SUDBURY - Laurentian University, as president Lynn Wells puts it, has already been “reviewed upside down and sideways” following its 2021-2022 insolvency, but that hasn’t stopped the province from mandating even more reviews.
Earlier this month, Laurentian undertook the process of meeting with a credit rating agency, Wells wrote in her report presented to the Nov. 19 meeting of Laurentian’s senate.
“While this was a new process for Laurentian, it is a regular annual engagement at many other institutions in the sector, and one in which the Ministry is encouraging more institutions to participate,” she writes.
Unfortunately, with Laurentian having undergone insolvency restructuring under the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act (or CCAA) earlier this decade, it is unable to borrow for some time to come.
“Regardless, the government wanted us to go through this process, as one more level of accountability through the credit rating process with Moody's,” she said. “We'll do a public announcement when the time is right. This will be a baseline, and there will be subsequent reviews in other years.”
Wells wrote that this allows Laurentian to prepare for a future in which it may once again be eligible to borrow from institutional lenders.
Laurentian is also one of 20 post-secondary institutions in the province mandated to take part in a third-party review of its operations.
To accomplish this, the province created a $15-million Efficiency and Accountability Fund (EAF) in February of this year.
The government press release announcing the program said that it would “identify actions institutions can take to drive long-term cost savings and positive outcomes for students and communities. These reviews will target structural issues as well as operational policies in order to improve sustainability and student experiences.”
Wells said the EAF is actually meant to do something similar to Laurentian’s post-insolvency transformation plan, “which is why it's a bit awkward for us …
“So we had to make very sure that we were kind of separating out what hadn't been covered by a previous review,” she said.
Laurentian vice-president, finance Sylvie Lafontaine said one of the areas outside of the transformation plan being targeted is collaborative procurement, combining purchasing in Northern Ontario.
Wells said the government made available $500,000 for the initiative, “which sounds great, except it goes to the consultants, not to the universities directly.”
Laurentian has been able to work with Deloitte on the EAF, the consultant that already worked with LU on its post-insolvency transformation plan.
“We have to have a plan approved by the board of governors by the end of January for the EAF, and then we have until the end of March to implement it,” Wells said. “So as you can imagine, this is taking up a fair amount of time. But we're hoping we'll have some good outcomes from it.”
Regarding academic programming, Laurentian provost Malcolm Campbell said the government’s intention was to look at programs with low enrolment, to find “efficiencies.” But given recent events, LU has already gone through this exercise.
“Therefore, when we were asked to participate in the Efficiency and Accountability Fund, we redirected our intent,” Campbell said. “This isn't about finding efficiencies. This is about building back efficiently, and so the efforts that will take place here at Laurentian University will be based on the consultations that we've been doing around our academic plan and around our strategic research plan.”
Laurentian University Staff Union (LUSU) president Tom Fenske said he’s glad to hear this, “because efficiency .. the last four years, efficiency means cuts. Right now at this institution, anybody that says that word, it means cuts.”
