VANCOUVER—Deneige Nadeau loves teaching critical and cultural theory at Vancouver’s Emily Carr University of Art + Design — but she doesn’t know how much longer she’ll be able to afford it.

She’s part of the two-thirds majority of instructors there who are on short-term contracts, getting paid per course with no guarantee they’ll be able to work again next year. Having been offered only one course to teach each term this year, Nadeau also serves beer to make ends meet.

“I’ve come across this concept in social science research about ‘hope labour’ and all the work that somebody does in the hopes that it will lead to something in the future,” Nadeau said in an interview with The Star last month.

A report released Thursday reveals new details about how many university instructors in Canada may be in the same situation — data that until now has been a blind spot for researchers and advocates due to the fact that it’s not reported by Statistics Canada.

The report entitled Contract U comes from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, based on Freedom-of-Information requests with all 78 publicly funded Canadian universities. It shows that more than half of all academic appointments made by the universities that responded to the requests weren’t full-time, permanent, tenure-track jobs but temporary contracts.

A total of 53.6 per cent of positions offered by universities in the 2016-2017 academic year were on contract. About 80 per cent of them were part-time.

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Chandra Pasma, a post-secondary researcher at the Canadian Union of Public Employees who co-authored the report, said precarious employment has long been a top priority of the union.

“There are surveys and there are lots of anecdotes of what (precarious academic appointments) are like for workers and for students,” she said. “One of the biggest challenges that we have is the complete lack of data.”

Karen Foster, associate professor of sociology at Dalhousie University in Halifax, helped establish those detrimental impacts.

Foster co-authored a report that found most contract academic staff surveyed would rather have full-time secure positions and that uncertainty about their futures led to stress and health issues in addition to taking time away from research and student services.

She told The Star she was glad Pasma went through the painstaking process of making individual requests to all Canadian universities to get the missing information.

“Someone needed to do it,” Foster said. “Institutions, and people who want to gut post-secondary institutions of funding, were hiding behind that lack of data ... This data tells us that it is that bad.”

It also shows that universities’ reliance on contract academic staff varies across provinces, disciplines and individual institutions.

When Pasma requested data from all 78 publicly funded universities, 22 of them initially either refused, provided incomplete data, asked for “excessive” fees or failed to respond. It took many appeals and complaints before Pasma settled on a final data set from 67 universities.

According to the data, 13 universities had more than two-thirds contract appointments. The university with the highest proportion was Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, which had 78 per cent contract appointments. Institut nationale de la recherche scientifique in Quebec City was the only responding institution with no contract appointments.

Among provinces, B.C., Ontario and Quebec surpassed the average. Quebec had the highest proportion of contract appointments at 61 per cent, while B.C. had 55 per cent and Ontario had 54 per cent.

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David Robinson, executive director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers, said it’s unclear why Quebec stands so far apart from the other provinces but it may have to do with how universities are organized there. Compared to other provinces, he said, Quebec university teachers have seen a longer-standing labour movement that may mean more robust job protections and hiring procedures.

The report concludes that universities’ reliance on contract faculty isn’t exclusively a function of reduced public funding. If it was that simple, Pasma wrote in the report, you would expect universities within provinces to have approximately equal rates of contract staff.

But that doesn’t seem to be the case. The proportion of contract appointments varies by institution, discipline and urban-or-rural setting, suggesting that the choices of individual institutions plays as much of a role as funding does.

For example, the University of British Columbia has 44 per cent contract appointments while Simon Fraser University has 78 per cent, even though both universities are large institutions based in Vancouver.

Universities located in urban centres had a larger proportion of contract appointments. Calgary universities, for example, had 49 per cent contract appointments even though Alberta’s average is much lower at 39 per cent.

The exceptions were Quebec, where Montreal had a lower-than-average proportion of contracts, and Ontario, which showed no difference between Toronto and the rest of the province. (However, the University of Toronto and McGill University in Montreal, both large institutions, were not in the data set.)

Humanities and social sciences had more contract instructors than the sciences and professional disciplines. Veterinary medicine and agriculture were the only two disciplines with less than one-third contract faculty on average.

Contract positions at Canadian universities are not new. They have long been used to substitute for professors on leave or to allow someone with specific expertise who isn’t employed by the university to teach certain courses.

“What we have seen more and more is the increasing reliance on contract positions not just to fill temporary gaps but also to fill long-term employment contracts,” Robinson said. “It’s being used as a two tiered system.”

Foster said there’s little incentive for universities to change their practices with respect to contract staff unless they’re put under pressure to do so.

“I don’t think that individual institutions will be surprised by these findings; it’s just that now it’s out in the public,” she said.

Provinces can use legislative and regulatory tools, such as implementing equal-pay-for-equal-work laws. Ontario did this with Bill 148, portions of which Premier Doug Ford’s government has promised to repeal.

Some students believe they have a role to play in protecting their instructors’ job security. Terra Poirier, who recently graduated from Emily Carr, recently published an art book called Non-regular on the experiences of her precariously employed instructors.

“There’s no future if education itself has become so degraded,” Poirier said. “If the university is exploiting my teachers, then that’s not going to stand.”

Correction — Nov. 1, 2018: This article was edited from a previous version that incorrectly stated Terra Poirier is currently an undergraduate at Emily Carr. In fact, Poirier was an undergraduate student at Emily Carr until she graduated in May 2018.

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