Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to members of the committee for inviting us to be here.
I'm the executive director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers. We represent 65,000 academic staff, at 122 universities and colleges across Canada.
For the past five years, our organization has been the most persistent, relentless critic of the administration and board of First Nations University of Canada.We felt that actions taken in 2005 violated serious principles of governance that are necessary for any university in this country, or in fact North America.
We have worked diligently since February 2005 to get this situation changed. Over that five years we have met with the board of governors of First Nations University; the president and senior administration of the University of Regina; the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada, which is the presidents of universities organization; the government; the minister; and the deputy minister in Saskatchewan.
The only institution that refused to meet with us during that five years was the Government of Canada. I have a number of letters that I sent to previous ministers and deputy ministers asking for meetings and they persistently refused to meet with us. We were unable to get necessary changes, so finally, in 2008, our organization took the most serious sanction we have, and that is to censure the university--the administration and board of that university. We haven't had to censure a university in this country in 28 years. We have censured other universities in the past--the University of Victoria, Memorial University, the University of Calgary--and those censures led to changes. Sometimes it took a long time. At Memorial, it took 10 years to get the necessary changes.
We took that step, which was a huge step for us. We saw nothing else that we could do to put pressure on to get the changes. The reason we were so persistent--and we made lots of enemies in this process--is because this is a unique institution. It's the only first nations university in this country. It's the only institution for first nations students who want to go to an institution in a first nations culture and tradition to study. That's why, as Ms. Adams indicated, many are there.
We wanted the institution to survive, but we knew that without changes to its governance structure it would not be able to.
Finally, in 2009, there was a real breakthrough. The FSIN elected a new grand chief--Chief Lonechild, who is with you today. Chief Lonechild worked very hard, and he showed enormous political courage to push through fundamental changes to the governance structure of First Nations University. The university board of governors was dissolved, and a new board was established along the lines that a series of commissions and task forces and CAUT had called for: a smaller and depoliticized board. Subsequently the University of Regina, the First Nations University of Canada, and the Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations have entered into discussions, which Chief Lonechild referred to, to deal with the administrative side.
In other words, all the pieces necessary for this institution to succeed have been put in place. The only missing element now is the $7.2 million of core funding that the federal government withdrew--and I draw your attention to this--four days after the Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations dissolved the board of governors and agreed to make the changes we had all been calling for.
In conclusion, without the federal government's commitment to restore the $7.2 million in core funding by March 31, almost all the faculty and staff of this university will have to receive layoff notices on April 1. That will be the beginning of the end of Canada's only first nations university. The future of that university lies in the hands of the Government of Canada.
We urge you, in the strongest terms, as the organization that has been the principal critic of what has been happening there, to recognize the changes that the FSIN, the University of Regina, and the First Nations University have made around financial and administrative arrangements to allow this institution to survive. We urge you to do that in the strongest terms.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.