HUMAN RIGHTS CODE AMENDMENT ACT, 1992 / LOI DE 1992 MODIFIANT LE CODE DES DROITS DE LA PERSONNE
COUNCIL OF ONTARIO UNIVERSITIES
CONTENTS
Tuesday 24 November 1992
Human Rights Code Amendment Act, 1992, Bill 15
Council of Ontario Universities
Dr Peter George, president
Dr James A. McAllister, senior policy consultant
STANDING COMMITTEE ON ADMINISTRATION OF JUSTICE
*Chair / Président: Cooper, Mike (Kitchener-Wilmot ND)
Vice-Chair / Vice-Président: Morrow, Mark (Wentworth East/-Est ND)
*Akande, Zanana L. (St Andrew-St Patrick ND)
*Carter, Jenny (Peterborough ND)
Chiarelli, Robert (Ottawa West/-Ouest L)
Curling, Alvin (Scarborough North/-Nord L)
*Harnick, Charles (Willowdale PC)
Mahoney, Steven W. (Mississauga West/-Ouest L)
*Malkowski, Gary (York East/-Est ND)
Runciman, Robert W. (Leeds-Grenville PC)
Wessenger, Paul (Simcoe Centre ND)
*Winninger, David (London South/-Sud ND)
Substitutions / Membres remplaçants:
*Swarbrick, Anne (Scarborough West/-Ouest ND) for Mr Morrow
*In attendance / présents
Clerk / Greffière: Freedman, Lisa
Staff / Personnel: Swift, Susan, research officer, Legislative Research Service
The committee met at 1608 in room 151.
HUMAN RIGHTS CODE AMENDMENT ACT, 1992 / LOI DE 1992 MODIFIANT LE CODE DES DROITS DE LA PERSONNE
Consideration of Bill 15, An Act to amend the Human Rights Code / Loi modifiant le Code des droits de la personne.
The Chair (Mr Mike Cooper): I'd like to call this meeting of the standing committee on administration of justice to order. We'll be resuming our public presentations on Bill 15, An Act to amend the Human Rights Code.
COUNCIL OF ONTARIO UNIVERSITIES
The Chair: Today our presenters are from the Council of Ontario Universities. Good afternoon. If you could, please identify yourselves for the record and then proceed with your submission.
Dr Peter George: My name is Peter George. I am president of the council. I'm accompanied by James McAllister, who is a research associate at the council.
I'd like to thank you, Mr Chairman and members of the committee, for this opportunity to discuss Mr Winninger's proposed amendment to the Human Rights Code. It will seem like, as Yogi Berra used to say, déjà vu all over again for David and me, I think, because we've had lengthy conservation about this topic in the recent past.
This is an issue that's extremely important to the universities of Ontario, so important that we thought it necessary that we appear before this committee. If I may, what I shall do is talk briefly to the brief we presented. I trust that members of the committee will read it more fully at their leisure. Then when I finish my introductory comments, perhaps we could engage in discussion about the brief and about the consequences of the proposed bill.
Our understanding of the bill is that it would alter the definition of age in subsection 10(1) of the Ontario Human Rights Code. The present definition of age means "an age that is 18 years or more, except in subsection 5(1) where `age' means an age that is 18 years or more and less than 65 years." The present act permits discrimination with respect to employment for people under 18 and over 65 years of age. If this bill were to pass, the revised code would no longer permit discrimination on the basis of age to people over 65 years of age.
We believe there are important aspects to this proposed amendment to the code that would seriously affect universities and our ability to undertake our mandate within the province. In the first place, the effect of the bill would be to negate decisions of the Court of Appeal of the Supreme Court of Ontario and of the Supreme Court of Canada with respect to mandatory retirement.
The Ontario Court commented on the existing Human Rights Code section with respect to employment and we quote that decision at length. It refers to points that are of great interest to the universities. We believe that freedom to agree on a termination date is of benefit both to universities as employers and to our employees. It permits well-defined planning horizons, of course. It allows for a wage structure where employees are paid rather less in earlier years than their productivity and rather more in later years. In our case, it does provide us with concrete planning horizons, which facilitates the recruitment and training of new staff.
It has a number of other advantages. Certainly I think the most important from our point of view is that it does provide for regular openings for new workers in the university, with a regularly planned pattern of retirement for both the faculty and staff.
The Supreme Court of Canada also commented in this same case about mandatory retirement and its being the norm in many parts of the labour market in this country. Judgements of both of these courts and the concern with which the university community greets the proposed amendments flow from a series of major problems which would be created for universities were this legislation to pass. Let me look, first of all, at the issue of academic renewal.
Certainly we at the council are trying to be quite active publicly in telling Ontarians about the important role of universities and economic and social renewal in this province. I think the public, in turn, is looking to institutions of higher learning, both colleges and universities, more and more to be active contributors to finding solutions to the problems faced by our province and this nation.
Particularly in a time of economic difficulty, society has a need, for example, for the significant research output of our institutions and for the well-trained, highly skilled workforce produced by our universities and for the essential knowledge base that is continually being expanded by scholars throughout our institutions.
It is acknowledged, I think, by this government in its budget planning papers that education and training are essential features of any sort of economic recovery and that maintaining Ontario's economic competitiveness in the future will rely heavily on maintaining and improving the quality of our educational system and its products.
An essential ingredient in economic renewal is the ongoing process of academic renewal or academic revitalization. New ideas, new perspectives, new ways of doing things -- all must find their place in the modern university environment. Universities must not be allowed to stagnate, must never become too comfortable with the existing ways they look at the world. Universities must always be on the lookout for innovative approaches for doing new things and for doing the old things in better ways.
Academic renewal takes place in a number of ways. One of these is the recruitment of new, often younger, faculty members. I say "often younger," because we are finding that there are persons who would not be defined as the normal product, if you like, of the regular progression from secondary school to university to graduate school to the employment market who have gained employment in our institutions. Many of these people, I think, are female. Many of them have re-entered the educational market after stopping out for family responsibilities or other life experiences.
The recruitment of new faculty members brings new insights and energy to pursue major research activities. These faculty are a constant source of new and fresh ideas for the institution and they bring a creativity and vitality to the university community which is irreplaceable.
In recent times these new faculty have reflected the changing labour force and composition of Ontario society. For example, women now represent a majority of university undergraduates in this province. Almost 55% of full-time undergraduates are female. By way of contrast, among the existing faculty, just over 20% are female. In historical terms, women have made dramatic gains in being hired by Ontario universities in recent years. As recently as the 1970s, for example, only about 1 in 10 full-time faculty was female. These gains have been accomplished by hiring new members of faculty who reflect the changing gender distribution of the graduate student pool. Without these new hirings it would have been impossible for women and other minorities to have made such headway in gaining access.
In fact, the importance of recruiting these younger and more predominantly female faculty has been recognized in the past by the government of Ontario. In 1986, the Ministry of Colleges and Universities implemented a program of grants for faculty renewal at Ontario universities. Over the course of the past six years the government has spent $100 million on this worthwhile initiative.
At the upper end of the faculty age profile, the government has recently seen fit to offer extensive financial assistance to universities to enable older members of staff to retire early. Among these projects funded during the 1992-93 fiscal year by the transition assistance program of the Ministry of Colleges and Universities, 14 projects, involving a similar number of universities and costing the government well in excess of $6 million, were directed explicitly at encouraging faculty and staff to accept early retirement.
The stress by the government and the universities on early retirements recognizes that there are no major shortages of faculty or potential faculty to fill teaching and research positions. Indeed, a recently completed study in which both the universities and the government participated concluded, "Projections of supply and demand for replacement professoriate suggest that Ontario's universities are, on balance, well prepared for the 1990s in terms of increased production of doctoral candidates." An adequate supply of faculty will be available in most disciplines in the foreseeable future.
The financial situation: Recruitment of new faculty is also a crucial ingredient to the restoration of financial viability to Ontario universities. For most of the past two decades, Ontario's universities have seen the level of financial support which they have received from the provincial government decline precipitously in relation to the task at hand. More and more students apply to attend Ontario universities every year. In most of those years, our universities have accommodated a higher level of enrolment. More and more research is performed each year at the behest of federal granting councils and the private sector.
Yet operating grants per student, once inflation is taken into account, have declined in value almost every year. Provincial support of the university system each year represents a smaller and smaller share of government expenditures. Universities have been supported by the province far less generously on a per-client basis than hospitals, schools or correctional institutions. The portion of Ontario's economic activity which goes towards university education is far less than in the past.
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A major ingredient in the financial crisis currently facing this province's universities is also the age distribution of their faculty. Every institution has in place a salary scheme for full-time faculty which on the basis of proven performance recognizes career progress and moves individuals up a salary grid that allows them to progress through the academic ranks. Many of these salary schemes provide for larger annual percentage increases in salary for more junior faculty to move their salaries up the grid more quickly. However, it is still the case that a senior person, well within the full professor rank, may earn three times as much as a more junior faculty member newly recruited into the assistant professor rank at the same institution.
The financial viability of universities is dependent on senior members of faculty retiring and institutions being able to substitute junior people in their place. However, the high levels of hiring that occurred in the 1960s and early 1970s have left universities with a disproportionate number of faculty at the senior levels.
Universities have been among the hardest hit of all our institutions by the effects of the baby boom generation. In a normal situation, the annual cost of career progress increases to salaries would be offset by the retirement of more highly paid senior faculty. Increased recruitment of staff two or three decades ago has left in its wake large numbers of senior faculty, so that instead of the demographers' normal age triangle, with large numbers of people at the bottom and smaller and smaller numbers each year of age up the triangle, we have an inverted triangle, with the largest number of faculty in their 50s and fewer people at each younger age.
The most recent information available, which is for 1988-89, suggests that over two thirds of the full-time teaching staff at Ontario universities are at the most senior ranks, full professor or associate professor, and that the average for faculty at these ranks is 52 and 47 years of age respectively. Both of these median ages will have increased in the four years since these data were collected.
As these senior faculty age, the financial crisis will be exacerbated, at least until they reach the point where they must retire. Then they can be replaced by more junior faculty who can be hired at a much lower salary. In the meantime, universities must struggle on, coping with the financial crisis through programs of employment discontinuance, such as the early retirement of faculty and staff, layoffs and through demanding heavier workloads of the people who remain. The latter is reflected in ever-increasing class sizes and student-teacher ratios.
To suddenly abolish mandatory retirement would eliminate many of those retirement opportunities that have enabled universities to cope with the continuing financial crisis.
Information from the University of Manitoba, which operates in a jurisdiction where mandatory retirement does not exist, suggests that most faculty who are still employed when they reach the age of 65 do not choose to retire at that age or for several years thereafter.
Applying the most recent information available from that institution suggests that not being able to replace faculty aged 65 or over with younger or more junior persons would cost Ontario universities as much as $20 million annually. This cost is likely to escalate as the bulge of faculty currently in their 50s approaches retirement age.
Third, let me comment briefly on tenure. The fact that most of these senior faculty have tenure would make it extremely difficult to end their employment if mandatory retirement were to be abolished.
Tenure exists at Ontario universities to protect the freedom of expression that is so necessary to the academic enterprise. Without tenure, the free flow of ideas so necessary to the success of the academic enterprise and its spillovers to the larger society could be called into question. However, except under circumstances of gross misconduct, incompetence or persistent failure to discharge academic responsibilities, tenure comes to an end only when the faculty member dies or retires.
If mandatory retirement were abolished, it could prove difficult to remove many older tenured professors. This is particularly the case at institutions where faculty members are unionized. In such an environment it would prove difficult to establish stricter performance appraisal systems given the role of faculty and faculty associations in the governance of the institutions.
In summary, tenure is part of a package which includes mandatory retirement. In the words of the Ontario Court in the case cited above: "By giving up the right to indefinite employment, the faculty member receives a guarantee of tenure, favourable salary benefits, and a pension on retirement. It also provides a dignified way of leaving employment without embarrassing assessments as to ability to perform work."
Tenure provides an extraordinary level of protection for senior faculty members. At some point in the life of the faculty member, that protection must come to an end, and the present system, where it ceases automatically at age 65, is both equitable and relatively painless.
In conclusion, I would say that mandatory retirement is part of a package of rights and responsibilities which includes fair and equitable recruitment policies, career progress through the ranks based on merit, freedom of expression guaranteed by academic tenure and university pension plans which adequately protect employees when they retire.
To abolish any one of these provisions would throw the rest into doubt. To abolish mandatory retirement would challenge the whole process of faculty renewal in which the Ontario government has already invested considerable resources and in the long run could weaken the universities' ability to contribute to the renewal and competitiveness of Ontario society.
For these reasons, Ontario's universities oppose Bill 15. The proposed legislation, as drafted, fails to take into account the problems it would create for the universities of this province. Those universities are already in the midst of a financial crisis, exacerbated first by the provincial government's announcement of a 1% increase in funding for 1992-93, a 2% increase for 1993-94 and a 2% increase in 1994-95. Abolition of mandatory retirement would greatly worsen the crisis already at hand.
The Chair: Thank you. Questions or comments? Ms Akande.
Ms Zanana L. Akande (St Andrew-St Patrick): Thank you very much for a very thorough presentation. I do appreciate your point of view. I especially look at the area of cost and I can see where all those issues around cost do have a great influence on your decision to oppose this bill.
I am, however, quite concerned that you equate academic renewal, or the lack of the ability to implement it, with age. It seems to me that so many research awards have shown that the old have a great deal to contribute, when you look at the age at which many of these men and women are when they achieve that level.
So I would question you on it and I would wonder whether in fact that kind of renewal isn't more a product of a person's flexibility and ability to change styles, change directions, appropriate to the needs that are current, rather than age.
Dr George: I think that's a very important point and I would offer two suggestions. The first is that when it comes to faculty renewal, I think the norm has been that it is junior appointees who are entering the ranks as persons who reach age 65 retire. Those junior appointees have normally -- and I say "normally" -- been relatively young but not entirely so.
So it is possible, especially in certain disciplines like, for example, social work, that people are brought into the institution who are somewhat more mature, have a lot of professional service background and bring that blend of experience and academic credentials into the institution as they arrive.
The second thing I would say is that I'm a great believer in providing opportunities on a selective basis to faculty members and staff beyond the age of 65, but that does not mean I see it as a right.
In my own experience when I was a dean of faculty, I did negotiate with faculty members who were approaching retirement age for post-retirement employment. When faculty members had an especially strong research program or a teaching program or experience that was important to some of the service activities of the faculty and the university, those opportunities I thought enriched the university.
My concern is that there be the capacity for some kind of selection or choice among individuals who wish to offer their services post-retirement and to the institution to make selection from those individuals post-retirement.
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Ms Akande: Given that fact, then, would you be able to suggest or recommend, not necessarily now or here, some criteria upon which that kind of selection might be made? Because we're also interested in the area of fairness.
Dr George: In the institutions, there is an annual performance review of faculty. That annual performance review is conducted on the basis of three areas of contribution. The first is teaching, the second is research and the third is professional and community service.
What happens, in my experience -- and it may be limited to my own institution and to my own faculty -- as mandatory retirement looms, is that the criteria are imposed less rigidly in the annual performance appraisal. I think institutions begin to make some accommodation to individuals who are approaching retirement to ease their way into retirement after 65. However, there remain many faculty members who continue to be very good teachers in their 60s, continue to have very active research programs and continue to earn significant research grants from external funding agencies. It is those persons whose loss to the university I think is most deeply felt under mandatory retirement.
Based on the annual performance reviews, I think institutions are in a position to decide, on an equitable basis using the criteria that are normally employed in the evaluation of faculty, whom to offer post-retirement contracts to and whom not to offer them to.
Ms Akande: That brings us back to the point of entry, doesn't it? One other thing I was interested in, if I may, is that you mentioned there has been a significant increase in the hiring of women, especially in permanent positions, and you generalize, and other minorities. Are there statistics on the increase in the "other minorities" category?
Dr George: I'll ask Mr McAllister to respond to that question, if I might.
Ms Akande: I'd appreciate it.
Dr James A. McAllister: The data that we have available on a system-wide basis is pretty limited. At the present time, there's a committee of COU dealing with employment and educational equity. The first task of that committee is to design a database which will give this sort of information, and it's in the midst of doing that now.
Ms Akande: Will it give it and continue to monitor it or continue to collect it? Is it a process by which this information will continue to be collected?
Dr McAllister: It would be collected on an annual basis, yes.
Mr David Winninger (London South): You've certainly raised a number of interesting points, Dr George. My question has several parts, Mr Chair, and you'll have to forgive me if I go a little overtime, but I'm confident that if the Liberal members were here, they'd be anxious to yield me their time.
Mr Charles Harnick (Willowdale): I'm glad I got here.
Mr Winninger: As you know, Dr George, there are several other provinces, the two territories and the United States where mandatory retirement has, to a considerable extent, been eliminated, and the data that I was able to research shows that 1% to 2% of those who reach the age of 65 actually elect to stay on to work, and of those, two years later, nine out of 10 have already left employment. I was wondering, first of all, whether you had any figures on that, because I suspect, given this marginal 1% or 2%, that it wouldn't have a tremendous impact on your financial viability.
Dr George: I've not personally looked at the American data. We have presented in an appendix here for your information our understanding of the Manitoba experience which suggests a much more attenuated retirement pattern than the one that you depict for American institutions.
The estimate that we've put, admittedly a crude one, on the additional cost to the system of ending mandatory retirement is approximately $20 million, which would be about 1% of the total transfer payment to the institutions. So I think that is one measure of the cost.
I think the other measure of the cost is a much more difficult one, and that is the opportunity cost of not replacing faculty who are staying on by new faculty. I think it's fair to say that in all cases it is not trading up from a retiree to a new faculty person, because what you're giving up is a certain measure of experience and wisdom through experience. On the other hand, quite often you are gaining in energy and in fresh viewpoints.
The tradition of the university has been that faculty renewal through the replacement of retirees by junior faculty has tended to be an enriching device for departments and for institutions. The cost of change in that policy is not something that can be measured in dollars, not directly at least. But I think my experience as an academic is that the pain of seeing a long-standing colleague depart formally from the institution is matched -- sometimes undermatched, more times overmatched -- by the enthusiasm with which new faculty are brought into the institution.
I think it's fair to say that in most cases retired faculty, professors emeriti, who wish to continue an association with the institution, are given opportunities, albeit less remunerative opportunities, to engage in part-time teaching, to continue with a research affiliation with the institution. The institution continues to administer their research grants if they are successful in grant competitions.
Mr Winninger: Given that there are, as you've indicated already, arrangements that are entered into with some faculty members who become emeritus or other informal arrangements, surely if there were a form of automatic tenure review which would kick in after age 65, something going beyond that annual performance review that you probably have right now that deals with merit pay and things like that, you would be able to weed out some of those who no longer make the strong contribution they once did.
In addition, ancillary to that question, even though women may now represent 15% to 20% of many university faculties, could we not also have a situation of younger women displacing older women?
Dr George: The latter scenario is unlikely. What has been changing in faculty with the change in participation rate first in undergraduate programs, with increased female participation, then in graduate programs, is that the percentage of new recruits among faculty who are women has become higher and higher, and I expect in long-run equilibrium it will be proportional to the percentage, to the gender split, in graduate schools. I think it is an important challenge for us to see that the gender split in graduate schools mirrors that in undergraduate programs and that in faculty it mirrors that in graduate school.
That said, I think it is unlikely, given the gender distribution of senior faculty, that bringing in new female faculty will drive out older female faculty. The more likely outcome is that newer female faculty are driving out older male faculty.
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On the first point, I am really uncomfortable with the notion that there'll be a special review at age 65. I think that does strike me as age discrimination. I don't see any reason why it should be at 65 and not at 60, at 55, at age 50. The policy issue would not be a specially significant review at age 65 but a specially significant review at five-year intervals, which is a different policy issue, it seems to me.
Institutions are places of tradition too. It seems to me one of the traditions is that faculty members who are easing themselves into retirement are facilitated by their departments. If we were looking at special reviews, at special age thresholds, it would increase anxiety, increase tension within the institution and increase potential difficulty within the institution. I think the current system is an accommodation to many aspects of compensation and non-compensation matters in the university.
Mr Winninger: Okay, just one final part to that question: As you said earlier, often the academic career path is based on merit, and while you say that younger women won't displace older women, there will be older women who have reached the pinnacle of their success during very difficult times to advance their career to that point, individually, along with many male professors, who will be arbitrarily displaced at age 65 to keep things harmonious and comfortable within the academic sector.
I think we need to be clear that we are sacrificing some professors who reach age 65, distinguished people who actually have accumulated a body of knowledge that can make them more effective teachers and researchers than the younger, more cheaply paid faculty in many cases who are entering the work stream. I think we need to be clear about that, that this is some kind of, I guess, pragmatism that you are advocating here.
Dr George: I would have two pragmatic answers to that and I think the one in particular, the second one, has a lot of social significance.
The first pragmatic answer is that institutions, even within funding restriction, have often been able to offer part-time teaching or other kinds of contracts to persons of retirement age who are able to continue to make a significant contribution in the teaching or research area to the university. I see that as something that administrations have been continuing to do. Their ability to do so has been greatly restricted by funding restraint, however.
The second thing, and the more important issue in many ways, to my mind, in terms of social significance, is that if mandatory retirement ends, if senior professors remain in place, it will mean a significant decrease in renewal appointments and junior faculty appointments. It is there where we've been making the greatest gains in terms of redressing gender imbalance and bringing in members of underrepresented groups into the professoriate, and I think the social cost of putting an end to mandatory retirement will bear very heavily at the recruitment end of the faculty continuum.
I think the cost, socially, will be extremely high in terms of opportunities for appointment forgone. We will not be able to hire new women faculty, new faculty from underrepresented groups, because senior faculty are staying on past age 65. The financial consequences of that, I think, will be disastrous for the renewal process among junior appointees and for the opportunities for redressing gender and group imbalance that those represent.
Ms Jenny Carter (Peterborough): I don't disagree with most of what you've said, although I have one or two quibbles and, no, I don't have a conflict of interest because I have a 64-year-old husband who is a professor. He's committed to retirement and scaling down already, although he's still getting research grants.
I don't agree that new is always better. I think we have to be very careful about that. I don't think Shakespeare has been outdone yet, although he's very old hat indeed, and of course there is also the point that you have acknowledged, that learning can be cumulative over a lifetime, so that an older person can have advantages. Obviously, they've spent more time listening and learning and thinking and should have reached a certain maturity.
But the issue that really concerns me and which I think hasn't been addressed is the person who starts his or her career late. They're more likely to be female, but it could be a man. Again, my husband switched at age 40 when he had his midlife crisis, and that was when we emigrated and did the whole thing. His academic career started at that point.
But I think if people have worked over years to gain the qualifications, have got a PhD and become employed maybe at 50 or even later, their knowledge is up to date, they're fresh and keen, hopefully, and it doesn't seem quite fair to chop those people off at 65 in the same way you would somebody who started at 30 or wherever. I presume that their income also would not be as high as that of the person who had started younger. So I wonder whether some exception could be made for people in that category.
Dr George: I think that's a very good point, and the case I'm reminded of is the case of Olive Dickason from Alberta, whom I know and who I think is very good.
Ms Carter: Right, but I can think of others I know.
Dr George: I think there will always be those kinds of cases which sort of leap out at us from general policies. Those cases have been relatively few in number. There may be more in the future, but I think that will always represent a distinct minority of the cases of persons approaching age 65. I think that's a classic case, especially for somebody like Olive, who has remained a very productive scholar, where the post-retirement appointment opportunity would be exercised by an institution.
My own way of handling that when I was a dean was to say to an individual: "Obviously, it's in our interests if you can take retirement, because that means a lot of remuneration and benefits are shifted on to the pension fund. I will save that money from my operating budget. What I can do is to say I will give you a contract, post-retirement, which will pay you for doing some teaching for us, which will bring your income, if you like, up to what it would have been if you hadn't retired." That allows me to hire a junior replacement and also, in most cases, to have some fiscal savings so that the senior administration is happy too.
I think there are these kinds of arrangements that have been common in institutions. The question is, should they be a right, and whose right? Is it the right of the employee, as I think David would have it through this amendment, or is it, if I can use a crude term, a management right, something where the chairman of the department, or the director of the school and the vice-president academic, the dean and the president, decide, "This person is somebody we really have to keep around, and we would like to offer him something that makes it possible"?
Ms Carter: On the other hand, you see, part of your original argument was the invidiousness of having to distinguish between people who are useful at 65 and those who are not, and under this arrangement you could be back with that problem again.
Dr George: No, I don't think the point was the invidiousness of doing so. I think as a matter of course it would be invidious, but if it were a question of some individual saying, "I don't wish to stay on beyond retirement. I may choose to do so because I don't want to go through that review," or, "I may do so because I have better things to do. I want to open a consulting business" -- I think the invidiousness comes when all at a certain age are put through that hoop when some of them may wish to retire. Then it would be a question of who wishes to continue beyond retirement, and whether that should be a matter of right for the employee or a matter of selection according to well-established, well-known academic criteria that both faculty and administrations understand and have abided by throughout their careers.
Ms Carter: I certainly hope there's room for creativity in the kinds of ways in which people can continue to have some attachment after 65. I think different people have different things to offer and that variety should be there.
Just before I give up my turn, I'd like to say that I do agree with you very much about the starvation of funds that universities are undergoing, and I think that's very unfortunate.
Dr George: That has forced many difficult choices.
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Ms Anne Swarbrick (Scarborough West): Thank you, Dr George; I think you've made a very clear presentation. Am I understanding you correctly to be saying that the vacancies created by mandatory retirement are necessary for the appointment of women and other minorities, the target groups for employment equity, to the point that effectively the public policy thrust of employment equity would be undermined by the elimination of mandatory retirement?
Dr George: I think it would be seriously threatened by the elimination of mandatory retirement.
Ms Swarbrick: I assume you're saying particularly in today's economic realities.
Dr George: The pressure on us has been to annually reduce operating budgets in real terms, because our income has tended to grow by less than the rate of inflation and salary settlements have tended to exceed the rate of inflation. As a result, the operating budgets have been squeezed, and the normal way of handling that is through attrition of faculty numbers, which is greater the less able we are to replace highly paid senior faculty by more lowly paid junior faculty.
Ms Swarbrick: I thought the point you referred to from the Ontario Court decision, as reprinted on page 6, was a very interesting one, the idea that mandatory retirement is effectively a tradeoff for tenure and favourable salary benefits and pension on retirement. As someone who doesn't have a knowledge of the history of how we came about arriving at tenure in universities, was that your impression of the origins of tenure and mandatory retirement as being a tradeoff in --
Dr George: I don't think it was true at the origins of tenure, but I do think there has grown, over the past generation or two, a greater identification of tenure with job security.
Most universities would have dismissal procedures. Those dismissal procedures are not used very often. What happens in their stead is, in most cases, an annual performance review. If performance is good, fine; if it's not good, a series of meetings, usually with the immediate supervisor or chair or director. If it continues to be below standard for a couple of years, the meetings would be heightened. There would be attempts to encourage people to redress those deficiencies, perhaps to retool in certain areas, but there is a long tradition of moral suasion and negotiation in those cases.
I think it's fair to say that job security has become more closely identified with the tenure system. It's very hard to separate them out because academic freedom impinges on so many aspects of the job scenario.
The Chair: Thank you, Ms Swarbrick.
Ms Swarbrick: Just one last question. Is there time?
The Chair: Very briefly.
Ms Swarbrick: I'm not familiar with the situation of how decisions are arrived at in terms of how much research versus how much classroom teaching time professors are required to share, but I understood that that's a factor here as well, that as the professors become more senior they're more likely to choose, if they're allowed to, to spend more research time, and that a consequence of that can be an increase of the ratio of professors to student class size. Is that a factor in this or not?
Dr George: The standard practice is that each professor will be expected to contribute in the teaching and research and the professional and community service fronts. In my institution, which I think is fairly normal in its practices, those proportions would normally be 40-40-20. In performance appraisal and annual salary adjustment, the weightings would be roughly 2-2-1, teaching, research and professional and community service.
There is usually a normal teaching load in a department. It might be five courses, it might be six courses. Professors are expected to carry a normal teaching load plus a normal research load. Sometimes there are tradeoffs at the margin: A very distinguished researcher might teach a little bit less, a less distinguished researcher might teach a little bit more.
Most institutions which consider themselves to be emphasizing both teaching and research would not allow one to the exclusion of the other. It is not normal, in most institutions, to have research professors who do no teaching or to have teaching professors who do no research.
Ms Swarbrick: So you're saying that balance is not adversely affected by the age of the professors.
Dr George: No. In normal circumstances it is not.
Mr Harnick: Very briefly, on the second-last page of your brief you talk about the experience of early retirement at York University and OISE. The availability of that early retirement seems to me to indicate that you have almost an equal number of people taking early retirement as you have retiring after the so-called mandatory 65 years of age. That seems to suggest to me that the idea of mandatory retirement is not all that necessary if there's an early retirement package in place, if these numbers are valid in any meaningful way.
When you further factor into that the fact that a large number, or I would think a calculable percentage, certainly, of individuals have health problems as they get into their later 50s and 60s, that would be another attrition factor. So from what I read here, the idea of mandatory retirement may not be all that necessary to supply you with the numbers you need to accomplish the employment equity that you desire. Can you comment on that?
Dr George: Quite often early retirement is more expensive, at least in terms of annual costs, because special early retirement incentives have been used in universities, as in other jurisdictions, to enhance the rate of retirement.
I don't know the details of these particular 10, for example, who retired before the age of 65; Jim may be able to add to this. But in universities in recent years there have been a variety of early retirement schemes which have meant short-term cost in return for prospective long-term gain in the operating budget. In many cases, I must say, the early retirements have not been accompanied by replacements because of the sheer pressure to find savings in the operating budgets.
Mr Harnick: But a minute ago you indicated that the idea of a person retiring and coming back at a salary that would make up the difference between his pension and his actual income would have been a cost saving. By the same token, I would suggest, the idea of early retirement by way of an early retirement package and then hiring younger, less experienced new teachers would also present a saving in the longer term.
Dr George: It does present a saving in the longer term; I agree.
Mr Harnick: What I'm concerned with is that I see some inconsistency in what you're saying.
Dr George: I guess I don't, but that's fair enough. The fact is that any time a senior person leaves the institution, for whatever reason, you effect a saving in the operating budget. If you hire a junior person in replacement, there is some kind of net saving in the operating budget. Often with early retirements, what happens is that although the costs of that salaried member are dropped from the operating budget there are sweetener packages necessary to induce early retirement, which become a charge on the operating budget. So those will be a short-term charge, even though the person is strictly off the books in terms of being a teaching and research resource; they may continue on the books for as long as 18 months. In that case, you don't have the immediate impact of the savings; they are deferred until the end of the sweetener.
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Mr Harnick: There may still be a saving, even with the sweetener, but the saving is obviously less.
Dr George: Yes, and it's often used up, at least for this period of time, bridging time, before it's off the operating budget.
The Chair: One brief question that's arisen. Mr Winninger.
Mr Winninger: Thank you. I'm glad you came back to me, Mr Chair.
Interjection.
Mr Winninger: Well, I could seek unanimous consent.
This is logically connected to Mr Harnick's question, actually. Given that there are people who retire anyway, and given that there are attractive early retirement packages -- and I don't know if you keep data on target groups and to what extent they're being hired -- would it not be possible that every faculty member who takes early retirement or retires at 65 be replaced by one of the target groups, who qualifies otherwise for academic hiring?
Dr George: Who qualifies otherwise for academic hiring. Let me say in principle it would be possible, but let me just point out a couple of practical issues.
One is that we are faced with a situation of relatively small numbers, in many cases. One of the difficulties we face in this whole discussion about the representativeness of university populations is that I think participation rates in higher education are relatively high for members of those groups who complete, say, six OACs in the Ontario setting. The real social challenge, it seems to me, is that completion rates through six OACs are so low. I think it's really important for all of the educational sector to work together on addressing that issue, of increasing participation rates through secondary school, through completion of the OACs, through entry into undergraduate and graduate school, and eventually into selection in appropriate numbers into faculty positions.
Ms Akande: I would be remiss, Mr Chair, if I didn't respond to that. May I, please?
Dr George: I have a second point to make first. The second thing is that because of relatively small numbers, there is a distortion in the labour market associated with representatives or members of those groups. For example, there are certain disciplines where the gender bias remains very strong. My own discipline, economics, is one of those. The labour market for female economists for academic positions is at a significantly higher salary range than it is for males who are entering positions. So there is an impact on operating budgets through an affirmative action hiring program. That's why I say that in principle that can be accomplished. There are some practical concerns that need to be addressed, but I think on balance the answer is yes.
Ms Akande: May I?
The Chair: Briefly, please.
Ms Akande: I think the numbers of those who graduate from those other minorities is significant; in fact, numbers great enough to make their places quite known among the applicants for these particular positions, the very well-qualified people who are frequently subsequently hired in other universities. They exist in great numbers. Having taught at one of the universities, I know this. There seems to be a pre-screening that eliminates them from the ranks.
I might suggest, though, that on page 3 you have, "New ideas, new perspectives, new ways of doing things all must find their place in the modern university environment." You also have, "In recent times, these new faculty have reflected the changing labour force and composition of Ontario society."
One of those statements is not quite true. I would suggest to you that the changes in perspective and ideas and the new ways of doing things might well come from those who in fact are culturally different and who would be less imbued with the traditions that now exist at the university.
Dr George: I agree with you. One of the challenges, of course, is that by the time one goes through four years of an undergraduate program, a graduate program and often post-doctoral work, there is a time lag. I'm fully aware of that time lag, as are my colleagues. I think it is important that we do as much as we can to provide opportunities and to change the mix of faculty at institutions to better reflect Ontario society. I would just point out that one of the things we are doing this fall is introducing a pilot study for both admissions to faculties of education and for first-year full-time enrolment at Ontario universities to elicit information, on a voluntary basis, from students as to ethnic and cultural origins and extent of physical challenge, if any. Because one of the things we are both lacking, both the universities and not just the critics of universities but those who are urging universities to move more quickly, is a database to make those issues more transparent and to inform action on those issues. We are addressing that. We acknowledge that it's an important area.
Mr Gary Malkowski (York East): Do you have any kind of studies or current research that now identifies the numbers of people or professors themselves who may be disabled? My second question is, do you know of any professors who have taken early retirement because of disability?
Dr George: I think those are important questions. The difficulty in responding is that data on professors with physical disability are really not in the public domain. Those data are only available on a voluntary basis, so they're known only on that basis within the institutions. One of the difficulties we have faced with the human rights legislation is that it is difficult to acquire that kind of information. I think it's extremely important information, but it is not immediately available. It has to be provided, I think, on a voluntary basis.
Second, I don't know of specific numbers or specific cases of individuals who have taken early retirement because of disability. I'm sure, just because of the distribution of disabilities by age, that there must be some cases of that but none that I know of in my own direct experience as an academic administrator.
The Chair: Mr George, Mr McAllister, on behalf of this committee I'd like to take this opportunity to thank you for coming and appearing before us today.
Having no further business before this committee, this committee stands adjourned until after routine proceedings on Monday, November 30.
The committee adjourned at 1708.