Sharing his thoughts on Laurentian University’s insolvency, the university’s former chancellor says there’s “nothing to say it couldn’t happen” at any university in Ontario.
Steve Paikin is the anchor of TVO's flagship current affairs program, The Agenda with Steve Paikin.
He was also Laurentian University’s chancellor from 2013 until he resigned from the post in April of last year, just before massive program and employee cuts related to Laurentian’s insolvency restructuring.
The journalist accepted the appointment to become Laurentian’s chancellor for a five-year renewable term in 2013, presiding over graduation ceremonies, and handing out degrees on behalf of the university.
He was renewed as chancellor by Laurentian’s board of governors for a second term of three years in 2018, beginning July 1, 2018. This means his term as chancellor would have been coming to an end not long after he resigned last year.
Paikin was also presented with an honourary doctorate by Laurentian in 2012.
The journalist recently shared his thoughts on Laurentian’s insolvency during an interview as part of Village Media’s new Up Close and Personal interview series, hosted by Scott Sexsmith.
“I mean, the precarious nature of post-secondary education in the province of Ontario today is something that I think none of us is as on top of as we need to be, and for a bunch of reasons,” he said.
Paikin said one of those reasons is provincial funding of post-secondary education.
“I'm not being a critic here, I'm just saying a fact, the provincial allocation to post-secondary universities is certainly not as high as some people think it ought to be,” he said.
The province also recently announced it was extending the post-secondary tuition fee freeze for another year, putting a crunch on the sector.
“Tuition has been frozen for three years by the current government, which means in a world of six- or seven-per-cent inflation, they are really falling further and further behind as they try to provide programming,” Paikin said.
This financial crunch means universities are increasingly dependent on foreign students to make the bottom line, he said.
“In Cape Breton University in the Maritimes, 50 per cent of the student body is from out of the country,” Paikin said.
“I mean, that is a very dangerous situation. I mean, it's great, on the one hand, that the world wants to come here and have their students be educated by our terrific post-secondary institutions. But if for whatever reason they turn the taps off, we're there with our pants down. And that's very scary.
“So yeah, I sure hope what happened at Laurentian doesn't happen anywhere else, but the fact is we really don't know.”
During the interview with Sexsmith, Paikin also shared his reasons for leaving his post as Laurentian’s chancellor.
“You know, I've tried really hard not to answer that question for a long time, because I've not wanted to be a distraction to all of what the university has to go through,” he said.
(A year ago, in a brief email to Sudbury.com on the topic, Paikin said he quit the post “for obvious reasons”).
Referring to Laurentian’s declaration of insolvency and filing for creditor protection under the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act (or CCAA) on Feb. 1, 2021, Paikin said “I didn’t know any of that was coming down.”
Paikin said Robert Haché, the current president of Laurentian, was the third LU president he’d served under as chancellor. From what he’d seen during his time there, “things seemed quite successful.”
He said there are various kinds of chancellors — “there are some chancellors who talk daily to the presidents of their institutions. They do fundraising for the institution. They lobby government for the institution. That was not me. I was the exact opposite.”
Paikin said because he’s a journalist, he limited his role to presiding over ceremonial events such as graduation and other big events.
“I never lobbied government, I never raised money for them,” he said. “I wasn't allowed to do that kind of stuff. So, when the developments at Laurentian took place, nobody was more shocked than me.
“I had no sense at all that it was about to happen. I had had a conversation with the president and the board chair, I don't know, six weeks before that announcement was made.
“It was all pleasantries in the meeting, there was no indication given by either one of them that anything untoward was about to happen. And so I was truly shocked when it did happen.”
Paikin said that given everything that has happened, “and how out of the mix I clearly was with the whole thing,” he concluded there wasn’t much point in “hanging around.”
“And it was too controversial at that point,” he added. “Remember, I’m in journalism. I think the deal with Laurentian in the first place was as long as things stay uncontroversial, this is something we’ll let you do. But once it got controversial, that was a problem.”
