Note: I am writing this piece early on Friday morning, the day after this story broke. It is possible some details may have emerged over the weekend to render some aspects of this blog incorrect. Apologies if so.
On Thursday, the government of Ontario dismissed the Board of Governors at Conestoga College on grounds of financial mismanagement and replaced them with a single appointed administrator. This was grounds for schadenfreude among many folks who believe that John Tibbits and Conestoga single-handedly destroyed the Canadian housing market and/or the international student system. But I am here to tell you that something smells about this action.
The province apparently conducted an external audit of the college, which it chose not to release. Instead, it chose to cherry-pick three specific points in its press release: a possibly dodgy meal, a possibly dodgy business trip, and an absolutely outrageous financial settlement for the institution’s former President, John Tibbits.
Let’s take those in order.
The press release highlighted “a $1,300 dining expense for internal staff, where 50 per cent of the pre-tax total was alcohol”. Note the missing details, such as “how many staff were involved in this meal”? If it were three or four staff members, maybe this is a problem, but I can easily see a staff barbecue running that kind of tab. Which was it? Certainly, in the private sector something like this would raise no eyebrows at all. In the public sector it would, because you’re not supposed to spend any money on alcohol at a staff event. But this is a misdemeanor at best. Slap on the wrist stuff maybe, but at an administrative level, not a governance level: it’s nothing you would expect a Board of Governors to have known the first thing about.
Next, “the audit also uncovered a $23,000 trip to Italy taken by three senior leaders, and other similar trips, where the school paid for business class airfare, luxury accommodations and premium transportation”. It’s a bit hard to judge this one because we don’t know duration, purpose or anything like that, but I would point out a couple of things here. First “and other similar trips” is weasel-words. If this were a serious, systemic problem, presumably more details or total aggregate spending would have been described. Instead, the government chose to highlight a single trip which presumably is the most egregious example it could find. By inference then, though, most travel was therefore probably not egregious. Second, the wording of “the school paid for business class airfare” is striking because it doesn’t necessarily suggest that all three staff members were in B-class (go take a look at what B-class to Rome costs on Air Canada: even pre-Hormuz prices, it’s highly doubtful Conestoga could have bought three B-class tickets to Rome and kept it all under $23,000). Quite possibly it was only one person who travelled B-class, probably Tibbits. And there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with a CEO taking business-class on a trans-Atlantic flight, even in the public sector. Government of Ontario travel guidelines actually make it clear that public servants (senior ones, anyway) are very much allowed to take B-class for travel overseas.
I am not, to be clear, saying this this event was necessarily legit; what I am saying that given the obviously cherry-picked nature of this account, there is reason to suspect it’s not as egregious a violation as the government would like you to believe. And even if it was, accountability for such a lapse probably would not rest with the Board as a whole, but rather with the Board Chair who would normally be the one in charge of signing off on the President’s travel. Evidence perhaps for dumping one person, but not the whole Board.
That brings us to the issue of Tibbits’ salary and his severance package, which does look like a scandal, but not necessarily one that required an audit to uncover. The most complete coverage of this issue has come from The Sun’s Brian Lilley (hard to believe, but true). His description of the Board meeting where the severance package was approved has to be read to be believed. For reasons unknown, the Board Chair tried to pass the package without telling the Board what the package actually was – and succeeded despite significant opposition. This here is definitely a fireable offence – anyone who voted for something like that needed to be turfed. But as Lilley demonstrates, not everyone voted in favour. So, what’s the rationale for turfing the skeptics?
Finally, there is the issue of Tibbits’ salary. It’s not crazy that the longest-serving College president in the province would have the highest salary, and Tibbits was definitely long-serving (when appointed President of Conestoga, Bon Jovi’s Living on a Prayer was at the top of the charts). But what happened to his salary in the last few years was a bit of a scandal. He got a 28.6% pay boost in 2023 and another 20.7% pay boost in 2024 before taking a 5% cut in 2025. (My guess is that this was not all base pay but rather that he was given an incentive-related package which linked pay to enrolments to revenues or net revenues, all of which were ludicrously positive in 2023 and 2024, as I wrote about back here).
But here’s the thing – if it’s a scandal, it’s at least as much a Ministry scandal as a college one. There was quite simply no way the Ministry could not have known what was going on, not just because the salary sunshine list told everyone what was going on in more or less real time, but also because under public sector pay rules in Ontario, the ministry has to sign off on any presidential pay increase, either directly or by approving a set of “comparable institutions” to whose CEO’s salaries should be linked. One way or another, the ministry signed off on this every step of the way. If the Board has to be replaced, shouldn’t the Minister be replaced too?
Looked at like this, you really have to wonder what the rationale is for sacking the entire Board. Of the four specific charges the government levels, only one of them (admittedly the most egregious one) genuinely looks like poor college-level governance and even then, several members of the Board actually voted against. Why, why, why?
Here’s my guess. There’s a vengefulness in the air against colleges in general, and Conestoga specifically. It took the province awhile to figure this out; after all it was the feds who stepped to stop the madness at Conestoga, not the province, and for reasons that remain essentially unfathomable, the college still gets the largest number of international student spots under the Provincial Allocation Letter system. I suspect the government decided it wanted to punish Conestoga for (waves hands)…everything…and this was the best it could come up with.
And so, instead of Conestoga being governed by members of the local community, it is now run by Linda Franklin, a Toronto-based “administrator” who is there mainly as a “safe” pair of Tory hands. Yes, Linda Franklin was head of Colleges Ontario for many years, but that was an advocacy role, not an academic/administrative one. Her more relevant qualification, I suspect, is that she was briefly the President of the Albany Club, a joint which, if the old Progressive Conservative Party of Canada had been a religion, would have been their Masjid al-Haram.
This isn’t good. Given what’s been happening in the school boards and of course the government’s utterly egregious moves with respect to university admissions, one would have to be naïve not to see this as part of a creeping direct take-over of the education system by government. Even if it’s galling to have to defend Conestoga, things like truth, process and genuine accountability matter. So far at least, nothing about the Conestoga case suggests to me that these three things are anywhere near the top of the government’s agenda here.
