Firing at Athabasca U suggests there are now two classes of public board members in Alberta – those appointed by the UCP and those not

Writing in The Tyee Thursday, Alberta-based investigative journalist Charles Rusnell reported that Athabasca University’s president was fired Wednesday without a vote of the institution’s entire board of governors.

Three board members representing sections of the distance university’s community told Mr. Rusnell that they were not informed of the vote to remove Dr. Peter Scott, who was hired a year ago in January 2022 and had been resisting the United Conservative Party’s plan to use the university as a tool for economic development in the Town of Athabasca ever since. 

The three said they could easily have been reached. 

The same day, the university’s official position was “that Athabasca University’s Board of Governors made the decision about Dr. Scott in accordance with board bylaws, which include rules for how meetings are conducted and how votes are held.”

Contacted by Mr. Rusnell, the board’s UCP-appointed chair, Byron Nelson, used the same talking point, telling the reporter that Dr. Scott was fired after a “proper vote based on our bylaws,” and, moreover, that “we had a vote as per our bylaws that was in line with our governance rules.”

The Globe and Mail caught up to Mr. Nelson yesterday and he admitted, reluctantly by the sound of it, that the way he conducted the vote wasn’t exactly “best practices” for a supposedly democratic board, but that it couldn’t be because the board was secretly considering who they should hire to replace the guy they’d already decided to fire. 

Leastways, that’s the way I’d interpret Mr. Nelson’s explanation as transcribed by the Globe’s reporter, who wrote: “‘The way that this was conducted, while legal, I would acknowledge was not best practices,’ said Mr. Nelson, who is a lawyer. ‘It wasn’t best practices and it couldn’t be best practices.’ The process was less than ideal because the situation was ‘unique’ and required an ‘extreme amount of confidentiality,’ Mr. Nelson said.”

The Globe also identified two board members who had not been informed of the vote, both representatives of the university’s students – in other words, positions that couldn’t be controlled by the province’s UCP Government, which appointed Mr. Nelson last May and which without question was the driving force behind the firing of Dr. Scott and its timing, three weeks after the death of his wife in Australia. 

Article 8.2 of the General Bylaws of the AU Board of Governors, which deals with notice of meetings, states, “The accidental omission to give notice of a meeting, or the non-receipt of any notice by, (sic) any person entitled to such notice shall not invalidate the proceedings of the meeting. The failure to give notice of any particular item of business will not invalidate the proceedings of the meeting for which the notice was given.” (Emphasis added.)

The wording of the second sentence of Article 8.2.7 likely explains how it can be true that members of a democratic board were not told of the vote and yet the vote is technically legal at the same time.

In his conversation with the Globe’s reporter, Mr. Nelson argued that contacting all board members wasn’t necessary anyway because he had the votes he needed to fire Dr. Scott. 

“This was not a close vote,” he told the Globe’s reporter. “It was the overwhelming decision of the board.”

Of course, as history shows, an eloquent speaker can sometimes sway members of a governing body to vote in a way they didn’t plan to when they entered the meeting room. Which is why, in a case like this, both “best practices” and natural justice require a vote of the full board to be held. 

Some useful conclusions can be drawn from this development that are applicable to all post-secondary institutions in Alberta, including the University of Calgary and the University of Alberta. 

First, there are now two classes of board member on post-secondary institution boards, those who can expect to be notified of contentious agenda items and those who cannot be so sure they will be.

In the case of the AU Board, the former category appears to be made up of members hand-picked by Advanced Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides when he purged the board of NDP appointed public members in October 2022.

When he replaced those four board members with seven new public members, Dr. Nicolaides said he did it to advance his plan to force 500 staff members to move to the town of 2,800 located 145 kilometres north of Edmonton, where AU’s small campus is located. 

Second-class board members are those who cannot be counted on to do the minister’s bidding, such as representatives of students, grad students, academic staff, tutors, and so on. (See Article 3.1.1.) This is likely particularly so in the case of students at the 53-year-old distance university because the majority do not come from Alberta. In some years, as many as 40 per cent of registered students lived in Ontario. 

Second, that university and doubtless other public boards cannot be expected to abide by traditional best practices when decisions politically important to the government are in play, as is the case now with a provincial election scheduled for May 29 and promises made to voters in Athabasca about the size of the university’s workforce in the town. 

For the same reason, Alberta institutions under the hand of the UCP government cannot be expected to behave with much compassion when political considerations are in play. As noted, when he was fired, Dr. Scott was on leave in Australia mourning the death of his wife three weeks ago after a short battle with cancer.

The Globe reported that Dr. Nicolaides said in a statement yesterday that “it was his understanding that bylaws were followed, but any board members who feel the rules were breached should raise the issue with the chair.”

Once again, no laws were broken, a phrase that really ought to be translated into Latin and put on the coat of arms of Alberta as the province’s aspirational official motto. Nullae leges fracti sunt. 

As for taking it up with the board chair who made the decision, who was once a candidate to lead the Alberta Progressive Conservative Party, that does not seem like a formula likely to succeed.

Nothing to see here, folks. Please move along.