Georgian College faculty and support staff are feeling “scared, angry and frightened” after mass layoffs, programming cuts and wage reductions were officially announced Tuesday afternoon.
“It’s the full gamut of emotions. This is your livelihood,” said Dr. Anita Arvast, president of OPSEU Local 350, which represents the approximately 300 full-time and 900 part-time faculty members.
While Arvast said she’s not yet certain of the exact number of faculty members who will be impacted by the announcement, she anticipates both full- and part-time staff will be among those affected.
“It’s quite shocking, because 75 per cent of our faculty are non-full-time,” she said. “They are contract workers, so we will definitely be losing a lot of them as well.”
In an interview with BarrieToday, Georgian College president and chief executive officer Kevin Weaver said a town hall-style meeting was held for “Team Georgian” on Tuesday, when he shared information related to college’s financial situation and the gap it is attempting to close for 2025-26.
The college faces a projected financial gap of approximately $45 million for 2025-26, and an estimated gap of an additional $15 to 20 million for 2026-27 — and is due in large part to the federal government’s decision to cap study permits for international students last year.
“We have had to do a variety of things to close that gap and, unfortunately, that has included some layoffs. We have also closed some positions that were vacant, we’ve had some natural attrition and also had a voluntary retirement incentive program,” Weaver said, adding both support staff and faculty have been impacted.
As of Feb. 20, 86 jobs have been impacted: 45 layoffs, 31 voluntary retirements and 10 vacancy closures, bringing the total number of full-time positions affected since January 2024 to 229.
That represents approximately 22 per cent of Georgian’s total full-time workforce.
“We have had to make some tough decisions to suspend some program starts, and that will also have an impact on faculty teaching both full-time and non-full-time. The impacts really are across the board, unfortunately, and it will be felt by all employees,” Weaver said.
Several programs will also be suspended, which he said means no new cohort of students will begin a program; however, students currently in a program will be able to complete it through to graduation.
Programs in business and management, tourism and hospitality have been the hardest hit, said Weaver.
“We hope it’s short term, but that will only be dependent on if there are changes to the positive on the international student program from the federal government or a different mechanism for student demand in our catchment,” he added.
The immediacy and the size of the financial gap is driven by the “hard-hitting” changes to the international student program, which Weaver says unfairly targeted the college sector across Canada.
“Colleges in Ontario were particularly hard hit, because we’ve relied on international student enrolment and revenue to make up for the lack of sustainable funding,” he said.
Georgian had a large international student population, he acknowledged, saying that until the cap, about half of the student population at the college was made up of international students.
“Certainly, the demographic at the campus is different and the demographic in the communities is different. What it means is a net loss of full-time enrolment,” said Weaver.
The ripple effect to that, he added, means fewer students living, and working, in the community.
“It means fewer graduates across fewer program areas to feed the labour market,” he said.
The impact is expected to be felt far beyond the campus boundaries.
“When you reduce your workforce and have fewer students, there will be less spending. There is an economic impact to the region,” Weaver said. “Our early estimates suggest we will have reduced spending in our communities to the tune of about $17.6 million, and that will be primarily within the Barrie community.”
Arvast, who has also been teaching at the college for more than two decades, said post-secondary institutions have been underfunded for decades and international students were a “temporary solution” to a much larger problem.
“The international enrolment was just to keep us afloat,” she said. “We can’t blame the federal government for capping that. We have to look to the provincial government to fund us for the domestic students.
“At this point, we are actually losing money per domestic student because we are the lowest-funded province in Canada by about $8,000 per domestic student,” Arvast added. “This is a crisis that’s been a long time coming, and now the back is broken.”
Fewer faculty means a significant effect on student learning, she said.
“We are already a very lean machine, with gig workers doing most of the work,” said Arvast. "It’s going to get tougher, and this is just the college for now, but it’s going to impact our catchment area, because if you don’t have well-educated people, you’re not going to be able to attract industry.
“There’s a huge fallout when your post-secondary system is not well funded,” she added. “The whole economy is going to suffer as a result of underfunding.”
Support staff have also seen a reduction in hours by approximately six per cent, said Arvast, while faculty members have picked up extra teaching during times where they’d previously have been doing prep and curriculum development.
“We are not getting our hours cut, but we are having more courses we need to deliver at that time,” she said.
Georgian College has campuses in Barrie, Orillia, Midland, Collingwood, Bracebridge, Owen Sound and Orangeville.
While Weaver would not go into detail about how layoffs and cuts will affect individual campuses, it is being felt “across the board,” he said.
He also said he’s committed to looking at how to optimize what the college is doing across all seven campuses, something that will be included in the upcoming strategic plan.
In terms of how the college plans to move forward amidst all of this turmoil, Weaver said after what has been a “tough couple of months,” he’s looking forward to working with government officials to “find a path forward to sustainability.”
“We cannot cut our way out of this situation. We will not have the graduates we need to support the labour market and drive the economy in this province,” he said. “In the short term, we have to make those tough decisions because we have to be financially sustainable.
“Our communities need us, but the long term has to be a partnership with the provincial government so that we can get ourselves as a sector on a path to viability and sustainability,” Weaver added.
He said he’s been as transparent as possible, knowing the college had some tough decisions to make.
“It’s tough on everybody. It’s draining, it’s emotional and, at the same time, we remain a college of over 10,000 full-time students studying with us this semester who need us both inside and outside the classroom,” he said.
“It’s not lost on me how difficult it is for ‘Team Georgian’ to manage the weight of the fiscal changes and, at the same time, inspiring our students and graduates each and every day.”
From a union perspective, Arvast says there is little it can do under the circumstances.
“We have an employment stability committee for both faculty and support staff, so those have been struck just so we can look at where layoffs could potentially occur, and look at credentials to see if people could be teaching in other areas. That’s about all we can do,” she said.