At a town hall meeting on February 7, McGill President Deep Saini, Vice-President Fabrice Labeau, and Provost Christopher Manfredi announced a $45 million budget cut for the upcoming 2025-26 fiscal year. The university has been facing financial pressures from the Quebec government that have led to the current $15 million deficit. These include the financial repercussions for the tuition increase on out-of-province Canadian students, the recalibrations of grant funding for Quebec universities, the clawback in tuition revenues, federal and provincial caps on international student admissions, level-five French requirements for out-of-province students, and restrictions on the use of capital grants which fund infrastructure maintenance and operating costs.
Critically, the brunt of these costs are expected to ripple through employment at the university. Manfredi stated in the town hall meeting that “staffing costs account for 80 per cent of our operating expenses, so most of the adjustments are going to come from reducing our staffing costs.” While faculties and other major administrative units at the university have received budget targets for the upcoming year, which gives them the discretion to eliminate activities that may accrue additional costs, approximately 250 to 500 jobs will be cut in the process of this $45 million correction. McGill has yet to release details on which specific jobs they are targeting.
In order to account for the full repercussions of these financial pressures, administration has announced plans to launch a multi-year initiative in two key phases. This initiative seeks to not only balance McGill’s budget for the upcoming years, but almost optimize administrative services, review the current management of academic programs, and launch plans for strategic enrolment. Phase One of this initiative is geared towards implementing immediate corrections in the coming years, which include cutting $16 million and $14 million from the budget for the 2027 and 2028 fiscal years, respectively. Phase Two entails what Manfredi claims to be a “major transformation of McGill.” This phase will be carried out predominantly through an international benchmarking initiative titled UniForum, which observes the measures other universities have taken to increase efficiency under reduced operating costs due to financial pressures.
The immediate impacts of these budget cuts will be felt most drastically in the academic lives of McGill’s students. In December 2024, McGill imposed a hiring freeze in light of the financial impact the tuition hikes had on enrollment rates. Manfredi stated in an email to the Montreal Gazette that “the goal of this measure is to reduce the number of employees in the short term through attrition rather than cutting positions held by current members of our workforce.” Now, however, it appears that this is no longer a short-term solution, and that the university will begin implementing layoffs. In the town hall meeting, Manfredi claimed that McGill will ensure equal treatment across all employee groups — but it has already become evident that the most vulnerable employee groups, such as teaching assistants (TAs), will become the first source of reduction for the university’s operating costs.
Last winter, the Association of Graduate Students Employed at McGill (AGSEM) initiated a month-long strike asking for a pay increase comparable to the hourly rates of other Canadian universities. They ultimately came to an agreement with McGill on a 15.5 per cent increase over the next four years, with their hourly wage increasing from $33.03 to $38.46, effective as of August 1, 2026. This means that TAs now are still facing the same conditions in which they began their strike. Moreover, with McGill’s new policy of attrition, the university will not be replacing the positions of those TAs who choose to leave. This leaves many faculties potentially understaffed as they try to navigate this semester and the upcoming school year. However, in the town hall meeting, there was little discussion about how these job cuts will directly impact this student-led position, especially since TAs are often a first point of contact for students.
Saini admitted that “it just really is impossible to say how many jobs, because we won’t know that until individual units — faculties, departments and so on — come up with their plans on how they are going to achieve the reduction in salary mass.” Deferring the judgement on financial planning to the faculties themselves leaves TAs unable to go directly to McGill administration about their grievances. Saini, Manfredi, and Labeau emphasized how they are trying to maintain the reputation of McGill among the world’s leading universities. Manfredi assured students that they want to make sure that “McGill remains a place that provides [students] an educational experience that led [them] to choose McGill.”
However, these promises were made without a thorough explanation of how the budget cuts would directly impact the education students receive at McGill. TAs and professors work together to make sure that students are understanding course material in the most optimal fashion. It becomes difficult to “thrive in [one’s] research and scholarly endeavors,” as Manfredi put it, when one TA is assigned to large courses, often responsible for hundreds of students at once. The reduction in academic staff is guaranteed to put students’ educational experiences in jeopardy.