Month: April 2025

President Saini,

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. 

Some other interesting sources: 

Dear McGill Community,

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.

Signed by:

MUNACA Executive Committee

AMUSE Executive Committee

AGSEM Executive Committee

AMURE Executive Committee

SEU Executive Committee

References & Sources

https://www.datawrapper.de/_/rJ9Hy

Salary mass by job class and year 2013-2023.xlsx

McGill Annual Reports to National Assembly