St. Thomas University, a liberal arts college in Fredericton, New Brunswick, has locked out its 160 unionized full- and part-time faculty and announced its intention to make use of the province’s reactionary labor laws to force a vote on its “final” contract offer.

The vote, which is to be organized by the New Brunswick Labour Relations Board, will likely be held in January. Never before has a Canadian university imposed such a lockout. Bishop’s University, of Lennoxville, Quebec, did briefly lock out its faculty last summer, but only after the university’s administrative staff, also members of the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT), had been on strike for several weeks.

St. Thomas’s Board of Governors and management have assumed a provocative, antiunion stance throughout the eleven month-long negotiations. First they tabled a raft of proposals aimed at strengthening management control over hiring and promotion and gravely compromising academic freedom. Then the Board insisted that its modified contract proposal be accepted as the framework for any new agreement and, when this ultimatum was rejected, locked out the faculty, who had yet even to authorize their union to call a strike.

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