Laurentian's use of the Companies Creditors Arrangement Act admist bankruptcy has sparked conversation about the legality of this resource from community members, the CUAT and federal government
In February 2021 the leadership of Laurentian University made the decision to file for creditor protection from the Companies Creditors Arrangement Act amidst bankruptcy. The CCAA allows large corporations facing insolvency to receive guidance, including plans to restructure their corporation. As a federal law, the Government of Canada introduced this act to help companies proceed with their work as they manage their internal finances. The university has since exited insolvency and terminated their protection under the CCAA as of Nov. 2022.
A review done in 2022 by then Ontario Auditor General Bonnie Lysyk found that since the incitement of the CCAA, 195 university staff and faculty lost their jobs.
With the protection of the CCAA, they were not required to honour agreements previously made with labour groups, such as senior staff firing and severance. Additionally, 76 academic programs were cut, impacting roughly 932 students.
CTV news coverage shared their firing had been done through zoom, where Laurentian University’s Vice President of Academics promptly exited the call after sharing the news.
To protect the release of this information reaching the public for review, Laurentian university has spent $30 million in advisors and lawyers.
A statement and commissioned report by the Canadian Association of Universities Teachers shared that they believe that the decision made by Laurentian can become a precedent for others if access to CCAA is not legally halted. The CAUT stated that it is important to prevent public universities to file for bankruptcy in the same manner as commercial businesses.
Following these demands for prevention of public universities to utilize resources like CCAA, the Canadian federal government released statements. In Nov. 2023, they shared that they will be taking active steps to change CCAA so that public universities can no longer utilize this tool amid financial hardship. The exact steps taken are yet to be released and are awaited by many in 2024.
By: William Li
On Feb. 11, Uighur activist Rukiye Turdush’s presentation at McMaster University about China’s mass internment of Muslims was disrupted by student protestors.
Controversially, these students had rallied not only to protest the event, but to coordinate with the Chinese Embassy.
The Washington Post reports that this coordination went beyond ordinary consular services: in addition to sending photos, the students say they were requested to search the talk for any university officials or Chinese nationals.
This is alarming, as it represents an attempt to harass and intimidate Turdush into silence. It is also disturbing because the Chinese government has no business collecting information about political events on campus.
It is important to remember that the Chinese Communist Party currently runs an authoritarian government with absolute control of China, including its foreign embassies. The regime also has a long history of violently crushing dissent.
Most notably, at the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, thousands of students were massacred with tanks and machine guns. Lawyers, activists and even Nobel laureates are regularly imprisoned for criticizing the Communist Party. Today, China also uses internet censorship and a social credit system to neuter any challenge to Party rule.
The incident with Turdush shows that similar political repression is not something distant and foreign; it is something that happened on campus and continues to happen.
One of the most overlooked victims here are the Chinese international students. This is especially true if photos are being sent to the Chinese Embassy. This essentially creates a system of fear in which students surveil each other, reporting to officials any deviance from the Communist Party line.
For international students seeking a liberal education in Canada, where our academic freedom would let them develop skills in independent-thinking that may be frowned upon in China, these hopes are dashed.
Instead, they are kept on a tight leash. Any deviance from Party-approved behaviour risks a report to the embassy, and resulting repercussions back home such as endangering family members or losing job and business opportunities.
Despite being on Canadian soil, these students will never get to fully experience basic freedoms that Canadian citizens take for granted. If Chinese students cannot speak freely, or even attend a political event, without risking state punishment, then this prevents any real discussion about Turdush’s presentation or any issues affecting them.
Even worse, this kind of political repression is being advanced by McMaster Students Union-ratified clubs.
In a statement written in Chinese, the McMaster Chinese Students and Scholar Association, McMaster Chinese News Network and McMaster Chinese Professional Society condemned Turdush and confirmed they contacted the Chinese Consulate in Toronto.
The McMaster English Language Development Student Association, an affiliate of the faculty of humanities, and the McMaster Chinese Graduate Students Club also signed the statement.
This statement was not directed at Turdush, nor any non-Chinese students. Rather, for the international students who can read Chinese, the thinly-veiled threat was crystal clear: promote the Communist Party line on political issues, or you will be reported to the Chinese consulate.
This is deplorable. MSU-ratified clubs and affiliates of the university should not be surveilling McMaster students and reporting their activities to foreign governments.
They should not propagate an environment where fear of surveillance prevents students from speaking out. They should not masquerade as safe spaces for international students if they have a hidden agenda to allow authoritarian regimes a backdoor to covertly monitor their citizens abroad.
There is also evidence that this problem is not unique to McMaster. The Chinese government has actively tried to influence academic institutions in several liberal democracies, particularly with its Confucius Institutes.
The MSU needs to investigate if these clubs have violated the Clubs Operating Policy by reporting political activity on campus to the Chinese government, through negatively affecting students’ ability to conduct their lawful affairs (5.1.1.1), interfering with other clubs’ activities (5.1.1.2) or failing to fully disclose connections to bodies outside of the MSU (4.2).
Declining to take action would betray anybody who feels surveilled, muffled or repressed by the Chinese government, and tarnish the MSU’s reputation as a safe and inclusive union that puts students’ interests first.
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As students return from the winter break to begin new classes, a large population of students will be returning to their undergraduate thesis or seeking a thesis supervisor for the following year. The undergraduate thesis is a characteristic, and sometimes required, component of many four-year honours degree programs. Regardless of program, senior theses are designed to allow upper-year students to hone their research skills and prepare them for graduate studies.
I am completing my undergraduate thesis in an analytical chemistry lab alongside five other undergraduate students. While our projects vary in nature, the expectations of our thesis in terms of time commitment and research goals are essentially the same. However, the assessments for my thesis as an integrated science student differs from that of the chemistry students in the lab, which differ even from the chemical biology students — despite being in the same department of chemistry and chemical biology.
For example, the thesis report for students in the chemistry program is worth 40 per cent of their final grade whereas the same document for students in the chemical biology program is worth only 25 per cent. Besides the differences in weighting for the same assessment, students in chemical biology are required to complete different assessments like project outlines and interim reports while chemistry students must only complete their report and final presentation.
While all senior theses conducted by students in the department of chemistry and chemical biology are worth nine units, senior theses that conduct arguably similar work from students in the department of biochemistry can be worth up to 15 units. This becomes especially alarming when students from departments outside of biochemistry complete their thesis in a biochemistry lab and receive less units than their biochemistry student counterparts.
It makes little sense to have students that are under the same expectations and striving towards similar research goals receiving different academic credit.
Rather than the assessment for senior theses dictated by the program to which these students belong, assessments should be decided by the supervisor. This will not only ensure that students completing virtually the same work are assessed equally, it will provide supervisors more control over the research conducted under their supervision and allow them to create assessments that better reflect students’ achievements.
Additionally, as all senior theses share the same goal to improve students’ research capabilities, and considering students, for the most part, can conduct their thesis under the supervision of a supervisor outside of their program’s department, there is no real need for program-specific thesis courses. If the fear is that students within the same program will not develop the same transferable skills or be graded equally, the faculty rather than the program can mandate that all senior theses must include specific components and the same time commitments.
It may also be useful to consider implanting a mandatory seminar session for undergraduate thesis students to attend. The integrated science program already has such a seminar in place, where thesis students within the program are required to present updates on their research and peer-review literature reports and other related assessments.
If seminars like these were to be implemented faculty-wide, the typical undergraduate senior thesis could be restructured so that it is in total worth a standard number of units where the large per cent of a student’s grade is determined by their supervisor, and a certain smaller per cent is devoted to seminar assessments.
No matter what action is taken, it is clear that the current structure of undergraduate senior theses does not create fair opportunities for all students involved and requires serious restructuring.
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Following the advocacy efforts made by the McMaster Students Union, the fall 2018 term introduced McMaster University students to a new option for course enrolment: the personal interest course. The PIC option allows students to take an elective course without affecting their cumulative grade point average by making the course assessed on a credit or no-credit grading scale.
There's still time to register for a Personal Interest Course. Read more about PIC here: https://t.co/yoAi4Icjaz and learn how you can register for both Fall and Winter terms. #McSU #mcmasteru pic.twitter.com/HKXYCY7Ia8
— McMaster Students Union (MSU) (@MSU_McMaster) August 7, 2018
In order to receive a final grade of credit, students must earn a final mark of at least 50 per cent. Students who do not earn 50 per cent receive a final grade of no-credit, which is not considered as a failure and is not included in GPA calculations or averages.
According to the office of the registrar, “McMaster University encourages interdisciplinary study and believes undergraduate studies provides an excellent opportunity to explore topics which are new and unfamiliar.”
Thus, by removing the risk of negatively affecting students’ GPA, the PIC option can encourage students to explore new interests through choosing electives outside of their program. The units earned from successfully completing a PIC can even be used to satisfy a students’ elective or minor requirements.
Any undergraduate student with a cumulative GPA of at least 3.5 and who are registered in a participating program above level one may take advantage of the PIC option. Such students may take three units of PIC per term, with a maximum of twelve units per four- or five-level degrees or a maximum of nine units per three-level degrees.
Once enrolled in a course, selecting a PIC option simply requires changing the grading basis for the course on Mosaic from graded to PIC. For the 2019 winter term, students have until the end of the drop-and-add period on Jan. 15 to declare a PIC. If necessary, students can still opt to withdraw from the course as per the normal procedures and deadlines.
Surveying friends who took a PIC during the fall 2018 term, the reviews have been overwhelmingly positive. Whether it is the student in the natural sciences trying a music course or a humanities student gaining valuable business knowledge, the PIC option allows for students to develop new skills and realize new interests.
One of the best features of the PIC is that if students feel they are doing well in the course and would like to keep the numeric grade, they have the option to indicate the course is no longer a PIC on Mosaic by the last day for withdrawing from courses without failure by default, which is Mar. 15 for the winter 2019 term. This truly creates a no-risk scenario for students interested in taking new classes.
Before PIC was introduced, the only other way for undergraduate students to take a class without affecting their cumulative GPA was to audit the class. However, since completion of assignments and writing the final examination is not required, students cannot earn units for audited courses like they do with PIC.
I strongly encourage all students to at least consider taking a PIC. Who knows—you might discover a new passion or career interest!
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