Table of Contents
- uOttawa reports a surplus of $29.8 million for the 2023-2024 fiscal year
- Historic union victory at McGill University
1) uOttawa reports a surplus of $29.8 million for the 2023-2024 fiscal year
The University of Ottawa released its financial results for the 2023-2024 fiscal year1, announcing a surplus of $29.8 million, during its September 30 Board of Governors meeting.
A major obstacle during this current round of bargaining is the Employer’s repeated assertion that the university’s precarious financial situation makes it impossible to respond favourably to APUO Members’ proposals. In response, your negotiating team has reminded the Employer’s team that every budget is a question of priorities, and that Central Administration’s problem is its inability to make the University of Ottawa’s teaching and research mission its true budgetary priority.
For several years now, the Central Administration has been pushing a crisis narrative while making budget cuts to the university’s academic mission. However, it always finds money for administrative expenses that should be lower on the priority list, whether it’s the more than $45 million spent on Workday, the tens of millions of dollars a year spent on external consultants, or, most recently, the funds spent to launch the new employee card. Provincial underfunding of post-secondary education is certainly a problem that faculty, staff, and administrations in Ontario agree on. However, uOttawa’s Central Administration exacerbates this problem by refusing to give priority to our institution’s teaching and research mission.
2) Historic union victory at McGill University
From April 24 to October 1, 2024, the Association of McGill Professors of Law (AMPL) has led an intermittent strike. The AMPL became McGill’s first certified professors’ association in November 2022, but the University initially refused to recognize their certification and negotiate a collective agreement.
After five months of dispute, an agreement was finally reached on October 8. The agreement specifies that the McGill University administration will no longer challenge the AMPL’s certification or the unionization efforts of professors in the Faculty of Education and the Faculty of Arts. For their part, the professors have accepted the creation of a federated structure to negotiate their working conditions.
We congratulate AMPL members and the professors in the faculties of Education and Arts on this historic victory. As the AMPL stated on social media: “We aimed to unionize 45 law professors at #McGill. We ended up facilitating the unionization of over 500.”
1. As of November, 28 2024, the financial results are only available in French on the University of Ottawa’s Financial Statements and Reporting page, with a note stating that “The English version of the Review of the financial results will be available by October 12, 2024.”