Dalhousie, faculty association ‘fairly close’ to a deal, union president says

Atlantic Canada’s largest university and the association representing the more than 1,000 staff members are getting closer to an agreement, the union president said on Thursday.

According to David Westwood, the Dalhousie Faculty Association (DFA) President, there are a “few issues outstanding,” but the two sides are getting closer to a final agreement that would see the majority of classes reinstated at the school.

“We’re in that last sort of 100 metres and we need to close and then make some compromises on a few more issues, and I think we could probably have a deal,” he told The Todd Veinotte Show. “It’s not currently something we can recommend to our members.”

The Dalhousie Board of Governors and the DFA discussed the dispute on Monday and Tuesday before the conciliation talks ended at 4:00 p.m. with no agreement or future plans to discuss, according to an update from the university.

This brief statement angered students and other community members who have been in limbo.

“Nothing productive happened until this week, and finally we were making good progress, and then it sort of ground to a halt as I said on Tuesday,” Westwood said.

Then, on Wednesday afternoon, the school shared that it had given the DFA a new offer and “encouraged” it to bring the details to the membership.

“In our final communication before the lockout, I made clear a 2%/2%/2% proposal on compensation was what the Board could offer,” Kim Brooks, President and Vice-Chancellor, of Dalhousie, said. “This new proposal represents an increase on that earlier offer and includes additional financial non-compensation items that we hope address some of the concerns articulated by the DFA.”

According to Westwood, the DFA invited the university back to the bargaining table for Thursday morning, but the school declined.

Return to class sticking point

Despite no plans to meet yet, Westwood said that there is one issue that the association and the university have not addressed.

“The major sticking point right now is actually not the contract, it’s the return to work protocol,” he said. “Because the lockout happened two weeks before the term began, there’s a two-week amount of time of class preparation that’s been lost and needs to be replaced.”

The DFA said that the university board is ignoring this factor, and Westwood said they are not treating it as a serious problem.

“But it is a major problem because even if we did vote on this deal today and our members accepted it, we need two weeks of time to get classes and labs ready to start the term,” he said.

According to Westwood, there has been “zero” discussion on this policy. He fears this is directly putting the semester in jeopardy because of the action the university took to lock employees out before the year started.

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“Everybody in the world warned them that this is precisely what would happen, and they ignored it. And here we are in a huge mess,” Westwood said.

On Wednesday, the Dalhousie Student Union organized a rally to ask the university for refunds on tuition, as it says each week that classes are cancelled represents about 7 per cent of the semester.

“This will probably be an extended fight, but it’s one that’s worth doing because students aren’t unhappy,” Maren Mealey, Dalhousie Student Union President, told The Todd Veinotte Show. “We believe that there’s an obligation on their end to uphold our quality of education.”

Students fear that more of the semester could be lost. Mealey said she’s had discussions with administrative staff who are exploring options to condense classes by dropping outcomes.

“In a program like nursing or engineering, dropping content doesn’t work quite as easily,” she said.