"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."
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"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."
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"The 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."
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"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.”
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"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."
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"By supporting the CCAA process, the Ford government enabled the Laurentian board to:
• break collective agreements and slash over 200 faculty and staff positions.
• 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.
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"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."
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"Advocates 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"