Sask. Polytech unions say there’s a chill over faculty as over 100 staff laid off since April

WATCH: Layoffs at Saskatchewan Polytechnic continue, with 25 faculty members losing their jobs this week, according to their union.

The number of layoffs at Saskatchewan Polytechnic continues to grow.

The Saskatchewan Polytechnic Faculty Association (SPFA) says 25 of its members are being laid off this week.

“It’s having a chilling effect on students. It’s having a chilling effect on faculty,” SPFA President Michelle Downton said.

“I’ve heard many people saying that they would rather return to industry, which erodes our ability to provide robust educational programing.”

The latest round of layoffs is in addition to a series of layoffs dating back to April. So far this year, 63 members of the SPFA have been laid off.

Those numbers don’t include members of the Saskatchewan Government and General Employees’ Union (SGEU), which says 48 of its members have been laid off since August – pushing the total number of workers between the two unions to 111 laid off staff.

“What’s going to be left?” Deb Zawada, the chair of the SGEU’s bargaining committee.

“What impact is that going to be on our students and our staff?”

Zawada says she’s never seen reductions like this in her 36 years working with Saskatchewan Polytechnic. She says more and more staff are worrying if they’ll be employed by Christmas and feelings of job insecurity are high among staff.

“We haven’t been able to get answers. What’s the plan? There is no plan that anybody has heard,” she said.

At a media availability last week, Larry Rosia, Sask. Poly’s president and CEO said the staff reductions are part of efforts to increase the post secondary school’s financial sustainability. He said changes at the Ministry of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, which implemented a temporary cap on international student permits last year, has had an impact on enrolment revenue.

International students paid a high premium to study at Canadian schools.

“Polytechnic is not alone — 12,000 jobs have been lost in the higher education sector across Canada because of policy changes at IRCC,” he said last Friday.

“If that happened in any other sector, in any other industry you’d hear about on the news every day.”

On Thursday, the Saskatchewan NDP pointed to a lack of provincial funding as a reason for putting post-secondary institutions in this position to rely on international enrolment.

“It’s a $6 million cut as compared to last year, so what you see is a chronic underfunding for the last number of years. So that’s why our post-secondary (institutions) are dependent on the international student to fill those gaps. That should not happen,” NDP MLA Tajinder Grewal said.

This week, students in Prince Albert and Moose Jaw arrived at campus to find out both bookstores were closed. Students needing textbooks, safety supplies or equipment were told to look for the items online instead.

“If we aren’t educating our students in Saskatchewan, my concern is that we will lose them to the other provinces and they will never return,” Downton said. “We need to be educating people within Saskatchewan to retain them.”

Last March, the provincial government extended a funding memorandum of understanding with Sask. Poly for an additional year so both sides could explore the impacts the federal international student cap would have.

A new multi-year funding agreement has not yet been reached.

“As we work toward a new funding agreement, we remain committed to a strong post-secondary sector in our province, ensuring exceptional training opportunities for our students to help provide them with a bright future right here in Saskatchewan,” the province said in a statement.