Layoffs blamed on lack of international students after nationwide crackdown on immigration
By John Chilibeck, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, Daily Gleaner
Questions remain over the future of New Brunswick’s community college system after it was forced to cut programs and eliminate 66 positions, or about six per cent of its entire workforce.
Mary Butler, the president and CEO of New Brunswick Community College, or NBCC, told Brunswick News her organization began laying the groundwork for shedding positions last year, to give it time to lessen the impact on trusted and hard-working employees.
In the end, the English-language provincial Crown corporation eliminated 30 positions through retirements and vacancies; 26 by refusing to renew contracts of certain instructors; two through reassignments; and eight through layoffs or terms ending early.
It was the eight layoffs that really hurt, she said.
“It was tough, but I was glad that instead of 66 employees being blindsided of an early end, it was only eight,” Butler said in an interview. “It’s not a fun thing to go through for the employer or employee. We are a small, tightknit community. We all know each other.”
She was forced to make the cuts in late March because of Ottawa’s nationwide crackdown on immigration, leading to the loss of a significant number of the college’s international students who pay much higher tuition fees. It expects to lose 900 of the 2,200 international students from peak enrolment in 2023-24.
The loss of those international student revenues – $9 million last year and estimated to reach between $16 million and $19 million in losses in the coming years – in part convinced the college in February to suspend or cancel 13 programs this fall.
The suspensions include the international business management program in Saint John and studies to become a private security and investigations officer in Moncton.
Programs such as French language training for administrative professionals in Fredericton and insurance and risk management in Moncton were cancelled altogether.
“We faced a significant decline in enrolment and if you’re serving 800 to 1,000 fewer students, you have to right-size your operation in accordance with that, particularly when you’re facing a huge loss of revenue. So, it was necessary.”
Butler said while NBCC has an aggressive plan to increase domestic enrollment by four per cent – keeping the total student population near 13,000 studying at six campuses – the loss of those international students will continue to hurt its bottom line, forcing the college to run into deficit and dip into reserve funds.
That’s why in its annual business plan proposal to the provincial government, NBCC asked for an increase to its $63-million operational grant of $24 million for 2025-26, much of it just to meet the wage hikes the province previously signed off on.
Butler keeps reminding the provincial government that New Brunswick will face the loss of 133,000 workers over the next decade due to a huge number of retirements and economic growth. About four out of every 10 of those positions will require a college degree.
But NBCC officials are still on tenterhooks because they haven’t been informed about how big the operating grant will be for the next academic year.
Premier Susan Holt warned that the college wouldn’t get exactly what it wants.
“We had a lot of requests from a lot of organizations to increase their funding this year,” the premier said at a recent press conference. “We had that from every post-secondary institution, every university, every college, every regional health authority. We receive a ton of requests and as can be seen from our deficit budget of $547 million, we did not have the funds to grant everyone’s requests fully.”
Holt said her priority was putting more funding into kindergarten to Grade 12 public education, pushing test scores up and setting up the youngest children for a brighter future.
But the premier added that the federal Liberal government’s decision to cut back immigration by about half was shortsighted because certain regions of the country, including New Brunswick, were counting on immigration to slow down an aging population and boost economic growth.
“We are lobbying the federal government pretty aggressively to have them reconsider their policies around international students,” the premier said. “New Brunswick is not one of the places that has degree mills or college mills like you’d see in other places. We have excellent post-secondary institutions. NBCC is a perfect example of that. We don’t use temporary foreign workers to the same extent as other provinces do and yet we’ve been painted with the same brush and hit with the same harmful policies.”
Butler sympathized with the premier’s need to hold the line on deficit spending. The CEO says that what the Holt government is doing, announcing that it will carefully review base budget spending for the regional health authorities, is the same thing NBCC did a long time ago.
“We’re giving them a runway to get in and understand the lay of the land. They’ve only been in power a few months,” she said. “I’m hopeful that what they’ll do is hold other entities accountable for their budgets and how they’re managed. Then groups such as NBCC, that have managed their budget and done the work to find savings rather than go to government all the time with a handout, will be acknowledged.”
