Loyalist College CEO & President, Mark Kirkpatrick.
BELLEVILLE – The head of the Ontario Public Service Employees Union local at Loyalist College says she understands that full time non-probationary faculty will not be laid off at this time.
Tracy Mackenzie, the president of OPSEU Local 420 said that to QNet News earlier this month.
Loyalist College is one of many colleges in Ontario feeling the significant education cuts in the province. Loyalist has had to suspend 30% of their programs and cut 20% of their staff since January to make up for a significant shortfall in revenue after a dramatic drop in the number of international students enrolling at the college.
But a number of full-time faculty decided to take a voluntary incentive package to leave the college. That could mean that there won’t be layoffs of full time faculty who have been employed for more than two years, at least in the short term.
As head of the union local, Mackenzie represents approximately 300 staff. When asked what the overall mood has been like for the people she represents, she said there’s a lot of negative feelings.
“I think from my members specifically, they’re experiencing a lot of stress, fear and anger, to be honest. But, it’s not just my own members, it’s our colleagues in the support staff unit and in management and admin as well,” she began.
“We’ve already seen terminations of managers and admin, and layoff notices for support staff, so faculty are seeing all of that and it’s only increasing their fear and uncertainty. The processes surrounding layoffs are quite complex and are not that straightforward.”
Mackenzie said she would have liked to have seen the college address declining international enrolment differently.
“I think that there was opportunity long ago to look at programs that were not as financially healthy as others and implement processes that could improve the financial health of those programs,” she said.
“At the time, it didn’t seem to be a priority because we had all the money from international tuition and from our private public partnerships, but had those programs been looked at more closely several years ago, I do think that there are strategies that faculty could have assisted with in reducing some of those costs to make those programs healthier,”
“What I’m more worried about right now is future program suspensions. There are other programs that are not generating a lot of income or that are very costly to run, so there could potentially be additional program suspensions in the future if we don’t look at those programs now.”
Mackenzie also spoke about how these cuts will hit the community.
“The whole point of college is to provide access to a whole range of programs in order to drive the economies. With the cuts of the programs we’ve already seen, including the skilled trades, aesthetics, culinary, etc., we’re reducing a number of programs that students in our region have access to, therefore reducing the number of graduates,” she said.
“Students are either going to have to choose other programs to remain here in the region or go elsewhere for post-secondary, many of whom may never return. The impact on the workforce in the region is going to be significant with the loss of these programs and with the loss of these potential graduates.”
When asked if there was anything the Bay of Quinte population can do to support Loyalist College’s current situation, Mackenzie had ideas.
“Our local industries, the workforces, I think everybody can be reaching out to their local constituents, the provincial government, and they can be demanding that the province focus on post-secondary education opportunities because this is going to be a real loss to the region,” she said.
“OPSEU has created our ‘Save Colleges’ campaign which is what we are focused on, we’re providing it to all of our community members and asking them to support us, it essentially is drawing attention to the issues and asking for more post-secondary provincial funding,”
“So, I think anybody in the region that is worried about the changes that are happening here, their voices should be heard. The more voices that are heard, the more likely we are going to drive change.”
QNet News had the opportunity to speak with Loyalist College CEO & President, Mark Kirkpatrick, about how this has impacted the college and how they plan to operate going forward.
“This probably won’t be fixed in a year. This will take several years to get us to where we need to be. It’s a problem that is being felt across all 24 colleges in the province. It’s a total realignment of our expenses and what our new structure is going to be.”
When asked if Loyalist College has a plan going forward to make up for the significant tuition shortfall, Kirkpatrick said they do.
“We’ve tried to manage our budgets through the year, so we do have a budget that we can use to bridge us over the timeframe needed to get things right,” he said.
“Restructuring takes time, so what we are trying to do right now is manage our cash and our revenue. Our accumulated surplus is $68 million today, so we will be eating into that accumulated surplus over the next few years as we try to get our way through this.”
“We’ve already had substantive layoffs in the administrative level, we started laying people off during the first of the year,”
“We are down two positions at the executive table and they will not be filled.”
Kirkpatrick relayed the importance of post-secondary institutions such as Loyalist College for the working community.
“There’s a really big impact on the institution here, but there’s also a really big impact on the community, we shouldn’t lose sight of that,”
“A place like Loyalist in a smaller community that we are, the impact on our region is going to be felt far and wide. We’re going to do everything we can and advocate at as many levels as we can to make sure that this place (Loyalist College) is here for years to come.”
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