After years of encouraging ‘growth at all costs,’ the G&M recently reported that Ontario now wants some post-secondary institutions to change their focus — to teaching (!)

Ontario is overhauling the way it finances universities and colleges, replacing some per-student funding with performance-based support intended to discourage the emphasis on growth that many acknowledge has been detrimental to educational quality. Although still pushing expansion, the province is also pressing some schools to focus more on teaching than on aspiring to grow into elite comprehensive institutions.

The province will negotiate each school’s strategy individually, measuring success by examining factors such as student satisfaction, employment rates, and student mobility.

The goal is to have universities and colleges specialize more in their own strengths and core programs, spending more on excellence in teaching and the student experience on campus, while also providing as much choice and flexibility as possible in the style of learning available.

A representative of the province’s students said that funding should be targeted to specific areas. “If you want teachers to have better pedagogy, then fund training of pedagogy,” said Sam Andrey, executive director of the Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance. “Don’t increase budgets and hope for the best.”

Many schools, especially those in urban areas, will continue to expand. But for the first time in years, the government is also suggesting that some schools can decide not to grow, or even to shrink, without automatically seeing their funding stagnate.

Food for thought here at home, as Douglas strives to become the the largest and most progressive baccalaureate degree-granting college in British Columbia.

The complete text of this article is available online.

In July, 2011, the BC Federation of Labour released the first in a series of reports examining corporations in B.C. The “Failed Policies” series will examine corporate profits, corporate taxes paid, corporate investment and job creation.

The first report shows that while corporate profits have increased significantly over the last decade, taxes collected from these corporations have steadily declined. At no time in the last 30 years have corporations contributed less in tax revenue – as a proportion of their earnings – to British Columbia, even as corporate profits are at historic high levels in our province.

In 2011, B.C. corporate profits are expected to hit a new record high of $23.7 billion and are predicted to climb to $31.3 billion by 2015. During the last decade, B.C.’s corporate income tax rate was cut from 16.5% to today’s rate of 10%. These corporate tax cuts led to a loss of provincial revenues of at least $7.7 billion over the last 10 years and will lead to the loss of an additional $8.8 billion in revenues between now and 2015.

You can read the complete report at http://www.bcfed.ca/files/0500-11rep-es-failed_policies.pdf

From time to time I’m going to post information about the pressures other unions are facing to accept significant reductions in benefits, pensions, and other hard-won rights and protections.

If we are going to successfully defend our own collective agreement, we need to know what other public and private-sector unions are up against.

For example, Verizon Communications is seeking major concessions from 45,000 unionized workers in the Northeast and mid-Atlantic states, citing a long-term drop in revenue and profits in its old-fashioned telephone business and intense competition in television and Internet services.

In the most aggressive set of contract demands the union says it has ever seen, the employer wants:
- employees to contribute to their health care premiums, ($1,300 – $3,000 for family coverage, depending on the plan)
- the ability to lay-off workers without severance
- to tie raises more closely to job performance and to deny annual raises to subpar performers
- to freeze pensions for current employees
- to eliminate traditional pensions for future workers
- to limit sick days to 5 a year

Source: NYT Online, July 29, 2011