The Evergreen Paradox: Canada’s Shift Towards Short-term Readiness

This discussion paper develops and tests the Evergreen Paradox: the possibility that education, funding, accountability, and labour-market reward systems are increasingly prioritizing faster-depreciating domain capabilities at precisely the moment when lower-depreciation evergreen capabilities are becoming more important for adaptation, mobility, and renewal.

The discussion paper should be read as a preliminary system diagnosis. It does not claim to provide final causal proof. Instead, it brings together multiple sources of evidence to examine whether the same directional pattern appears across enrollment, funding, accountability, and graduate outcomes.