Laurentian – Insolvency, mass firings and the erosion of multiculturalism

Laurentian University, which became the first publicly funded entity in Canada to seek creditor protection after declaring insolvency earlier this year, has fired 100 academics, cut 69 programmes – and shattered what it proudly billed as its tri-cultural mandate by disproportionately cutting back francophone and indigenous offerings.

While there had been rumours that the university’s finances were perilous, an announcement on 1 February 2021 that Laurentian University was seeking creditor protection to avoid imminent bankruptcy came as a shock to the university community and residents of Sudbury in Ontario, a mining town of 165,000 people, 400 kilometres north of Toronto.

“The university had been so non-transparent with their finances for so long, that it was like crying wolf. They’d say, ‘Yeah, we have no money, but we have a balanced budget’,” says former professor Christopher Duncanson-Hales. He was one of 100 faculty fired on 30 March when the Ontario Superior Court of Justice accepted an emergency finance plan that cut 58 undergraduate and 11 graduate programmes, including Duncanson-Hales’s philosophy department.

The fall-out from years of mismanagement that saw the regional university of 7,000 students accumulate a debt of CA$322 million (US$267 million) will be measured by the shrunken institution that no longer has departments such as philosophy, ecology, environment, modern languages and music.

Laurentian is also seen as having broken faith with both its francophone and its indigenous faculty and students – two of the three legs of the tri-cultural mandate.

In the 1 February announcement, Laurentian’s President Robert Haché told students and staff that the board of governors had authorised a decision to seek protection under the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act or CCAA, because: “Despite our best efforts over the last year, Laurentian is insolvent.”

This was the first time not only that a publicly funded university had sought creditor protection in Canada, but also that a publicly funded entity of any type had sought such protection.

According to Professor Réal Fillion, who teaches philosophy at Université de Sudbury and is a member of the faculty union there, the immediate reaction was: “How is it possible that a publicly funded institution could declare itself insolvent?” However, he told University World News, “to call Ontario’s colleges and universities publicly funded is only partially true. To everyone’s surprise, they are private corporations and they can apply for this type of protection.”

In late May, quoting an anonymous source in Ontario’s Ministry of Colleges and Universities, the Sudbury Star reported that the university requested an emergency loan of CA$100 million. Without an independent third-party review of Laurentian’s finances, which the university refused, the province turned down the request but offered CA$12 million to tide it over to the end of the academic year in March.

Documents filed with the court by the monitor, the accounting firm of Ernst & Young, indicate that of CA$322 million in liabilities, between CA$91 million and CA$100 million is owed to three of Canada’s largest banks. Another creditor is the Northern Ontario School of Medicine, which was formerly under the aegis of Laurentian but discovered that research funds that were to be held in trust by Laurentian were used to pay ongoing expenses.

Following the passing of a motion in the Public Accounts Committee put forward by France Gélinas, the New Democratic Party (NDP) member of the provincial parliament for the riding of Nickel Belt, which borders Sudbury, the province’s auditor general will investigate how Laurentian ended up with what Haché called “the weakest finances of any Ontario university”.

In a Zoom call with students, Haché, who became president only two years ago, said: “There are a lot of things over the last 10 or even 15 years that contributed to taking the university to where it was.”

Previous presidents have either pointed the finger at Haché or expressed surprise at the university’s plight. Judith Woodsworth, who was president from 2002-08, blamed the university’s building spree over the past decade. “I wouldn’t have taken on a lot of debt to build buildings,” she told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

Other contributing factors are the tuition freeze the Ontario government put in place three years ago, and costs and lost income attributable to the COVID-19 crisis that has prevented students from attending classes on campus.

For her part, Dr Laura Mae Lindo, also a member of the provincial parliament for the NDP, says: “There was no way this came as a surprise. There were too many opportunities for red flags to have been raised.” She is especially interested in finding out about the role of the board appointed by the government.

“Many people made the assumption that they would in fact be giving some information to the government,” she told University World News. She adds that it is up to the government to make sure that the sector is adequately funded. “I don’t know that this government understands the importance of investing in the post-secondary sector,” Lindo says.

Regional impacts

Even prior to the announcement of the cuts, in a move to save approximately CA$7 million a year, Laurentian terminated agreements with three other post-secondary institutions in Northern Ontario with which it was federated – Université de Sudbury, Huntington University and Thorneloe University. Students from these institutions received degrees from Laurentian, which received a provincial charter when it was formed in 1960.

The dissolution of the federation also meant that the only medical school in Ontario’s north was suddenly cut off from the degree granting institution under which it had functioned. In response, the provincial government rushed through the legislature a bill to create the University of Hearst and a stand-alone Northern Ontario School of Medicine. The Université de Sudbury still possessed the two charters it had when the federation was created and plans to become a French only university.

According to Duncanson-Hales, in the weeks leading up to an April announcement on cuts, faculty – who, he stresses, had absolutely no input into the planned restructuring – were reduced to trying to figure out the odds of their programme surviving.

Faculty in the only midwifery programme in Ontario’s North, he told me, believed “they would never cut midwifery because it’s fully funded [by the provincial government outside Laurentian’s grant]. So, we’re okay.” After an outcry, it was arranged with two other universities to run this programme. Nor did the mathematics professors think they would be cut. “They’re never going to cut philosophy in a university,” Duncanson-Hales said.

But when the axe came down on 9 April, each of these programmes was cut, along with the many others, especially in the humanities and social sciences. “Those programmes,” says Réal Fillion, “were cut on the grounds of fewer enrolments. But not fewer enrolments in terms of students in classes but in terms of degrees granted for example.

“You’re not going to turn out a ton of philosophy students or graduates with a major in labour studies. But to have these kinds of critical studies is expected in a university,” he says, before adding in an exasperated voice, “where else are you going to find them? You’re not going to find them anywhere else on the market.”

Nor was Duncanson-Hales surprised when he was told that many of the courses that remain are oriented towards the mining sector, while those that are critical of its environmental or labour record were cut.

The most surprising cut is the physics department, which in addition to training 15 radiologists per year to treat cancer patients, also worked closely with the world-famous Sudbury Neutrino Observatory Lab or SNOLAB, which is part of the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory Collaboration (SNOC).

According to Canadian Nobel laureate (2015) Dr Arthur McDonald, former director of SNOC, the closing of the physics and mathematics departments means that Laurentian students will no longer be able to be part of ground-breaking research carried out a few kilometres away.

While the SNOLAB’s funding is entirely separate from Laurentian’s, the absence of its post-doctoral, doctoral and even undergraduate physics students will have an impact on the lab, which is situated under two kilometres of rock in a former nickel mine.

According to Professor Tony Noble, a physicist at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, and scientific director of the Arthur B McDonald Institute, these physics students formed “a small army of people who were facilitating a number of the experiments underground. Typically, they had something like 15 graduate students, four post-docs and in the summer, they would hire 20 undergraduates who would be underground working on the experiments,” he told University World News.

These students were especially important in this time of COVID. When “a lot of the world was unable to travel, they were stepping up their game and being proxies to make sure that the science was continuing well”, he says. So that they can complete their degrees, SNOLAB is working to arrange places at other universities for the graduate and postgraduate students.

A incubator for French culture

For decades after its formation in 1960, Laurentian was an incubator for French culture in Northern Ontario, which has a large percentage of francophones. Its role went beyond educating the next generation of French teachers for the school system and accountants and engineers.

According to Université d’Ottawa Professor Francois Larocque, who specialises in the legal aspects of francophone education in Ontario, Laurentian “was a hub for thinkers and artists from which emanated a slew of culturally significant institutions like the Théâtre du Nouvel-Ontario, Prise de parole [a publishing house], the Institut Franco-Ontarien – the first multi-disciplinary institute of higher learning devoted to the study of Franco-Ontarians – and a number of music festivals.

Over the past decade, however, as budgets tightened, although Laurentian continued to pay lip service to the French leg of its tri-cultural mandate, francophones noticed the hollowing out of the university’s French offerings.

“Things have been going south at Laurentian in terms of francophone services and programmes. We’ve witnessed a decline in the investment in French language programmes, professors not being replaced, inadequate marketing of the French language programmes,” says Denis Constantineau, spokesperson for the Coalition nord-ontarienne pour une université francophone.

In 2007, the theatre programme – Art d’expression – had five full-time professors and three sessional professors. When it was cancelled there was one full-time professor and a few sessionals. “Theatre is all about being able to see different artistic visions and ways of expression, so when you don’t have variety that’s a problem,” according to Marie-Pierre Proulx, director of Théâtre du Nouvel-Ontario.

Across the board, French language programmes were particularly vulnerable given the dollars and cents analysis used under the creditor protection act. “Their analysis has nothing to do with the quality of education; nothing to do with investing in the community or the role of the university in the future continuity of the community,” says Constantineau. “It’s a question of how much it costs to run a programme and how much tuition money it brings in.”

This made French theatre especially vulnerable. For, despite the fact that the number of students from other programmes like bio-medicine and business who take theatre courses has significantly increased in recent years, Laurentian counted only those students enrolled full time in the programme.

“It’s seen as a small programme, so there’s no investment in it, but there’s no investment because it’s a small programme; it’s a turning wheel,” Proulx told University World News. Even though over the past 10 years Laurentian built a number of buildings, the university did not supply the theatre programme with a dedicated rehearsal or performance space.

By cutting 24 undergraduate French programmes – including mining, surprisingly given the importance of mining in Sudbury – and four masters programmes, the francophone community believes Laurentian has broken faith with it and violated the province’s French Language Services Act (FLSA).

The act, passed in 1986, is not as sweeping as the Canadian Constitution (1982), which mandates French language school education anywhere in Canada “where numbers warrant” it (as, for example in Sudbury). Rather, in Laurentian’s case, the FLSA provides a certain amount of protection for those French language services being provided when the university took the pro-active step of seeking designation under the act in 2015.

According to Fillion: “Once designated, the FLSA offers protection and establishes an obligation. The protection is for students and employees. Programmes could not be cut or slashed without providing a level of justification the law mandates, which is that the cuts have to be absolutely necessary.”

The legal standard of what was “absolutely necessary” was established in 2001, in a case involving Ottawa’s Montfort Hospital, the only francophone teaching hospital in the province. The Ontario Appeals Court ruled that the government of the day’s plan to close Montfort Hospital to help deal with the province’s financial difficulties contravened the FLSA because the government had not shown that it was the only remaining course open to it.

In the thousand or so pages of documents filed with the court supporting Laurentian’s bid for creditor protection, including an affidavit from President Haché, there is no mention of the university’s status under the FLSA. “Not one mention of the fact that the university is a culturally significant institution for the francophone community. There is complete silence,” says Fillion.

The NDP’s Jamie West points a finger at the provincial government of Conservative Premier Doug Ford. The FLSA “guarantees the right to receive provincial services in French at Laurentian”, West told University World News. But the Ford government “has allowed the cuts of French language programmes at Laurentian, which violates the act”.

The office of the minister of francophone affairs, Caroline Mulroney, directed me to the office of the minister of colleges and universities, Ross Romano.

In an e-mail to University World News, Romano’s office said that “the Ministry of Francophone Affairs, in collaboration with the Ministry of Colleges and Universities, is also in regular communication with Laurentian University to understand the impact of programme cuts on Laurentian’s obligations and on the university’s compliance with the provisions of a partial designation under the French Language Services Act.”

Citing the fact that it intends to offer 28 French programmes, Laurentian continues to claim that it is servicing the francophone community, and, thus, appears on side with Romano’s statement that “Laurentian's partial designation under the French Language Services Act requires the university to offer certain programmes in French that will allow students to obtain degrees in specific fields”.

The Regroupement des professeurs francophones begs to differ. By its counting, there are only 14 remaining programmes. The five business administration courses – for example accounting, finance and general – all have a common core. Curiously, Laurentian also lists ‘French as second language’ as a French course.

Likening the francophone’s situation to making lemonade (when handed lemons), Constantineau told University World News that once the shock wore off, the francophone community came together and started militating for the creation of a French university, something they had wanted for half a century.

While discussions are ongoing with the minister, the Université de Sudbury has informed the Ontario government that it wishes to become a stand-alone full-service French university that, according to Larocque, will likely be governed by and for francophones in Ontario.

Without a French university in Sudbury, francophone students wishing to study in French will face what philosopher Fillion frames as “an almost colonial situation”. For, as the young Léopold Senghor did when he left Senegal for Paris, they will have to travel to the metropole to study at the Université d’Ottawa or to the newly established Université de l’Ontario français in Toronto.

Unlike Senghor, who famously returned to Senegal and became the nation’s first president, most francophone students who leave the north to study do not return. Without the vibrancy that such students bring to their community, the greater the threat of assimilation, says Constantineau.

Commitment to the indigenous community

The third leg of Laurentian’s tri-cultural mandate was its commitment to teaching indigenous students and studies. The indigenous social worker programme was and will remain at Laurentian. Indigenous studies was housed at Université de Sudbury. On 12 April, via a message on its website, the Université de Sudbury said that because Laurentian had ‘terminated’ the federation agreement, “we regret that we will be unable to teach courses in this programme as of 1 May”.

Since Laurentian has no plans to re-incorporate the nation’s oldest indigenous studies programme, founded in 1976, students already enrolled and those in the Sudbury catchment area – the area where most of the university’s students come from – who want to take indigenous studies, will have to enrol in other universities.

However, as Roxanne Manitowabi, a member of Laurentian University Native Education Council or LUNEC explains, studying indigenous culture in another part of Ontario means studying cultures other than the local Anishnawbek people and their Ojibwe language.

“Our ceremonies, such as naming ceremonies, would be different from the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) or Cree ceremonies. Hunting and gathering ceremonies would also be different; here we don’t hunt geese but Crees [who live on the St Lawrence River] would hunt geese,” she says.

Nor are the clan systems the same between indigenous peoples whose traditional lands are close to each other. Manitowabi’s Turtle clan is patriarchal while the Haudenosaunee is matriarchal. “As well, our creation stories are different,” she told University World News.

Dianne Balraj, a third-year student in the indigenous social worker programme and member of LUNEC, is understandably concerned about how her final year will play out. In an interview with University World News, she raised two other important points.

First, echoing Manitowabi, Balraj asks: “How might indigenous students’ success be impacted by moving further away from their communities and families, cultures and traditions” to study? Far too many indigenous students who leave the north to study never return; their skills and education are lost to the community for good.”

“We’re not building capacity in our communities. We’re training students and they’re not coming back to work in the communities where they are needed,” Manitowabi says.

The second point raised by Balraj, who holds an MA in international relations from Queen’s University and returned after working for five years in environmental policy to take Laurentian’s indigenous studies programme, concerns the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) that reported in 2015.

Among the 94 ‘calls to action’ in the TRC report are calls for the “federal government to provide adequate funding to end the backlog of First Nations students seeking post-secondary education” and for “post-secondary institutions to create university and college degree and diploma programmes in Aboriginal languages”.

The closure of the indigenous studies programme, Balraj argues, not only runs against the spirit of the TRC, it also sets back the cause of reconciliation. The closure also undercuts Laurentian’s claim to be tri-cultural. “Without indigenous studies,” she believes, “there is no tri-cultural mandate.”

The politics

Exactly why the Conservative government of Premier Doug Ford – a college dropout who is not known for his support of universities – allowed Laurentian to seek protection under the CCAA is unclear. Although chartered by the provincial parliament and, as such, an independent body, Laurentian is owned by the government of Ontario.

“The buck stops with the Ford government,” says West. “They can stop the cuts by providing the university with the funds it needs.”

Duncanson-Hales and other professors who have been let go from Laurentian see a darker picture than merely underfunding and mismanagement. They believe Laurentian’s financial crisis provided the government with a test case. By refusing to come to the university’s aid and allowing it to seek creditor protection, the government saw a means to rip up collective agreements (which was done) so that the university could be restructured.

“This is not conspiratorial, it’s just the facts,” he says.

The new structure, Duncanson-Hales fears, will be a university designed around micro-credentials. The 2020-24 academic plan defined micro-credentials as being “aligned with the competencies of the workforce, including critical thinking, professionalism, intercultural sensitivity, and digital dexterity”. One model would have students get a diploma with little spots on which you can put a sticker.

“This would take away any coherency from university education,” says Duncanson-Hales, because you are getting these little badges. The structure of the university with departments and approved degrees and electives doesn’t fit this model. “Now that they’ve torn the university apart, it makes it easier to implement these micro-credentials.”

Coincidentally, at a 23 April press conference, Ontario Minister of Colleges and Universities Ross Romano spoke at length about the government’s micro-credential initiative. “Universities and colleges connect the dots of Ontario’s resilient economy by training sought-after graduates, future-proofing workers and offering relevant training opportunities that impact on local and regional economies,” he said.

The minister’s plan is what Duncanson-Hales fears and what Constantineau sees as the lesson of what can be called L’Affair laurentien: “The minute you start looking at a university as a business, you have embarked on a slippery slope. We know that universities have a much broader role than simply contributing to the economy of a region. As soon as you start counting widgets and lose sight of the broader role, you’re in trouble.”

University World News requested interviews with leaders from both Laurentian University and Université de Sudbury. Both requests were denied.

This article was updated on 8 June 2021