The Camosun College Faculty Association (CCFA) is hoping to find a new approach with Camosun College in their objective of reaching an agreement on alternatives to layoffs: open bargaining. The union says that after violating the terms of the collective agreement between the two parties, the college has remained steadfast in their conduct; the CCFA is hoping to promote transparency and accountability with the open-bargaining process to bring greater attention to their advocacy.
In a round of mediation on Friday, May 2, the college and the union were unable to reach a negotiation, says CCFA president Lynelle Yutani.
“Despite the ways in which the college was violating our collective agreement being pointed out to them, the mediator was not able to successfully negotiate any alternatives,” says Yutani. “So unfortunately, Section 54 of the labour code requires the participants to be equally willing to find solutions. And I think that’s the key, is that the faculty association was willing to work hard to find solutions, any alternatives to laying people off, and better alternatives to the choices that the college was making. The college’s only excuse for everything that they were choosing to do was that they were out of time.”
Yutani says the CCFA wants to ensure all members of the union are informed of and involved in the bargaining process. A more cooperative approach, she says, could be more constructive. (A spokesperson for Camosun College told Nexus that they did not have anybody available for an interview for this story.)
“A union isn’t a small group of people who do work for their members. A union is all of its members together, working together to get a good contract, or working together to agree on whatever compromises we need to make to get a contract. So, if we’re all making those decisions together, if everyone has the ability to provide feedback and to make suggestions… then whatever we’re left with, we’ve all created together,” she says. “And that’s something that if the employer was wise, I think that they would be interested in that open approach. Because if everybody agrees together that this is the best contract that we can come up with, then it allows everyone to work together, to uphold that contract, to make sure that it’s followed, and to, I think, value that work that you’ve done collaboratively.”
Since the college announced a projected $5-million deficit would result in layoffs, the union has filed five total grievances for agreement violations. Yutani says this issue is, in part, a product of misinterpretation.
“In, I would say, the past situations, when the college has gone through layoffs, it’s been the faculty association’s experience that the college followed the collective agreement as we understand it today,” says Yutani. “But because there are virtually no humans employed at the college in human resources that were around for the last time layoffs happened, there’s almost nobody there internally that can say, Hey, you guys are doing this wrong. And they come from different backgrounds in their interpretation of what our language means. They’ve arrived at [this] from a different perspective.”
As a result of the former Liberal government’s international student cap for all Canadian post-secondary institutions, Camosun College has suffered from a decrease in funding from enrolment. Despite advocacy for financial assistance across BC universities and colleges, the provincial government’s 2025 budget has not allocated funding to ease this tension.
Yutani says that in periods of financial austerity, as the college is currently confronting, workers disproportionately suffer.
“The signature move of employers [during financial strain] is to ask workers to do more with less, whether that’s less resources, whether that’s less time, whether that’s less compensation,” she says. “Basically, we want everyone to see what it is that we’re being asked to concede or to compromise over. And we want everyone to see… how reasonable what we’re going for is… We don’t want any of what we negotiate with our employer to be behind a closed door. If we’re going to agree to it, then we’re all going to know what the trade-offs were. And that means that when the employer comes and says, We want you to increase class sizes 20 percent, we think that that’s something that the public, and especially the students, would want to know as well. “
Yutani would like to see clarity from Camosun; she says the college hasn’t justified to the CCFA its response to the crisis. While an open-bargaining approach concerns some, she believes it will hold the college accountable.
“Often, the objection to open bargaining is, well, people won’t understand what we mean when we say things like that, bargaining is supposed to be secret so that you can have a frank conversation,” says Yutani. “Our objection to that is that what’s really happening there is that they don’t want everyone to know what they’re tabling and the purposes behind it. Because we want everybody to know not just what we’re being asked, if we’re being asked to give things up, but [also] why, what’s the employer’s reasons? Because they’ve completely failed at providing rationale for their budgetary choices. They’ve completely failed at giving us rationale for their layoff choices, and we’re not going to allow them to hide their rationale for bargaining proposals behind closed doors.”
Yutani believes that through collaboration, Camosun will work best through its deficit.
“We’re just going to model the behaviours that we think our employer should have been displaying all along through this crisis,” she says. “We’d be in a much different place because we would all understand the problem. We would all have had a stake in solving the problem, and we would all be working together on the solution.”