F urther than in any Canadian province, governments in Ontario have driven the public university system down the neoliberal road of privatization and corporatization since the late 1970s. The central economic device in this transformation has been provincial reductions in per-student grants to universities, coupled with increases in tuition fees for students.
By the time the Doug Ford conservatives came to power in 2018, Ontario spent less per university student than any province and had among Canada’s highest tuition fees. Ontario governments had reduced public grants for university operating revenues from about 80 percent in 1980 to around 50 percent in 2004 and to only 38 percent in 2017. Over this period, domestic and international tuition fees and miscellaneous fees paid by students jumped from 15 percent of operating funds in 1980 to 56 percent in 2017, to become the largest source of operating funds. By the 2010s, some government policy analysts and senior university administrators were using the terminology of “publicly assisted” or “publicly supported” universities rather than “public” universities.
The Ontario public system was also highly unequal in terms of university size and regional disparity, and it became more so as total enrolment grew. Between 2000 and 2018, the average size of Ontario public universities grew from 13,462 students (for eighteen universities) to 23,515 students (for twenty). In these, the University of Toronto nearly doubled in size to 83,554 students. By contrast, the average size of universities in Northern Ontario changed from 3,681 to 4,747 students, of which two were under 1,000 students. Well before 2018, the total number of full-time students in all the northern universities had peaked and started to decline absolutely.
The Ford government has furthered public university decline, undermined their claimed priority of “financial stabilization” of the post-secondary system in the wake of the Laurentian University debacle, spread indebtedness among universities and students, and heightened the exploitation of international students. This does not deny the roles of preceding Conservative, Liberal, and New Democratic Party governments since the late 1970s—all supported neoliberal policies and bear major responsibilities for the decline of public university education in Ontario. So do federal Liberal and Conservative governments.
The Ford government has deepened and created new crisis conditions in the public system. Their populist rhetoric is a phony cover for more openly anti-democratic efforts to subordinate university education and fuse it with corporate direction, values, and objectives. A democratic response requires breaking from the neoliberal policy direction as a whole, particularly privatization and corporatization, by asserting the principles of universal, free, and democratic public education in the post-secondary system in all regions of Ontario.
W hile the processes of privatization and corporatization were not complete when the Ford conservatives came to power, the public universities had already formed a tuition-dependent, corporative-competitive system.
In that system, incremental reductions in provincial per-student funding were typical, along with an expectation from universities of some respite through increases in tuition fees, incidental fees, international recruiting, external research funding, and ancillary revenues. Institutional indebtedness, along with inter-university and external competition, had not reached such destructive levels as to threaten the system’s scope and stability. Concerns about student accessibility were ignored or downplayed by claiming students could get student assistance.
For the Ford conservatives, however, this gradualist decline did not go far enough. In 2019, the government reduced domestic tuition fees by 10 percent, proclaiming with populist bravado: “Government for the People to Lower Student Tuition Burden by 10 percent.” Yet this same government also cut student assistance, including the elimination of a program of free tuition for low-income students. The then minister of training, colleges, and universities, Merrilee Fullerton, a physician, commented, “The Ontario Student Assistance Program grants had become unsustainable, and it was time to refocus the program to provide help to students in the most financial need.” Of course, the province would determine who were the lower number of “deserving poor” among students—as Ontario lurched further backward from universality and education as a right.
Crucially, the Ford government did not compensate universities for revenues lost due to the tuition reduction. Then, for the following years, the conservatives doubled down on defunding by maintaining both domestic tuition freezes and reduced real per-student funding to public universities—while university costs continued to rise at rates higher than average inflation. Such financial pressures against the public system were destined to reduce program quality, cut faculty and staff jobs, worsen working conditions, and increase university indebtedness and vulnerability to external “shocks,” such as in international student enrolment numbers on which the system was increasingly dependent.
Further, the Ford government encouraged more intensified competitive pressures against public universities, particularly through increasing degree-granting powers to colleges and through facilitating the spread of private post-secondary programs. Public universities had already established joint programs with colleges in which students were charged higher university-level tuition fees while receiving lower-cost, college-level services. This field for university profit making at the expense of students was now being partially turned over directly to colleges. As well, politically, college control would mean fewer concerns about collegial governance, academic freedom, and faculty research—key characteristics of the public university system largely not present in the college system.
As for private competition, signs soon appeared of how private for-profit universities might profit from the high tuition fee levels and exploitation of international students in Ontario’s public system. The University of Niagara Falls, owned by Global University Systems Canada, a Netherlands-based corporation, planned its first class for 2024: “UNF will have a strong but not exclusive focus on the international student market, offering five undergraduate and master’s programs in business management, data analytics, digital media and biomedical sciences.” The corporation said it planned to set tuition “broadly in line with similar programs in Ontario.”
By privatization in this context, I mean a process by which the costs of education services are shifted to students (and their families)—that is, students pay individually for their university programs, primarily through tuition fees. A key indicator of the privatization of public universities is the portion of the cost of provision of education services that is from private sources. The set of education services becomes defined increasingly as a commodity with a partial or full price (tuition) and subject to competitive pressures among universities based on maximizing net revenue (or profit). Generally, for each production unit, privatization requires either break-even or high net revenues—which reduces and eliminates the role for government funding. Full privatization implies not only higher tuition and/or reduced costs or quality but also the closure of programs and institutions unable to raise tuition revenue and/or reduce costs or quality.
While the emphasis here is on education services as primary, these are not the only services in universities subject to privatization. Long before Ford, Ontario universities have pursued other avenues of privatization, particularly in ancillary services (internet technology, catering services, food courts, residences, conference venues, parking, merchandise, etc.). These turned many campuses into glorified platforms for landlordism, for contracting out, and for monopolistic forms of profit extraction. The current direction in privatization is to cut even more deeply into core education functions.
The privatization of university programs and other operations does not necessitate that the capital costs and means of provision (the university’s land and facilities) are predominantly privately owned or held by private for-profit corporations. Control and effective ownership of the land and facilities still remain ultimately with the state through legislative charters of incorporation, powers to amend, appointments, financial coercion, and information access.
Privatization hits unequal institutions differently. During the three decades following the late 1970s, as university fees were raised across the board, they were also “differentiated”—raised even higher—for international students and for professional and graduate programs. More prestigious universities and programs with greater student demand and market power saw even higher increases in some differentiated fees.
As a result, elite universities, particularly the University of Toronto, came to have a much higher tuition (private) share and lower government share in their operating revenues than, say, small northern universities. For example, according to the 2016/17 operating revenues, the University of Toronto received 64.7 percent from tuition and miscellaneous fees and 29.6 percent from provincial grants and contracts; by contrast, Lakehead University received 49.7 percent and 46.1 percent respectively, and Nipissing University received 41.3 percent and 55.2 percent. In this way, the University of Toronto was much further along the road to full privatization compared to two much smaller northern universities; in this way, too, the latter are relatively more vulnerable to public funding cuts.
Hence, destabilizing financial attacks like those of the Ford conservatives are more likely to further privatization in better-endowed institutions and increase impoverishment among the rest, including program closures. In the Ontario context, with its uneven regional educational and employment conditions, some fees in certain universities were already so high that they were beginning to choke off enrolment in some programs, such as in arts and basic sciences, or to lead students to study at other institutions or jurisdictions.
This is already an aspect of the decline in relative demand for arts programs. The effects appear earlier in universities and programs lowest in the hierarchy of demand, such as universities in Northern Ontario. The general effect of this is that arts programs (especially fine arts and humanities), and some basic sciences, become increasingly streamed as studies for privileged elites or as academic luxuries.
One might ask here if Ford’s one-time tuition reduction and freeze of tuition fees is some sort of populist halt to the privatization process? Given Ontario students now pay on average well over half of operational costs, the Ford reduction and freeze of fees is insufficient, quantitatively, to change the system’s tuition-dependent, corporative-competitive conditions. Short of mass closures, the Ford government’s sharpened financial degradation of public universities is more likely to accelerate the privatization process for better-endowed universities while elsewhere precipitating class streaming, quality cuts, program closings, and increased regional disparity.
Despite their declining—yet highly privatized and corporatized condition—Ontario’s public universities remain fundamentally public in terms of assets and control in an overall public system. Indeed, the terms “publicly assisted” and “publicly supported” are misleading in that they suggest the universities are private but receiving assistance, while actually they are still public but being denied adequate public funding support.
T he next phase of the Ford government university policy was dominated by the Laurentian University–Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act debacle, which revealed not only the government’s gross negligence in financial oversight but also a range of their anti-democratic education politics.
The Laurentian–CCAA process obtained for its supporters an unprecedented, radical downsizing and extraordinary corporate centralization of a public university—now sometimes called “the Laurentian model.” While the Ford government did not initiate the corporate hijack, they supported it, covered for it, and used it to give the impression of a concern for “stabilization” while driving forward with their continued degradation of the public system.
I characterize the Laurentian–CCAA event as a debacle in that the strategy of the Laurentian University senior administration and Board of Governors was widely exposed and discredited and most of its characters driven from the scene. Then, after the program closures and mass terminations were executed, the Ford conservatives moved in to reduce and replace Laurentian’s Board of Governors in their own narrowly corporatist image so as to ensure their ideology of downsized provision, top-down management, and “market-aligned” education would be carried through and maintained long term.
Compared to other public universities in Ontario, Laurentian (chartered in 1960) is a relatively small, significantly first-generation, and working-class university, located in Sudbury, a hard-rock mining community. Its mandate prominently claims bilingualism (English- and French-language programs, services, and administration) and triculturalism (English, French, and Indigenous). Laurentian is often viewed as a “regional” university in Ontario.
The crisis broke out into public view on February 1, 2021—in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic—when the Laurentian Board of Governors sought and obtained bankruptcy protection under the CCAA. For the first time in Canadian history, this corporate bankruptcy legislation was applied to a public post-secondary institution. New profitable territory was opened up for corporate lawyers, consultants, and corporations desiring to profit from the privatization of public institutions.
By supporting the CCAA process, the Ford government enabled the Laurentian board to:
• eliminate seventy-six academic programs directly affecting over 932 students, mainly but not only in arts and basic sciences
• destroy Huntington University, Thorneloe University, and the Université de Sudbury, three small federated universities that provided mostly arts programs and had been founding partners with Laurentian
• cut the second oldest Indigenous studies program in Canada without any consultation with Indigenous communities
• cut a disproportionate number of programs vital to the Franco-Ontarian community, including the well-enrolled sage-femme / midwifery program
• wipe out individual and institutional donations to Laurentian for teaching and research
• end or disrupt research activities, including research with community and third-party obligations
• close important cultural and sports activities with destructive community effects
• and inflict massive reputational damage on the institution, including internationally.
It needs to be emphasized that the entire CCAA process was unnecessary, enormously costly, and could have been ended by the Ford government, which has instead supported it through to the present day. The Laurentian administration started planning secretly nearly a year in advance and took advantage of the weak bargaining approach of Laurentian’s faculty association to delay negotiations and manoeuvre the university into an even more desperate situation. Months in advance of the CCAA onslaught, the provincial government was aware that Laurentian was considering a CCAA strategy, and weeks before, the ministry had formal communications with Laurentian about financial assistance.
Even after February 1, 2021, the CCAA process could have been brought to an end by provincial financial intervention or by facilitating a takeover or trusteeship by another university. Although it was often said that the province could not intervene, the province could and did intervene, at least three times publicly, such as with taking over Laurentian’s $35 million debtor-in-possession (bridging) loan. The province also intervened to protect the Northern Ontario School of Medicine and the Université de Hearst from being dragged down by their connections with Laurentian—while it did nothing for Laurentian’s three federated universities.
Any responsible government should have been alarmed by expenditures for CCAA legal and financial consultants as well as by their possible self-serving role, on which the auditor general commented gently: “In our view, Laurentian’s actions in this regard were significantly influenced by these external parties.” The auditor general observed that by September 12, 2022, Laurentian had incurred over $30 million in “legal and other financial consultant fees associated with its insolvency.” It is remarkable that then minister Ross Romano, himself a lawyer, or his advisers would not have questioned such a waste of student tuitions and public funds.
The CCAA’s final scenes would be played without Romano. On June 18, 2021, he was dumped and replaced by Jill Dunlop, a former faculty member of Georgian College. Dunlop would continue government support of the CCAA and its anti-community consequences, all while extolling her “love and appreciation of rural Ontario and community engagement.”
The Laurentian–CCAA debacle was treated by the Ford government as a local failure, but it was foremost a provincial failure, in financial oversight, in funding and governance policies, and in regional representation for Northern Ontario. Such failure was used to increase more centralized, corporate, financial oversight—not greater community oversight or democratic engagement.
The CCAA process itself lent support to the dominant framing of the crisis as primarily one of local conditions by restricting most issues to those that were immediate and interior to Laurentian. The auditor general’s report had a larger scope, but it still placed the primary responsibility on Laurentian, particularly putting a major responsibility on the previous president, Dominic Giroux, and his overspending on capital projects and top-heavy administration.
However, the auditor general also showed that the ministry had been aware, for over a decade, of Laurentian’s situation—that it could be facing long-term enrolment issues. Most striking, the ministry was “not effectively overseeing the financial sustainability of the university sector.” Her report contained eleven recommendations to the ministry and two about lobbying requirements to the office of the integrity commissioner. Unfortunately, other factors affecting Laurentian (and other northern universities) were not addressed, such as the impacts of rising tuition on enrolment and the province’s inaction on satellite campus expansion outside the region.
The Ford government’s support for the CCAA enabled a new anti-labour extreme in public universities. The Laurentian board strategized using the CCAA to break the collective agreement with the faculty association, especially on financial exigency and severance, “to terminate more senior, fully tenured professors and avoid paying them full severance entitlements in cases where they were terminated before their retirement,” as well as to clear many union grievances and to be “less transparent.”
This was evident in the termination protocol which was accepted by Laurentian’s faculty association by a majority vote of members. The first board target was faculty on limited-term contracts, usually the most vulnerable to predatory administrations. Then came faculty of pensionable age. This was a direct attack on tenure and seniority using age. It was not about any bona fide occupational requirement or inadequate performance. Nor was it even about years of service—which might at least recognize the reality that some scholars, especially women, start permanent university work later in life or have career interruptions for children or other family obligations.
The protocol expressed flagrant ageism and was fed by a long-held Ford attack on older professors, claiming “the growing average retirement age among university faculty is ‘limiting turnover that would bring in earlier career professionals with new teaching methods and increase diversity,’” while ignoring provincial responsibilities for cuts to new hiring and non-replacement of faculty who do retire, leave, or die. This attack, which included stigmatizing senior professors as “double dippers,” is part of a larger reactionary effort to reverse the ending of mandatory retirement and to absolve neoliberal governments for the decline of public universities.
After older faculty, the terminations turned to faculty in alleged low-enrolment programs. “Low enrolment” was determined by a senate committee meeting in secret, led by the administration’s data and threats, without possibility of appeal. No questions were allowed as to why enrolments were low. In rapid turn, there followed a brief debate and vote by senate, a spectacle in which senate faculty members and students under administrative eye and pressure voted in the majority to dispatch their colleagues. The faculty association took the position of abstaining.
The Ford government’s responsibility in the devastation of Laurentian included negligence in protecting national rights and consultation, and in representing regional concerns in education.
The closure of English-language programs showed the utter hypocrisy of Ford’s populist job rhetoric. While praising the importance of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) education for jobs, the Ford government raised no concerns regarding Laurentian’s closure of both its math and physics departments, the latter associated with the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory and the 2015 Nobel Prize for physics.
In my view, it is unlikely that the Ford government would have supported a Laurentian-style scorched-campus policy in a Toronto-area university. Provincial policy with its metropolitanist outlook treats Northern Ontario primarily as a place for resource extraction and transportation corridors. For Ford conservatives, the priority for Northern Ontario is resource mega projects, like the Ring of Fire, not major educational, scientific, and cultural needs, including public university education and research.
A dvocates for public university education face in the Ford government both deepened crisis conditions and a hardened neoliberal drive that seeks to reduce public funding while furthering privatization and corporatization. This is consistent with capitalist accumulation—not “stabilization”—including class streaming and forcing the costs of education onto working people. The effects of Ford’s hardened neoliberal policies against the public university system are being felt in spreading indebtedness, vulnerability to instability, and closure threats—especially to smaller and regional universities and to the arts and basic sciences.
It is also leading to more authoritarian, anti-collegial, and anti-labour administrative measures within the universities. As 2024 began, the Council of Ontario Universities had already “urgently” announced: “Almost half of Ontario’s universities are now running deficits, with schools warning that student services will face cuts if the government does not provide a bump in funding and also allow tuition to rise by at least 5 percent this fall.” Then came a change to federal immigration policy to reduce the number of international-student study permits. That triggered further cries about the conditions of Ontario’s post-secondary institutions. Neither of the COU measures would alter the overall direction of public decline, nor by itself will the federal prohibition of the CCAA against public post-secondary institutions.
The degradation of Ontario’s public university system makes even more crucial the struggle for democratic public education, including universal free access, respect of Indigenous and Franco-Ontarian national rights in education, collegial governance, reduced regional disparity, and, not least, community accountability and accessible, accurate statistics. Policy responses need to include:
• increased federal responsibility for funding free, universal post-secondary education across Canada, including fulfilling treaty responsibilities for full educational funding of Indigenous students; strengthened support for minority-language programs; regional research capacity; increased arts and cultural program support; and assuring a non-exploitative approach to international education and student exchange
• to counter uneven development among public universities, the province should regionally balance the allocation of system enrolment to stabilize northern and regional enrolments and capacity utilization; clarify regional mandates and end extra-regional satellite campuses; and consolidate the northern English-language universities as a strengthened, regional, multi-site university with a full range of programs
• increased democratic community accountability and engagement; elections in regional university board representation; and reform for independent, accurate, and accessible public statistics of post-secondary institutions.
As things stand, a real danger exists that the actual crisis conditions in the Ontario public system will be used to advance the Laurentian model by other means.
Adapted and excerpted, with permission, from Against the People: How Ford Nation Is Dismantling Ontario, edited by Bryan Evans and Carlo Fanelli, published by Fernwood Publishing.
