At the May 16 Town Hall, McGill’s administration delivered a confusing and contradictory message: they acknowledged that layoffs and budget cuts are not sustainable, yet insisted they are inevitable. This narrative is being pushed without transparency or genuine accountability — and it’s frontline staff and students who will pay the price. At the same time, McGill is pushing to raise another $1 billion to reach its $3 billion fundraising goal — a move that stands in stark contrast to the austerity measures being proposed.
What the Administration Isn’t Telling You The total salary mass for Senior Administration and management is $71 million higher than it would be if it had increased at the same rate as salaries for all other job classes. No mention of salary freezes or reductions for senior administrative staff. No commitment to full financial transparency, no clear answers on where and how money is being spent.
Let’s call on McGill to ✅ Implement a moratorium on layoffs and job abolitions ✅ End the hiring freeze that harms departments and services ✅ Cancel the costly NousGroup consulting contract ✅ Freeze and reduce executive compensation ✅ Reverse the opening of Horizon McGill, a high-cost project pushed forward amidst cutbacks
This Is a Choice — Not a Necessity Without access to full financial records, how can students, staff, and faculty know whether cuts are truly necessary? Right now, you are being asked to accept austerity measures without evidence. McGill is using fear and urgency to justify harmful policies without democratic input or transparency.
Let Us Stand for Fairness, Not Fear. The McGill community deserves a voice in decisions that affect livelihoods, academic quality, and student services.
SIGN OUR PETITION to demand a fair, transparent, and people-first approach!
First, I must thank you for the week I had following Easter. It was the worst week I have had since becoming a union activist in 1976. I spent most of that week listening to bullshit excuses by HR and supervisors reading from a script. ‘As you know, McGill is facing some financial difficulties so we are going to have to let you go’. All the while you and far too many upper management sit in your offices and pursue the bottom lines of financial ledgers. You collect exorbitant salaries and keep your cushy jobs.
HAVE YOU NO SHAME!!?? Cut upper management positions and salaries.
The decisions you make on behalf of McGill lacks insight on the impact it has on your employees, MUNACA membership, and their families. I would like to put a human face on those whose lives you have turned upside down and forced into a financial crisis. I, of course, will not identify these victims of your cold hearted decisions as you must understand for fear that you may consider retribution.
One member whose job was abolished was hit so hard by the news that he said it was worse than when he was diagnosed with cancer a few years back.
Another victim of your callous decisions was a young woman who had a job but left it to come to McGill believing the myths perpetrated by you and your cronies that McGill was and #1 institution; employees know it is bought and paid for nonsense. In just a couple of months, she would have obtained employment security but to meet your 5% cuts, she is now out of a job. She was recently engaged and has been planning her wedding which, thanks to you, has now been put on hold. Stop lying. Tell the world that McGill is no longer an institute of higher learning and academic research, it is a corporate trade school with an eye on the bottom line with the intent on making it a profitable enterprise.
Next time you take a gander at the bottom line, please consider the profoundly negative impact this has on the lives of employees you are messing with!! They are not just a bottom line.
MUNACA is putting you and your cadre of executives on notice that we are going to hold you accountable, and will ensure your employment will also be affected by these tone deaf decisions.
They are the front line! And they keep McGill functioning!
Dear Members, You and your coworkers have made it clear: enough is enough. Now, it’s time to take the fight straight to McGill’s administration. We have just launched a new public petition calling on McGill to
Implement a Moratorium on Layoffs & Job Abolitions
End the Hiring Freeze
Cancel the NousGroup Consulting Contract
Freeze and Cut Executive Compensation
Reverse the opening of Horizon McGill
Sign your name and share this petition with all your MUNACA co-workers and your broader community to tell Deep Saini and his NousGroup hatchetmen that you will stand and fight for your jobs, your university community, and the future of public higher education in Canada.
Survey Results
The results of the Anonymous Executive Survey you filled out have just come in, and they are eye-opening. Here are some quick stats:
236 of you responded to the survey so far.
97.5% of you agreed that the senior executives of McGill bear responsibility for the financial situation and should take a corresponding cut to their own compensation.
80% of you oppose the opening of the new “Horizon McGill” office and the dramatic expense it entails.
81% of you are against the university hiring NousGroup, at a fee of over $370,000 dollars and counting, in light of the senior admin’s “budget deficit.”
85% of you are ready and willing to fight back against the Senior Administration’s imposed austerity!
Here’s what you and your coworkers are saying loud and clear:
“More and more, it seems that this university is being transformed into a corporate entity. A president is not needed at a university. It is a position for countries and private corporations. The constant need for doing more, more quickly is also part of the corporate mindset. A university is there to educate and research, and should not be turned into a diploma factory.”
“The budget cuts and the cry for poverty from a literal multimillion dollar corporation is full of s***…. : they don’t care about the people on the bottom. These [Executives] are making upwards of $500,000 a year in salary (plus bonuses) and all I want is to be able to afford a place with a second bedroom….If anyone is ready to fight the University over this, it’s me.”
“Spending money on the creation of a new program, hiring a new director, and contracting an outside firm to solve the “budget problem” is a real slap in the face. How many members’ salaries can fit into the salaries of McGill executives?”
I write to you today to vociferously decry your callous actions towards McGill and all its constituents. Under the guise of a budgetary shortfall, you are continuing your policy of scorched earth and laying waste to every institution you have headed over the years. You are following in the footsteps of Heather Monroe-Blum, turning the Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning into a ‘Corporate Trade School’.
You are laying off and terminating hard working employees who have families and are already struggling to make ends meet, some of whom are on long term disability. All the while the upper management, with their bloated salaries, continue to feed at the trough of excess. This tone deaf reaction to the so-called deficit can only result in ruination of a once proud place of higher learning, the final nail in the coffin as it were.
For the sake of the argument, let us assume the deficit is real. I would then ask that you and the upper management of McGill show some actual leadership. This can be done in several ways;
Reduce the number of positions in upper management,
Reduce their salaries to the equivalent in other Quebec Universities,
Place a hiring freeze on upper management positions for the duration of the ‘budgetary crisis’,
Stop and cancel the hiring of those whose purposes is to find employees to be terminated,
Cancel the Nous Group contract and any other one in the same vein. See below for examples of the devastation caused by NousGroup and like companies that have no understanding of Universities and their commitment to higher education and research.
Also, I am asking you to cancel all terminations, layoffs, relocations and provide all the stakeholders with the budget and expenses, the real one with all the information in order to see the true picture. I would then ask you to sit with all the interested parties in good faith, with transparency and with a sincere desire to deal fairly and effectively with the present state of affairs at McGill. If you refuse, I would then ask for your resignation.
MUNACA and the other unions on campus will not take these cuts lying down. We’re organizing.
Regards tc
Thomas Chalmers
President MUNACA/PSAC 17602
President Saini you were President & Vice-Chancellor / Professor of Plant, Food & Environmental Sciences Dalhousie University, Jan 2020 to Dec 2022. In 2022 Dalhousie hired UniForum . We also know that Nous Group was used by University of Canberra, where you were Vice-Chancellor & President University of Canberra Sep 2016 – Dec 2019.The general impact of UniForum and Nous Group on universities is that they offer a very expensive benchmarking tool and consultancy, that will push through a pre-existing agenda to make Universities run like businesses during, recommending centralization, automation, and even governance changes, all in times of “austerity”. They manipulate statistics and methodology for this end.( Nous Group and UniForum )
MUNACA spoke to someone at SFU and learned that they cut so deep that their popular co-op program nearly lost accreditation, and they could not keep up with admissions to the University. Here’s a bit of what happened at Queen’s https://qcaa.ca/shockdoctrine/
At Laurentian University the result of austerity with UniForum/Nous Group recommendation was probably the most devastating: “The group recommends reducing the size of the university’s senate, developing a new strategic plan and consolidating all student services.” In all 69 undergraduate and graduate programs and 195 faculty positions were cut. Nous Group worked to change Laurenntian’s own governance structure. The reports produced by Nous Group have been removed from Laurentian’s website.
We, the undersigned McGill union representatives, condemn in the strongest possible terms McGill Senior Administration’s recent announcement of layoffs and broader policy of austerity in the face of supposed budget shortfalls.
McGill seeks to push the consequences of budget shortfalls onto its already overworked staff while seeking to insulate their extremely well-paid Senior Administration. McGill Senior Administration has claimed that they have a budget shortfall of $45 million projected for 2025-26 and that staffing accounts for 80% of overall university expenses. What they fail to mention is that over 17% of McGill’s salary budget was spent on executive and management staff as of the 2023-24 financial year. In 2013-14, this figure was 9%. If McGill’s executive and managerial salary mass had risen at the same rate as all other job classes at the university, the university would be saving $71 million dollars.
Initially, McGill Senior Administration said a loss of 350-500 jobs would be necessary. Now they are announcing 99 initial layoffs. Conveniently, 99 is exactly the threshold for the minimum 8 weeks of notice under Quebec law regulating collective dismissal. For the dismissal of 100-299 workers, a notice period of 12 weeks is required; for over 300, a notice period of 16 weeks is required. How can we trust that there will be no further layoffs?
Despite supposed concern for budgetary deficits, the McGill University Senior Administration decided to hire NousCubane, a group of consultants associated with commencing layoffs at other universities in Canada. NousCubane was paid $372,500 by McGill Senior Administration to send surveys to all full-time employees. McGill Senior Administration did this « consultation” without the unions, before announcing the cuts at the February 7th town hall. In doing so, the unions contend that McGill Administration infringed on Article 12 of the Quebec Labour Code which states that “No employer, or person acting for an employer or an association of employers, shall in any manner seek to dominate, hinder or finance the formation or the activities of any association of employees, or to participate therein.” This clear mismanagement of funds not only targets the workers at McGill, but the larger McGill community who will be directly harmed by cuts to services and departments.
Why does McGill insist that a $45 million shortfall requires cutting up to 500 staff? Are McGill’s executives and managers taking any salary cuts to do their part in keeping the university solvent? Are they reviewing their own positions and compensation packages with the same scrutiny they offer to the rest of us? Why do they judge themselves more necessary than the employees doing the on-the-ground work vital to the continued operations of our university? McGill’s global profile and prestige does not come from its executives. It comes from the achievements of workers, students, and alumni.
We call on McGill’s Senior Administration to acknowledge their role in McGill’s current budgetary crisis and take action accordingly. We call for a moratorium on job cuts until there is a freeze and cut on executive salaries.
We have looked into the UniForum questionnaire. The questions may appear innocuous and even legitimate, but the context reveals that they are not.
At the University’s Town Hall on February 7th, it was announced that the “salary mass” of administrative personnel would be reduced due to financial difficulties. In clear terms, they are threatening to lay off administrative personnel in the near future.
The employer intends to use this survey to justify laying us off, abolishing our jobs, and reorganizing our workplace, all while the compensation for those making these decisions continues to balloon. The employer has the gall to ask for the support of those whose livelihoods are in jeopardy, to help to determine which positions should be cut first!
We urge our fellow union members to use this template to respond to this so-called “survey.”
Instructions:
For all multiple-choice or rating questions regarding professional staff and services, select high satisfaction responses.
For any written response sections, use the following statement:
“I am very satisfied with the dedication and hard work of my colleagues at McGill, who consistently strive to provide essential services despite years of hiring freezes. This survey fails to distinguish between the decisions made by senior administration’s policies and processes versus the actual performance of frontline staff.
Our frontline workforce holds irreplaceable institutional knowledge and expertise, essential to the university’s daily operations. We will not allow this data to be weaponized through surveys to rationalize the destruction of our jobs and livelihoods.
We are ready and willing to have a genuine conversation about how this university can be better managed, but this survey is not the forum. It is a tool designed to justify cuts, not a meaningful dialogue. We believe that all McGill staff deserve respect, security, and the resources to do their jobs effectively.”
On February 7th, 2025, the University surprisingly announced, during their Townhall, some disturbing news that MUNACA was surprised to learn, especially considering the magnitude of what was being disclosed.
Considering the Employer’s failure to contact the Union prior to this announcement, we have requested a meeting with the Employer as soon as possible. The purpose of this meeting is to address all of the current and upcoming reorganizations, restructurings and their consequences, including abolitions and potential layoffs. Our intention is to mitigate the upcoming ‘Project Horizon’.
We will keep you updated as the situation evolves.
We stronglyrecommend that you:
Verify that your Seniority is Correct
● by going into Workday and the November 2024 Seniority list and ensuring these are reflective of your time at McGill. If it is incorrect, contact HR to have it corrected and CC reception@munaca.com.
● If you suspect you are on soft/research funds please make sure that you have your letters ofhire/appointments and verify if indeed you belong to some research group (as of what date) as these groups may or may not have job security.If you are unsure please contact us.
Let us know about any Reorganizations, Restructuring or Shuffling of personnel so we can take a look into it
Have questions or concerns about seniority, reorganizations or anything else?
Like you, I have been watching the rapid deterioration of human rights, social justice, and workers’ rights in the United States with growing concern. Our two nations have proudly shared the longest undefended border in the world for generations – a steady partnership that is now under attack by the Trump administration.
Donald Trump and his administration are undoing so many of the hard-fought victories our collective labour movement has fought and won. I share the anger and frustration many of you are feeling. His divisive rhetoric and policies are impacting the lives of millions of workers, for the worst, on either side of the border.
As we find ourselves on the brink of a trade war with our closest ally – one that will hurt millions of workers and families in Canada – I want to recognize just how important your work is every day, but especially now in the face of this crisis.
Understandably, this is a very stressful time we are living in. This is only intensified by the affordability crisis affecting millions of us across Canada. I want you to know that we’ll continue to fight for you. We won’t back down when it comes to defending your rights.
We are here for you.
We’re a team.
As we navigate these tense times, remember you have us to rely on.
We write to you today to update you on MUNACA’s new telephone number. In order to protect the integrity of union business we felt it prudent to have a telephone system of our own.
MUNACA’s new phone number is 514-371-2222. You will be able to select five locals;
Reception
Labour Relations
Research
President
Vice-President Labour Relations
We apologise in advance for any inconvenience during this transition period.
