Alice Laberge, Acting Chair of UBC, Corporate Director of RBC, time to disclose. On 1 September, the Faculty Association of UBC requested that you please
call upon the Board of Governors to approach Professor Gupta to renegotiate the terms of his resignation agreement so that both the University and Professor Gupta are able to speak fully to the reasons for his resignation.
On 3 September, the Graduate Student Society of UBC openly stated:
The GSS has concluded that the practices of the UBC Board of Governors are not sufficiently transparent to ensure that UBC’s values – integrity, public interest, mutual respect and equity – are maintained.
We know what you must be thinking: there is not much difference between UBC and RBC. That’s why Corporate Directors are needed on BoG and in the President’s Office.
In academia and banking, confidentiality or non-disclosure agreements are increasingly common. These agreements are increasingly used to move what would otherwise be public into a private or nonpublic arrangement, under the aegis of privacy protection.
In 2004, the Federal Information Commissioner expressed concerns that civil servants, lawyers and managers in public institutions in Canada were managing “to find ingenious ways to wiggle and squirm to avoid the full operation of the law.” Reflecting what we see nowadays at UBC, the Commissioner observed” “The attitude has truly become,’Why write it when you can speak it? Why speak it when you can nod? Why nod when you can wink?'”
In “A Love Affair with Secrecy,” Berlin writes that the “Access to Information Act was supposed to get government documents into the hands of Canadians. Instead, it has created a state in which there are often no documents to get.”
Increasingly, at UBC and RBC, public information becomes private.
At URBC UBC and RBC, non-disclosure agreements are increasingly common to deflect distracting things such as Freedom of Information requests.
Regarding President Gupta’s resignation, the BoG and Legal Counsel compressed and reduced an inordinate amount of public information to privacy protection. That’s unsustainable and troubling. How much is too much?
Please respond to the FAUBC that the terms of the confidentiality agreement have been renegotiated.
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Some say Stephen, you know full well that, on this momentous birthday, UBC was founded by RBC. RBC is a lot older and knows better and that is why its Corporate Directors are still needed to run the University. Grandaddy Macdonald, with all his RBC money, must’ve stated in his confidentiality agreement, like that of Nostradamus, that a RBC Corporate Director would be needed at 100 years. I stand corrected.
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