Dear Contract Instructors,
This message is an update to Unit 2 members regarding the so-called financial crisis at Carleton, its likely impact on our members, and the Union’s responses and actions to date.
By way of preface, we acknowledge that universities across the country, and here in Ontario specifically, are facing economic challenges for a myriad of reasons. However, Carleton’s financial situation is compounded by senior management decisions and budgets that are not merely a reflection of market forces, but rather, financial choices. When Carleton pays a full year’s salary to a University president who left the institution in the summer for a still-more lucrative job elsewhere, or when it spends a reported $2.1 million dollars on unnecessary new front gate signage, its hand is not being forced by necessity—it is making choices.
Carleton’s actions to date—the Voluntary Retirement Incentive Program, which saw more than 40 full-time faculty retire with no plan to replace them; the systematic reduction of CIs across faculties; the plans to reduce course offerings and to increase enrollment caps in the courses that do remain—plainly illustrate that the institution’s focus is not on ensuring that the teaching and learning experience are of the quality that students are used to. Almost all of its cost-cutting initiatives have focused on ways to reduce the labour involved in the delivering of instruction instead of, for instance, reversing decades of growth at the managerial level.
How We Got Here
In the first week of July 2024, CUPE 4600 was unofficially made aware of Carleton’s plans to dramatically reduce CI employment. From that moment on, at every monthly meeting of the JCAA, the Unit 2 executive made a point of asking Carleton to provide an update regarding what its plan was with respect to CIs. At each monthly meeting, Carleton denied that any such plans had been developed or finalized. After five months of such denials, in December 2024, the Dean of the Faculty of Arts (FASS) accidentally “let the cat out of the bag” by announcing—with tone-deaf fanfare—the great “success” the faculty had made towards its goal of reducing CIs for 2025-2026 by 50%, a goal that corresponded with the unofficial information we received previously in July. This message, framed as “good news” and sent out less than two weeks before Christmas, was the first official confirmation the Union or our members received of Carleton’s plan to reduce CIs for the next academic year.
In the days after the FASS Dean’s email, CUPE 4600 responded with a series of open letters (here and here) calling on senior representatives of Labour Relations to discuss the substance of that email. The responses received, which you can read in the links above, were wholly unsatisfactory. At the January JCAA meeting, in lieu of something addressing the specific situation CIs are facing, Carleton agreed to provide a “financial presentation” in February, which we dutifully attended. We went into that meeting armed with a series of questions that we had gathered from members at events hosted in February. The answers we received were, again, unsatisfactory—in fact, the executive members in attendance witnessed the shockingly hostile responses of the Deans in attendance in particular. As of the moment of writing this, in spite of monthly requests, Carleton still has not communicated its plan regarding CI employment to the Union or its members. At this point, it seems the only way we will come to know it in full is by analyzing the job postings for 2025-2026, which are due by May 1.
What We’re Doing Now
With Carleton’s reluctance to talk about the specific impact of its so-called financial crisis on CIs, thereby avoiding the need to discuss any measures it might be able to offer to help lessen that impact, the Union has pivoted to making its own demands.
Given that CI work is inherently precarious, articulating clear remedies is a challenge. We must be realistic: our members have no guarantees of long-term employment, nor do we have any provisions that protect us from layoffs. Those realities acknowledged, our first effort at securing our members something by way of relief has come in the form of a draft Letter of Understanding (LOU), presented at the mid-March 2025 JCAA, that would ‘pause’ the clock on members’ seniority effective as of April 30, 2025, for at least three years. (Currently, CIs earn seniority points for each course they teach, which factor into re-hiring decisions. To maintain those points, you must keep teaching at the institution. If you don’t teach for two full years, your seniority points lapse.)
With so many members facing the likely prospect that they will have no courses assigned to them next year, and given Carleton’s own projections that this crisis will extend for three years, our proposed LOU is a common-sense, zero-cost measure that offers the University an easy path to show that it actually respects and values its CIs. Should Carleton refuse this LOU, which again costs no money and no labour (time) to institute, the only reasonable conclusion an impartial spectator could make is that the University places no value on the years of experience and expertise that CIs have, for decades, used to improve to the teaching and learning experience of Carleton’s students.
In addition to the LOU on seniority points, the Union also made a formal request at the same mid-March JCAA meeting that University’s senior administration offer some form of communication directly to CIs addressing the drastic reduction in course contracts for the foreseeable future. If they refuse to tell the Union what’s going on, they at least owe it to their own employees. A failure to communicate to CIs as a nine hundred-person employee group on campus already denotes a lack of compassion for the uncertain future many of us are facing, but a refusal to communicate after the Union has made it clear that saying nothing is not acceptable will denote something far worse. We are awaiting the University’s response.
The Road Ahead
The year ahead for Contract Instructors is going to be a challenging one, but it will also be a time of opportunity. With our collective agreement expiring in August 2025, we need to focus on developing and arguing for proposals informed by member priorities, and mobilizing our members so that Carleton takes those proposals seriously. That requires work, which no one but our members can do for us. (And, good news: many of the avenues for getting more involved in the Union are roles that offer compensation, in the form of honoraria, wages, and seniority points.)
If you want to see change, you need to get involved. Consider standing for office at our AGM on Thursday, April 3, or running for a position on the Unit 2 Bargaining Team on Monday, April 14, or becoming a Steward for your department, or getting involved in the Mobilization Committee or the Bargaining Research Committee, which meet regularly. Our Union will only go so far as our members will take us.
In solidarity,
Mark Blenkinsop & Morgan Rooney, Co-Vice Presidents, Unit 2
Patti Kmiec, Chief Steward, Unit 2
Esther Post, President
Ryan Conrad, Vice President Internal