The quiet disappearance of non-regular faculty across the province and the diffusion of responsibility among governments and institutions
Written by Laura Morales Padilla (she/they) // EIC
Visuals by Kayla Kim (she/her) // Contributor
The difference between a regular and a non-regular instructor is invisible to students. Still, non-regular status—also referred to as sessional, term or contract faculty—is an important distinction for administrations and faculty unions across post-secondary institutions as it determines working conditions. While performing the same job and teaching the same courses, job security, benefits and compensation look very different for non-regular faculty, especially when institutions face financial struggles.
As reported by the Courier, decades of underfunding led public institutions to rely on international tuition, which is why the 2024 cap on study permits and other immigration policy changes triggered a sector-wide crisis. Capilano University was no exception. President Jason Dewling’s presentation during the October senate meeting showed that new visa approvals plummeted from 2575 in 2023 to 180 in 2025.
To address the lower enrolment, courses at CapU are currently being cut if they fail to meet an 80 per cent threshold. This would be 28 students in a standard 35-student class, unless they meet the criteria for an exception.
Between 2020 and 2025, CapU conducted the Capilano Graduating Students Surveys of students who graduated in each academic year. The Courier obtained a summary of the results through a freedom of information (FOI) request sent in June 2026. The surveys asked recent graduates to evaluate instructors, program organization and course scheduling on a scale from poor (zero per cent) to good (100 per cent). The only evaluation question that has consistently been below 50 per cent in the last three years is “scheduling of courses,” with the lowest score being 40 per cent in 2025. The impact of the 80 per cent threshold on this metric is yet to be assessed, as well as the potential loss of revenue due to students taking courses at other institutions when they are unavailable at CapU. Additionally, according to the university’s FOI response, no 2026 survey is planned due to staffing shortages.
The long-term consequences of the university’s response to declining enrolment remain uncertain. Yet the disproportionate impact that the sudden shift in enrolment had on non-regular faculty was not unforeseeable or inevitable.
The Courier gathered perspectives from non-regular and regular faculty, the administration, a senior steward from the Capilano Faculty Association (CFA) and the chair for the Non-Regular Faculty Members Committee to understand the challenges non-regular faculty face and how their precarious work conditions affect the long-term health of the institution.
What does it mean to be non-regular faculty (NREG)?
Non-regular faculty (NREGs) have “no assurance for ongoing work here,” explained Dr. Douglas Alards-Tomalin, CFA senior steward. “Work is assigned to them by their functional area based on availability,” he added, recognizing that the university can lose talented faculty if they get a permanent full-time position elsewhere, since many NREGs do work at multiple institutions to make ends meet.
Depending on the faculty’s credentials and experience, they are placed on a salary scale in which step 10 is the lowest and step one is the highest. As explained by Dr. Lesley Schimanski from the Non-Regular Faculty Members Committee, most NREGs would be placed at or near the top step based on their qualifications, but they start at Step 10, which is currently 65 per cent of the top step. Unless there are exceptional circumstances where a program requires unusual skills, credentials or experience, NREGs are placed on scale once they’ve taught eight sections—the equivalent of a full-time year’s workload—which can take years since NREGs only get the workload that is available after REGs’ workloads are set. Moreover, no matter how qualified they are, NREGs are capped at step four once they are placed on the salary scale—which is about 84 per cent of the top step—and they advance up one step for every eight sections worked. Meanwhile, REGs can be placed immediately as high as step one. The CFA negotiated a higher cap in 2020 and 2024. Until 2020, placement was capped at Step eight, which is 71 per cent of the top step.
For an instructor who went through the regularization process at CapU about two years ago (REG1), the difference in pay was shocking. When describing the experience of receiving their first pay as a REG, they wrote
“it really brought home for me how significant the disparity is in pay. Given that the work involved in teaching the same courses can be so similar, I find the difference difficult to justify and, frankly, unfair.”
The Courier asked the university administration if they have a target or ceiling for the proportion of teaching delivered by non-regular faculty. The answer was no, with the clarification that “Teaching assignments are governed by the collective agreement.” Dr. Schimanski pointed out that during peak enrolment times, around 45 to 50 per cent of course sections were being taught by NREGs. She explained that the lower pay for NREGs creates a potential incentive for the university to avoid regularization and hire more NREGs instead.
According to the collective agreement, “The University recognizes the importance to employees, their families and to the community of a stable employment,” which is why when regular faculty’s workload is reduced, they have rights such as severance pay and retraining. When the university finds it necessary to reduce the workload or number of employees, due to low enrolments, programming changes or shortage of funds, they have to provide the information on which they base their decision to the union.
When it comes to NREGs, the process looks very different. “They don’t communicate anything with me,” said an NREG who is still working at CapU in an interview with the Courier. They were confused when they realized their name was missing from the schedule after two terms of consistent work. “Am I working in the Spring?” the NREG remembered asking. “They were like, ‘No, you’re not on the schedule.’”
According to Alards-Tomalin, the union is unclear on why there would ever be opposition from the university to regularize someone. The need to hire constantly “drains the time and resources away from the dean and the coordinator,” he explained, which leaves less time for program development, student recruitment or chairing committees. NREGs would clearly benefit from job security and from being paid according to “where they would rightfully fall on the salary scale,” stated Alards-Tomalin, and “it benefits the University greatly too in that they [non-regulars] don’t leave for other institutions, and are more committed to working here.”
He questioned the logic of avoiding regularization to prevent future reductions. With reductions, he refers to when the university lowers a REG’s committed workload below what was guaranteed in their appointment letter, which carries costs, since reduced faculty have rights to severance pay and retraining. The existence of a reduction process for REGs and the agreement’s language around it, reflect a shared recognition of the importance of such protections. Upholding those rights for regular faculty while avoiding regularization, the process that extends those rights to NREGs, creates an inconsistency that affects how accountable a university is for the number of employees it hires. “Opposing regularization now because there’s a worry that in the future they may need to be reduced is not a valid argument in our mind,” Alards-Tomalin said.
The Courier asked the university administration about the workload involved in the hiring process for NREGs, and what overseeing the probationary period looks like. On October 7, they responded that “Hiring and evaluation are ancillary duties expected of all faculty members under Article 6 of the agreement. The search, hiring and evaluation processes are the same for regular and non-regular faculty.” As Alards-Tomalin pointed out, the additional work involved in the continuous hiring process for non-regulars “often goes unrecognized” and depending on how many people are hired per year, it may take time from other department priorities.
When asked what risks does the university consider when deciding between having someone on reduction versus not regularizing someone, the university administration wrote that “the words ‘risks’ and ‘deciding’ may not accurately characterize the regularization and reduction processes.” The administration described both as “distinct processes governed by the collective agreement, and the university administers them in collaboration with academic departments according to the agreement’s requirements and established procedures. They are not alternative options from which the university selects based on a risk analysis.”
As stated by the administration, the collective agreement does describe the requirements and procedures that trigger a REG position, with an important condition: “so long as work at the commitment level is assured for the next academic year.” This is where the university’s assessment determines the outcome, meaning that even if an NREG has worked the required number of years and taught the required number of sections—the conditions that are in their control—the university can argue that there is no assurance of enough work to support the commitment level calculated for them as a REG, and therefore regularization does not occur.
Moreover, the university’s role is not limited to “administering” the collective agreement’s procedures, as those procedures are the product of years of negotiation between the administration, the union and the Post-Secondary Employers’ Association during collective bargaining. The union has pushed to bring NREG working conditions closer to REG conditions, such as by paying NREGs according to where they would fall on the salary scale. According to Alards-Tomalin, the employer has resisted. As he noted, “steps towards recognizing the equivalence of the work done by faculty in both roles has only ever been a Union priority and not an administrative one.”
On the other hand, as pointed out by REG1, NREGs are also expected to contribute to committees, curriculum development and other work for their department. This becomes challenging to do while working for multiple institutions and worrying about finding work the next term. “That ongoing uncertainty was exhausting and made it difficult to feel fully settled,” they wrote, reflecting on the lack of reciprocity when it comes to commitment. “It’s hard to ask people to invest deeply in a place of work when that place isn’t providing them with security or demonstrating a comparable investment in them,” they added.
“I don’t feel as connected to Cap as I was in the past,” said the NREG. Earlier this year, they still saw a future for them at the institution. Now, they are exploring other opportunities. “Precarious employment will do that to you,” they added.
Diffusion of responsibility and the quiet disappearance of non-regular faculty across the province
Since the beginning of 2024, public colleges and universities have laid off 1,300 faculty, as reported by The Tyee in June 2026. However, the number of NREGs lost is not reflected in this number because work is assigned to them based only on availability. Frank Cosco, president of the Vancouver Community College Faculty Association, said at a webinar organized by BC Policy Solutions in June that their college lost close to a quarter of their regular faculty and “all of our term instructors, of whom we had a couple of hundred.” Pauline Greaves, president of the Langara Faculty Association, said during that webinar that all of their temporary faculty had also been lost. They were simply told, “we don’t have any work for you,” she said. As temporary faculty, they were not entitled to severance.
Because non-regular faculty are not formally laid off, and are simply not given more work, it is difficult to calculate how many lost their jobs or saw their workload shrink significantly.
However, CapU’s Faculty Association (CFA) president Michael Begg did manage to calculate the amount of work lost by the end of last year. “In Fall 2025 non-regs had 75% less work than in Spring 2024 (two terms the CFA has figures for),” he wrote.
Diffusion of responsibility occurs when no single actor perceives themselves as responsible or accountable for a collective outcome. The loss of work without severance for hundreds of non-regular faculty in the context of the post-secondary education crisis illustrates that: colleges and universities blame the federal government for capping international enrolment without consulting with the sector and the province for inadequate funding. The province pointed at the federal government for the cap on study permits being decided unilaterally, and at institutions for an administration culture of “don’t manage, rather complain about inadequate funding,” as stated in Don Wright’s funding formula review.
The federal government expected universities to play a filtering role in selecting “high-quality” immigrants for Canada, so it placed the blame on “bad actors,” referring to private institutions that scammed international students. More indirectly, it pointed at public institutions for recruiting and expanding far beyond what Canada’s own population needed, realizing that a profit-driven education system could not serve as a reliable filter.
The number of actors involved makes it hard to hold any one of them accountable for the consequences of unsustainable recruitment. However, as Dr. Dale McCartney explained in his dissertation about the history of international student policy in Canada, this difficulty is not accidental. It is an example of policy heterarchy, in which responsibilities overlap and are not clearly defined. For contrast, in a hierarchy, the government would instruct institutions on how to recruit students.
In a heterarchy, those decisions are left to the institutions themselves but within a limited range of choices, because the government still defines the expected outcomes. In this context, the B.C. Federation of Post-Secondary Educators (FPSE) stated that “the government encouraged and, at some level, sponsored the aggressive recruitment of international students as a solution to the funding gap at BC’s colleges and universities.” To their point, the federal government created the three-step (study-work-stay) immigration pathway. It helped market certain programs as a route to permanent residency for students from lower-middle income countries, who had no other immigration pathways available.
Moreover, the province failed to hold institutions accountable for the actions that led to, and the consequences of, unsustainable growth. International students made up 51.3 per cent of CapU’s full-time-equivalent enrolment in 2023–24, when the target in their 2021 internationalization plan stated “no more than 40%.” During this time, many international students took online courses at Thompson Rivers University and transferred the credits afterwards, as there were not enough courses at CapU for them to get the minimum of nine credits needed to maintain Post-Graduation Work Permit eligibility.
In June 2024, the B.C. government’s International Student Enrolment Guidelines became effective, stating that “international enrolment should not exceed 30%” and that “institutions should provide international students with transparent tuition fee costs […] over the standard duration of the student’s study program.” CapU reported 48.7 per cent for 2024-25 in its Accountability Report and continues to not disclose full-program costs, as international tuition fee increases have been a year-by-year decision. In December 2025, the Courier asked CapU’s administration if the university had faced any kind of sanction for not following these guidelines. The administration’s response was one word: “No.”
Regularization
“I didn’t have a clear understanding of where I stood in the process of whether regularization was a guaranteed outcome if I did everything I was supposed to do,” explained REG1. They acknowledged that they could’ve sought out information at the time, but also recognized that the onboarding process can be overwhelming on its own.
“There is a lot of information to absorb outside of thinking about regularization, and NREGs are often working across multiple post-secondary institutions,” they wrote, adding that “it’s hard to find the time or capacity to read through and understand all the intricacies of the regularization process.” They triggered the REG position before the decline in international enrolment but didn’t get it automatically. The interview process took place during the semester, “meaning additional administrative work on top of a full course load, and with very little notice for the interview,” they added.
A faculty member who was a coordinator at the time (REG2) told the Courier that not all faculty were on board with the rate by which the university was growing. “We argued that it wasn’t sustainable to hire as many people as we were being asked to hire and we were told to do it anyway,” they said. By hiring multiple people without the certainty that there will continue to be enough work for everyone, explained REG2, the university risked creating precarious conditions even for REGs.
Uneven increases in salary expenses and erosion of trust
Even though CapU’s reliance on international enrolment is now widely accepted, that was not the case three years ago. The growing number of international students in 2023 overwhelmed students, who struggled to find a spot in the courses they needed. Departments scrambled to add courses with very short notice to meet demand, faculty received hundreds of emails from concerned students trying to secure a seat in their courses and even transit had bus lines so long they prompted the Capilano Students’ Union to push TransLink to increase service levels.
According to REG2, the administration wouldn’t acknowledge that the number of international students they had enrolled had surpassed sustainable levels. “What we saw in our classrooms did not align with what the administration was reporting in regards to international student numbers,” they said. Back then, when the Courier inquired if CapU was concerned about relying on international enrolment to cover rising operating costs, Paul Dangerfield, the former president, responded: “At CapU, we are not reliant on international student tuition to deliver quality education.”
Another factor undermining trust in CapU’s administration, as explained by MoveUP Vice-President Christy Slusarenko in March, is that the impacts have been distributed unevenly. “Our union has been sounding the alarm for years that they are far too top-heavy,” she said, referring to administrative, exempt and excluded positions.
To verify this claim, the Courier put together the following graph breaking down CapU’s expenses over the last six fiscal years, showing how faculty, exempt staff, and administrative salaries changed alongside the rise and fall of international tuition revenue. The figures and percentage calculations have been reviewed by CapU’s Vice-president Finance & Administration, who confirmed their accuracy on October 14, 2026.
The area shaded in yellow represents international tuition revenue, and the three lines represent expenses from the different employee groups. The faculty (teaching) line increased alongside tuition revenue but at a slower rate and then stabilized when tuition dropped. Meanwhile, the administration line continued to increase almost at the same rate even after international enrolment dropped.
The gap between faculty (teaching) and administrative salary changes is partly explained by their different compensation structures. Non-regular faculty salaries are initially capped, while administrative positions —including the president, vice-presidents, managers and other non-union employees—are eligible for “performance-based” increases after completing one year of work.
According to CapU’s policy B.516, these increases are calculated through a merit matrix based on available funding and four core principles: transparency, performance, differentiation and accountability. But how these are measured remains unclear, as executive compensation is approved through the Board of Governors’ in-camera process. In some cases, the publicly measurable outcomes do not appear to match the principles on which merit increases are based.
For instance, Toran Savjord, former Vice-President of Strategic Planning, Assessment & Institutional Effectiveness, saw his total compensation rise from $195,363 in 2021–22 to $247,857 in 2024–25, with disclosed performance-based increases of roughly seven per cent per year. Over that same period, CapU’s international enrolment exceeded the 40 per cent target in its 2021 Internationalization Plan—with the consequences documented above—while domestic FTE targets went unmet, outcomes that could be considered relevant within the portfolio the merit matrix is meant to assess.
A new leadership and the pathway forward
The Courier requested a comment from president Jason Dewling regarding the uneven percentage changes in the chart above.
“University executive recognized the need to review the university’s administrative and exempt employee complement and engaged MNP to undertake a comprehensive review and provide recommendations,” wrote Dewling.
In other words, the review conducted by the business consulting firm MNP will inform decisions focused on “flattening the organizational structure,” according to the President’s Report to the Board of Governors on October 13, 2026.
“With the significant decline in international enrolment, we have already begun realigning programs and operations, and this review will help inform decisions about organizational structure, staffing levels and operational effectiveness. This work is part of our broader efforts to address projected operating deficits and ensure the university is organized to meet current and future needs.” —Jason Dewling, President and Vice-Chancellor.
Meanwhile, collective bargaining between the Capilano Faculty Association (CFA) and the university is ongoing, meaning the union is currently negotiating faculty’s terms and conditions of employment. As CapU’s website notes, “universities must balance competitive compensation to attract and retain talent with limited funding and operational sustainability.” The issue of non-regular faculty’s placement on the pay scale is among the matters being negotiated, as indicated in the email exchange with the administration. The CFA’s ongoing efforts to improve NREGs’ working conditions are evident both in their bargaining proposals and in the way union representatives speak about NREGs. “We value them greatly,” Dr. Schimanski said, stressing that they do the same work as regular faculty.
Colleges and universities have pointed to the government’s cap on study permits to explain NREGs’ loss of work. But these institutions were not passive observers of a surge of international students. No student can obtain a study permit without first receiving a letter of acceptance from an eligible Canadian post-secondary institution. Encouraged by the funding and policy environment, these institutions were actively investing in international recruitment.
They shaped the growth that led to the current crisis, leaving the faculty whose work delivered that growth to bear the risks of a change in demand, without the protections that regular status provides.
As these institutions adapt to a sudden drop in demand, it is important to question how growth should be structured and whether it is acceptable for a university to be risk-averse when it comes to faculty regularization, while being risk-tolerant when it comes to growing at an unsustainable rate.