Well, I don’t suppose you can accuse the University of Alberta of shaking down the Parkland Institute.
At any rate, U of A President Indira Samarasekera isn’t sending over someone named Vinnie the Claw to collect the vig. But why bother with that kind of nonsense when you can just take the money?
Thanks in significant part to the appalling funding situation at Alberta post-secondary institutions generally and the U of A in particular — a state of affairs that can be laid directly at the feet of the commitment-challenged Redford Government — the university is now skimming 5 per cent off the top when Albertans donate to the various centres and institutes housed on the campus.
This, it is said here, will cause no joy to donors — and may indeed result in significant sources of funding drying up — when word of the Board of Governors policy that took effect on July 1 eventually leaks out.
In addition, by the way, henceforth and forevermore, every month the university will also snatch another 0.35 per cent of the funds such groups receive from endowments.
These policies add up to a particular blow to the Parkland Institute, the non-partisan research institute founded in 1996 to study “economic, social, cultural and political issues facing Albertans and Canadians, using the perspective of political economy.” It lists as its broad based themes, “revitalizing democracy and the role of government, building a just and sustainable economy and improving quality of life.”
In other words, Parkland was set up to engage in the mildly dangerous activity of studying the economic and public impact of things Alberta’s “1 per cent” and their enablers in government would like to see implemented as quickly as possible, such as pipelines to all points of the compass and the complete privatization of everything.
Just yesterday, for example, the Parkland published a study that demonstrated persuasively in a way that will appeal to this province’s dwindling reality-based community that, if you’re serious about providing quality care for seniors, privatization is not the way to go.
Just the sort of thing, in other words, that the privatization-crazed government of Premier Alison Redford and its loyal servants in the groves of academe do not want to hear spoken aloud.
On an annualized basis, given the Parkland Institute’s current revenue target of about $660,000, the university’s cash grab is going to cost it $33,000 that has already been budgeted.
The university claims its needs the money to run fund-raising operations for institutes and centres that operate under its expansive roof. They call it an “administrative fee.” But this is largely a fiction, at least in the case of the Parkland Institute, which raises most of its funds itself. In other words, there’s precious little administrating for the university to do for that extremely steep fee.
The real reason, as previously noted, is that the Redford Government’s promise of “stable and predictable funding” turned out to be baloney the minute the so-called “Bitumen Bubble” oil price differential loomed over the horizon and — quelle horreur! — left a government that had made deficit fighting its sine qua non facing the embarrassing possibility a multi-billion-dollar deficit.
That was the day Ms. Redford returned nice-guy Advanced Education Minister Steve Khan to the backbenches and replaced him with Deputy Premier Thomas Lukaszuk, a fellow who is apparently unafraid of a fight — no matter how foolish it makes him look.
The province had soon hacked $143 million out of the next year’s advanced education budget, and Mr. Lukaszuk was barking orders at universities, colleges and technical institutions to skid some teachers and staff, limit enrolment, and be right quick about it.
That was also the moment when institutions started to seek new ways to squeeze blood from the stone – and, if readers will pardon the mixture of metaphors, the funds collected by the Parkland Institute and like centres must have seemed like low-hanging fruit to cash-starved administrators.
At least some of the money skimmed from the Parkland is being used by the university to fund-raise for one of Dr. Samarasekera’s pet projects — her ill-defined and still unapproved “leadership institute.”
This is mildly ironic, since Parkland is being booted out of its current shabbily genteel offices in a former private residence owned by the U of A to make way for a new headquarters for the very same institute.
I suppose it is churlish to say all this only a day after the government announced it is restoring about $50 million — roughly a third of the funds it had just snatched away — to university financing.
This may be because the Bitumen Bubble has popped, dissipated, melted or whatever bubbles do — or because it was mere convenience in the first place, needed to solve one particular political problem. Now that the parents of university students are presumably complaining, some of it must be returned to solve that problem.
Anything’s possible with the Redford Government, which, if nothing else can be said in its favour, has established that it can turn on a dime — even if it doesn’t have much idea which direction it’s turning.
The trouble is, as NDP Leader Brian Mason observed in the Legislature yesterday, this government doesn’t have the business skills to run a lemonade stand.
And that means worthwhile institutions like the Parkland Institute, and for that matter the University of Alberta, are left holding the bag. Stay tuned, because everything will change again tomorrow!
This post also appears on David Climenhaga’s blog, Alberta Diary.
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