There has been some brouhaha in Ontario about Canada Christian College (CCC), an evangelical school in Whitby, being given the title “university” and being “allowed to offer degrees”.  There is both less and more to this story than meets the eye.  Allow me to walk you through it.

Let’s start at the beginning: when does a university become a university and who gets to grant degrees in Ontario?  Well, until 2000, you needed an Act of the Legislature.  CCC received permission to issue thirteen degrees (Bachelors, Master’s and Doctorates in Theology, Christian Counselling and Sacred Music, Bachelor’s and Master’s in Divinity and Religious Education and Doctorate in Ministry) in a Private Members Bill in 1999.  This bill did not however, grant use of the term university.

In 2000, the Harris government introduced the Post-Secondary Education Choice and Excellence Act, which created a whole new process for offering degrees and using the name “university”.  The Act set up something called the “Post-Secondary Quality Assessment Board” (PEQAB for short) – a group of five non-governmental worthies from across the province who review applications from organizations which wish to offer degrees, aided by a secretariat located inside the Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities.  The Secretariat, in turn, calls on the services of academic experts from across the country in reviewing applications.  The main client over the years has been Ontario colleges, who now offer 4-year degrees in a range of subjects.  But private organizations (secular and religious) use the service, too, as do Indigenous institutions (Six Nations Polytechnic has a couple of degree programs in the pipeline right now) as to out-of-province providers such as Athabasca University, Northeastern University and (until recently) Charles Sturt University of New South Wales.

The application is a two-stage process.  First, you submit an “organization” review, which is meant to contain all the procedural stuff: organizational governance, management structure, policies on everything from tuition refunds to academic freedom, etc.  This is usually easy for existing organizations to pass, but if you’re a start-up it can be tricky to navigate.  Separately, PEQAB will look at the curriculum for your degree program.  This process is pretty vigorous: academics in related program fields from across Canada will take a fine tooth-comb to every proposed course, as well as the progression structure and graduation requirements.  The staff and expert recommendations are given to the Board; if the Board approves, it goes to the Minister for sign-off.  Ministers can and do ignore Board reports: two religious universities (one Baha’i and one Buddhist, IIRC) were given Board approval under the McGuinty government but nixed by the Minister (pretty sure it was Chris Bentley).  Overall, it’s a rigorous and appropriate way to regulate degrees.

That said, Section 2 of the legislation makes it clear that you don’t need to go through any of this if your power to grant degrees is enshrined in a Legislative Act.  Mainly, that was a device to exempt existing universities from any of these procedures (Ontario, pretty much uniquely in the world of higher education quality assurance, gives older universities a pass on quality assurance because they are older universities).  But where universities were limited to giving out only certain types of degrees (e.g Theology), they still had to go through the PEQAB process in order to offer new degrees, as Tyndale University – another evangelical institution which got an Act similar to CCC’s in 1986 – recently did with respect to its Bachelor of Education program.

Got all that?  Good.  So, two weeks ago the provincial government passed Bill 213, a truly astounding grab-bag measure, which among many other things proposed to i) change CCC’s name to “Canada University and School of Graduate Theological Students” (not Canada Christian University – just “Canada University”, which is just awful) and ii) permit the College to offer degrees in Arts and in Sciences.  This may not sound like much and there is precedent at Tyndale University, which used a similar procedure to introduce a Bachelor of Arts degree back in 2003 as well as doctoral degrees in Religion, Theology and Divinity.   But CCC is, to put it mildly, a bit more controversial than Tyndale.  Its president, Charles McVety, is a man of strongly homophobic and anti-Muslim views, who believes that tradable carbon emissions credits will lead to the “one world government of the Anti-Christ.”  He is in fact so far off the charts that he managed to get his weekly TV show on Crossroads Television (a Conservative, faith-based station) thrown off the air for being too outlandish. 

The initial opposition reaction muddied the waters a bit.  A lot of the initial howl was in effect: “you’re going to let this Islamo-/homophobe issue degrees”?  But that was a wrong line of attack, because the degree-granting ship sailed twenty years ago.  Instead, the furore should have been: how on earth is the Province of Ontario going to let someone who does not believe in Science issue Science degrees? 

The Tory line of defence was completely bizarre.  It was, in effect, that CCC “was going through the same tough process as everyone else”.  This seems to be a reference to the fact that earlier this year, CCC submitted both a name change request and its organizational review (but not, significantly, two program reviews for new degrees in Arts and Sciences – remember, the org review is just a pre-req) to PEQAB.  But neither had yet gone to the Board for a decision as of mid-October (the name change application is still on the PEQAB site, the org review was taken down after the story broke two weeks ago).  But this is simply nonsense: the entire point of putting this in legislation is to avoid scrutiny from PEQAB. 

My guess is that what happened is this:  CCC started the PEQAB process in the summer.  At a very early stage, it became clear that it would likely not pass PEQAB’s organizational review test because its policy on academic freedom would be considered totally inadequate (you can read it here: in fact it is a policy on student academic honesty, nothing to do with academic freedom at all), and even if by some miracle it did, the idea that a review panel of Canadian scientists would ever green-light a Science degree from an institution run by a creationist is simply a non-starter (I can sort of imagine an Arts degree, because they’d probably model it on Tyndale’s, which is legal even if it never went through the PEQAB process, but it wouldn’t have been a sure thing.)  And so, it decided to go the backdoor route, via legislation and its friends in government (McVety’s support of Ford in the extremely tight Tory leadership race on 2018 is well-known).

So that’s the story.  A previous Conservative government put in place a reasonably rigorous system of quality control on the introduction of new programs; while this government is doing an end-run around it to reward a friend of the government with generally repugnant views.  And then lying about the process. 

I wish this government could be better.