Open Letter to Deep Saini from MUNACA President

President Saini,

I write to you today to vociferously decry your callous actions towards McGill and all its constituents. Under the guise of a budgetary shortfall, you are continuing your policy of scorched earth and laying waste to every institution you have headed over the years. You are following in the footsteps of Heather Monroe-Blum, turning the Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning into a ‘Corporate Trade School’.

You are laying off and terminating  hard working employees who have families and are already struggling to make ends meet, some of whom are on long term disability. All the while the upper management, with their bloated salaries, continue to feed at the trough of excess. This tone deaf reaction to the so-called deficit can only result in ruination of a once proud place of higher learning, the final nail in the coffin as it were. 

For the sake of the argument, let us assume the deficit is real. I would then ask that you and the upper management of McGill show some actual leadership. This can be done in several ways;

• Reduce the number of positions in upper management,

• Reduce their salaries to the equivalent in other Quebec Universities, 
  
  
• Place a hiring freeze on upper management positions for the duration of the ‘budgetary crisis’,
  
  
• Stop and cancel the hiring of those whose purposes is to find employees to be terminated,
  
  
• Cancel the Nous Group contract and any other one in the same vein. See below for examples of the devastation caused by NousGroup and like companies that have no understanding of Universities and their commitment to higher education and research.

Also, I am asking you to cancel all terminations, layoffs, relocations and provide all the stakeholders with the budget and expenses, the real one with all the information in order to see the true picture. I would then ask you to sit with all the interested parties in good faith, with transparency and with a sincere desire to deal fairly and effectively with the present state of affairs at McGill. If you refuse, I would then ask for your resignation.

MUNACA and the other unions on campus will not take these cuts lying down. We’re organizing.

Regards tc

Thomas Chalmers

President MUNACA/PSAC 17602

President Saini you were President & Vice-Chancellor / Professor of Plant, Food & Environmental Sciences  Dalhousie University,  Jan 2020 to Dec 2022. In 2022 Dalhousie hired UniForum . We also know that Nous Group was used by University of Canberra, where you were Vice-Chancellor & President  University of Canberra  Sep 2016 – Dec 2019.The general impact of UniForum and Nous Group on universities is that they offer a very expensive benchmarking tool and consultancy, that will push through a pre-existing agenda to make Universities run like businesses during, recommending centralization, automation, and even governance changes, all in times of “austerity”. They manipulate statistics and methodology for this end.( Nous Group and UniForum )

MUNACA spoke to someone at SFU and learned that they cut so deep that their popular co-op program nearly lost accreditation, and they could not keep up with admissions to the University. Here’s a bit of what happened at Queen’s https://qcaa.ca/shockdoctrine/

At Laurentian University the result of austerity with UniForum/Nous Group recommendation was probably the most devastating: “The group recommends reducing the size of the university’s senate, developing a new strategic plan and consolidating all student services.”  In all 69 undergraduate and graduate programs and 195 faculty positions were cut. Nous Group worked to change Laurenntian’s own governance structure. The reports produced by Nous Group have been removed from Laurentian’s website. 

Some other interesting sources: