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“The impacts on staff have not yet been determined. We have some very difficult decisions to make,” read an emailed statement from the university. “We know that with these levels of reductions, there are simply not enough non-salary savings or revenue growth opportunities available for us to balance the 2019–20 and 2020–21 budgets without a reduction in positions.”

Budget cuts included a 7.9 per cent reduction to MacEwan’s provincial Campus Alberta grant, tied with Bow Valley College for the largest proportion of funding cut from any institution in the province.

For MacEwan, the grant cut equates to a $9.1-million loss. The school also lost the entirety of its $3-million Infrastructure Maintenance Program grant.

But McGrath said the cuts are actually worse than they initially appear because they apply retroactively to the school’s 2019–20 budget. Accounting for the fact that MacEwan has a fiscal year of July 1 to June 30 as opposed to the province’s fiscal year of April 1 to March 31, as well as the administration’s expectation of a further cut to the grant of 6.5 per cent effective April 1, 2020, McGrath says the school has until June to make up a $17-million shortfall.

Under the Post-Secondary Learning Act, institutions may not submit a deficit budget to the province, meaning that MacEwan has a short period of time to find savings equivalent to about seven per cent of its $253-million budget.

“We have to fit 15 months of cuts into eight months or less, because we have to balance the budget,” McGrath said. “We have to do this by June 30 of 2020, the end of our fiscal year. Essentially, since April of 2019, when you consider the retroactive nature of the reduction, we’ve been spending money we don’t have.”