Where were eastern Ontario's public colleges when Kemptville needed them?

Province-appointed facilitator Lyle Vanclief addresses the public
at the July 16th town hall meeting in Kemptville. He refused to take
any questions.  (Image: Nick Gardiner, The Recorder and Times)

As many of you already know, on March 12th the University of Guelph announced that it will be closing its two Ontario Agricultural College campuses in Kemptville and Alfred, leaving the only remaining agricultural diploma in the province at Ridgetown in Kent county - a campus located over 600km away from most eastern Ontarians and teaching for entirely different agricultural conditions.

In their March 12th statement the university attempted to justify its austerity actions,

"Despite efforts over the past several years to introduce new revenue-generating educational programs and attract new students, enrolment at both campuses remains stagnant while operating costs have increased. Costs per full-time equivalent student are substantially higher at these campuses..."

The wording of the announcement is very telling. The decision was not educationally motivated but financially - what they call "stagnant" enrolment rates have been consistent without decrease ever since U of G took over Kemptville operations in 1997.

Kemptville is being discarded as a bad investment by the university, regardless of its essential nature to the economy of eastern Ontario, it failed to be "revenue-generating". I for one was under the impression that colleges were a public service, not a source of revenue for university administrators to furnish their sunshine list salaries.

I myself was hoping to attend Kemptville this September and was shocked by the news. Kemptville has been an institution among eastern Ontario farmers for nearly 100 years. Any and every kid hoping to take over the family farm went to Kemptville if they could. For generations it has been the basis of farm education in our communities, and without it a whole generation of rural youth will be without access to the latest agricultural knowledge.

Fortunately for me there was an alternative. Immediately after the closure announcement for Campus d'Alfred talks were underway with Collège boréal and La Cité collégiale, Ontario's two French-language colleges, to keep the doors of the tiny francophone campus open. In the end a funding partnership with Collège boréal, through which Alfred already had a partnership for its veterinary program, managed to save the campus. By March 29th the institution was once again accepting applications, just over two weeks after the official announcement of closure.

Other prospective Kemptville students are not so lucky to be bilingual as I am. For them, the choice faced right now is between a jump to the other side of the province and abandoning the family farm, or no education at all.

So, while Ontario's French language colleges immediately came to the aid of Campus d'Alfred, where were the English language colleges of eastern Ontario?

Afterall the Kemptville College Renewal Task Force, a committee formed by the Kemptville College Foundation, announced on April 8th that they were in talks with St Lawrence and Algonquin colleges. Yet by a month to the day later when the task force launched a formal request for expressions of interest, it seems the colleges had lost interest.

When I was in Kemptville on July 16th for a town hall meeting (that's me with the ponytail in the video!), we were informed that the task force had received only two formal expressions of interest by the May 28th deadline - one from a private sector group and one from a public sector group, both of which were said to be "international" (as in, not Canadian institutions) but remained unnamed.

Furthermore we were told that at this point Kemptville would not be resuming operations in time for September, and that even a potential September 2015 start date was unlikely at this time. The solution that was ultimately reached for the interim was having the municipality of North Grenville operate the college itself, a task it was willing to take up so long as it could be assured that municipal taxpayers wouldn't be footing the bill. Since this solution requires both negotiations with Guelph over their "intellectual property" (the agriculture diploma program) and negotiations with the province over funding, the task force informed us they were expecting a three-year period before the college would be up and running once more.

So what happened to the interested colleges? It couldn't be that they got cold feet about having satellite campuses since St Lawrence College already has three campuses, as does Algonquin. At any rate we weren't getting any answers from the task force as to why the colleges had dumped them - when asked outright, the task force dodged the question. Presumably because any negotiations which took place were strictly confidential. 

From Algonquin we can get a bit of information from the minutes of the Algonquin President's Council for their March 12th and April 2nd meetings,

"PC members discussed the potential impact and opportunities of the closure on Algonquin College and agreed it will conduct a high level financial and academic program review of the Kemptville College entity and report back to PC by the end of June on what opportunities may be available..."

The minutes give a report back date of April 2nd. Sure enough in the April 2nd meetings, we see this,

"C. Brulé updated PC members on the review of the University of Guelph's Kemptville campus. Discussion included steps taken to date, anticipated next steps and the expected frequency of the exchange of updated information. Discussion followed regarding apprenticeship and communication strategy."

And then, nothing. The minutes list no follow-up date, and Kemptville isn't mentioned in any subsequent PC meetings. From St Lawrence we get even less information, the minutes of the May 6th meeting of the Board of Governors gives a brief mention by Vice President Academic Lorraine Carter,

"The Sr. Vice-President provided a quick verbal update on Kemptville, pointing out that the team is still looking at ways that St. Lawrence College could support this demographic"

I've sent an email to both Claude Brulé and Lorraine Carter, who are mentioned in the minutes, to ask whether Algonquin or St Lawrence respectively plans to be involved in the Kemptville renewal process but as of yet I've received no response. I haven't got high hopes that I'll receive anything but the same vague answers provided at the town hall meeting.

One thing's for certain, both St Lawrence and Algonquin definitely chose to abandon Kemptville and consequently abandon all of eastern Ontario's agricultural communities. Perhaps they made the same revenue-based analysis that U of G had made. Both of these colleges have much larger budgets than Collège boréal and yet were seemingly unwilling to come to the aid of this vital educational institution in their locale the way boréal did so swiftly. And without these colleges' aid on the horizon, the future of agricultural education in the province looks bleak indeed.