All Posts Tagged With: "money"

Previous station shut down by CRTC

Ryerson's Ted Rogers School by ⌘N on Flickr

On Ryerson University’s Toronto campus Tuesday, newspaper boxes and streetlight polls were been plastered with advertisements urging students to vote for a new student-owned radio station in a referendum next week. The old campus station, CKLN-FM, was famously shut down in a rare move by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commision in January. “York University has one,” reads one poster created by supporters of a new station.

But will that be enough to convince students? The cost, a mandatory $10.35 charged annually to each and every student, has caused an opposition group to organize against the proposal. The vote will happen between Oct. 24 and 26. Mark Single, a fourth-year engineering student, started the No to Ryerson Radio Committee: “Supporters see this as another way to grab money from students’ pockets who don’t have money in the first place,” he told The Eyeopener.

Continue reading Ryerson to decide on $10 fee for radio station

Staff keep $30 wages, but don’t need to be replaced

Photo courtesy of stephenrwalli on Flickr

The Simon Fraser Student Society lockout has ended after 94 days. ”I think both sides compromised,” President Jeff McCann told The Peak student newspaper. The Canadian Union of Public Employees staff signed a new collective agreement with the SFSS board on Oct. 11 and went back to work.

The major relief for current employees in the new contract is that permanent staff will keep their current wages, which average $30.48 per hour. The SFSS had originally proposed a wage cut of roughly $10 before the lockout began in July. New permanent employees will start at $25 per hour—lower than the union wanted—but more in line with the average hourly wage in Canada, which was $24.71 in August, according to Statistics Canada.

The board won concessions too, in that new student employees can be paid a much lower $14.50 per hour. That could save money. McCann had long argued that wages were so high that the SFSS was being forced to cut services and bursaries. Another win, as far as the board is concerned, is that they’re not obligated to replace staff when they leave, so long as they maintain a complement of at least six full-time and two part-time staff. There are currently 12 full-time employees.

STEM students will get $60,000 each

Seymour Schulich, who already has several Canadian schools named for him, has announced he has donated $100-million to fund scholarships in Canada and Israel, reports Shalom Life.

The Schulich Leader Scholarships are meant to increase enrollment in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) subjects, in order to spur innovation.

All graduating high school and CEGEP students in Canada and Israel who are planning to study STEM subjects may apply. Each winner will receive $60,000 over four years. Five Israeli and 20 Canadian Universities will award one scholar each in the first year of the program. After that it will grow 75 awards per year. United Jewish Appeal of Greater Toronto will administer the cash.

Schulich, a business leader, has already made donations that have resulted in the following things named for him: a medical and dentistry school at the University of Western Ontario, a library and a school of music at McGill University, a law school at Dalhousie University, an engineering school at the University of Calgary, an education school at Nipissing University and a business school at York University.

Tiny program is too expensive: Dean of Arts

Photo by *Bárbara* Cannnela on Flickr

Enrollment has been suspended in the University of Windsor’s music therapy program, meaning no new students will be taken into the program next year. Only six or seven students graduate from the program each year and to keep accredition, the program must maintain two or more tenure-track faculty members dedicated to it, Cecil Houston, Dean of Arts and Social Sciences, told the Windsor Star. “The enrolment is just too small and the cost is just too great to maintain the professional accreditation,” Houston told the paper on Friday. Windsor’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences has a $1.6-million deficit on a budget of $30 million, he said.

The only other programs accredited by the Canadian Association for Music Therapy, according to its website, are available at Acadia University, Canadian Mennonite University (Manitoba), Capilano University, Wilfrid Laurier University and Concordia University.

Classes will go ahead as planned: university

McGill University’s 1,700 non-academic employees went on strike at 6 a.m. this morning. The employees provide course registration, laboratory support, clerical support, record keeping, student residence management, IT support and more.

University classes will go ahead next week. ”You have the right, as a student or an employee, to cross the picket line to get to class or to your work,” the university wrote in a statement. “McGill will ensure that you can enter the campus safely.”

The collective agreement expired in Dec. 2010. MUNACA wants a three per cent wage increase. McGill has offered 1.2 per cent.*

The workers say they also want more secure benefits. ”Unlike other university workers in Quebec, there are no protections for our pensions and benefits at McGill,” wrote McGill University Non-Academic Certified Association (MUNACA) president Kevin Whittaker. “The time has come for the university to recognize our hard work and our contribution to the quality of life students enjoy.”

*This post has been updated to remove salary data that was incorrect. Maclean’s On Campus regrets the error.

Young people today can’t hold a hammer or screw a screw

Photo courtesy of B Rosen on Flickr

By Cynthia Reynolds

It’s hard not to laugh when Barry Smith starts telling stories about the hapless young workers he has to deal with. Smith, who runs Toronto-area roofing company RoofSmith Canada, tells of one who didn’t come to work because his cat had fleas, and another who jumped off a shed roof, even though he’d just tossed bags of nails into the garbage bin below. But the laughing tapers off when Smith, 46, talks about skills.

“They don’t know how to handle a tool properly,” he says quietly. “They’re bright kids, but they hold a hammer at the top instead of the bottom, so it takes four swings instead of one to get a nail in. They don’t know how to read the short lines on a tape measure and they’ve never used power tools, which makes you really cautious.” He says they can’t seem to detect the patterns of the work—you rip up part of the roof, that gets thrown down, that goes into the garbage—so they just stand around. “It can get really frustrating.”

Continue reading The mechanically challenged generation

Which schools got the most $150,000 research awards?

Stephen Harper presented 167 Vanier Graduate Scholarships last week at McMaster University. At $150,000 apiece, they’re the most highly sought after prizes for doctoral students studying in Canada.

Schools may only nominate a set number of students based how much money they have received in the past, which gives established PhD programs a clear advantage.

That said, the distribution of the awards tells us something about where the country’s most highly sought after researchers have chosen to study. Here’s the school-by-school breakdown.

Toronto — 28
British Columbia — 25
McGill — 25
Montréal — 12
Alberta — 11
Ottawa — 9
Calgary — 8
McMaster — 6
Western Ontario — 6
Waterloo — 5
Simon Fraser — 4
Laval — 4
Polytechnique Montréal — 3
Queen’s — 3
Dalhousie — 2
UQAM — 2
York — 2
Guelph — 2
Manitoba — 2
Victoria — 1
Concordia — 1
Sherbrooke — 1
Trent — 1
Regina — 1
Saskatchewan — 1
Saint Mary’s — 1

Foreign students were staring down 10 per cent fee hike

Photo courtesy of Anirudh Koul of Dalhousie

International students at Dalhousie University have been spared a 10 per cent hike to their already-expensive tuition fees.

Could governments finally be defending the students who bring so much money into Canada?

Dalhousie had proposed a seven per cent hike in differential fees, on top of the regular three per cent increase for all students, which would have meant a 10 per cent hike for internationals.

That was rejected by the Nova Scotia government in favour of an increase of 3.5 per cent in differentials, or 6.5 per cent in total. Currently, international students pay $3,630 more per term (or $7,260 more per school year) than Canadian students.

Dalhousie officials said they had requested the larger increase to support improved services for international students, including more advisors and workshops. Carolyn Waters, vice president academic, told the Chronicle Herald that more services are necessary because the number of international students at Dalhousie has grown by 85 per cent since 2008.

They now make up 10 per cent of the total student population.

But several international students had complained about the proposed increase, arguing that it was unfair and unafforable. Some wrote letters to the provincial government, saying that a fee increase would drive international students away from the university.

“[International students] might have to go back to their own country or shift to another university,” Meela Auaduer, a second year student from Malaysia, who penned one of the letters, told the CBC.

The debate over international student’s fees has been heating up across Canada in the past few years. International students pay up to three times what domestic students pay to attend. For example, a full time domestic student at the University of Manitoba studying Law would pay $8,705 in tuition per year while an international student would pay $19,863 for the same course.

The differential fees are meant to reflect the fact that governments provide much of the funding for domestic students. (Click to see how much of your tuition bill is covered by the government.)

But the students are all very good for Canada’s economy. A report from Foreign Affairs and International Trade showed that there were 178,000 international students studying in Canada, who produced $6.5-billion for the economy in 2008. $291 million went directly into government coffers. In total, international students created economic activity that sustained 83,000 Canadian jobs.

Other student groups will be pleased with Nova Scotia’s decision. ”The term that’s being used here a lot on campus [for international students] is ‘cash cows,’” Aisyah Abdakahar, a former vice-president for the University of Manitoba Students Union, told the Winnipeg Free Press.

“Accomplishments” kept him out of jail: judge

A former student council president at the First Nations University of Canada in Saskatoon has been convicted of fraud and theft of $30,000.

Blue Pelletier, 31, repeatedly wrote himself cheques from the student union’s bank accounts in 2006 and 2007 and never accounted for the money. Three other members of the council testified that Pelletier had told them he had used the money to buy a car and furniture for himself.

But he won’t go to jail. Instead, he’ll serve an 18-month conditional sentence that includes a curfew and he’ll be required to pay $20,000 back to the student’s council, reports CBC News.

Judge Gerry Allbright said that although Blue Pelletier is guilty, he had accomplished so much in his life that it proved the fraud was “no doubt, in my mind, an aberration.” Had it been more than an aberration, he would have gone to jail, said the judge.

That’s despite the fact that Pelletier accused the other council members of lying and blamed the lack of records for the cheques on a “lackadaisical” style of accounting. He had pleaded not guilty.

Click to see who made more than $1-million last year

Here are the Top 10 highest paid university officials in Canada, ranked by their base salaries.*

1. David Johnson
University of Waterloo president (now Governor General of Canada) — $1,041,881

2. Moriarty William
president of the University of Toronto Asset Management Corp. — $697,020

3. Amit Chakma
vice-president of the University of Waterloo (but president of Western as of July, 2010)  — $500,000

Continue reading Top 10 highest paid university officials in Canada