provincial governments have developed an appetite for proposals on how to enhance access to and improve the quality of higher education. This wave of interest among policymakers in access to postsecondary education is being driven by a number of factors. The first is the widespread understanding that Canada’s continued prosperity in an ever more competitive and integrated global economy rests on its ability to maintain an advantage in terms of the skills, flexibility and innovativeness of its labour force. The new jobs the economy is creating, and the existing jobs being vacated as baby boomers start to retire, require candidates with a postsecondary education to fill them.