By Jonathan Barazzutti

Since 2020, steep increases to tuition fees have triggered large-scale protests by the students who pay those fees at the University of Alberta, University of Calgary, University of British Columbia and at McGill University and Concordia University in Quebec, among many other schools. (A freeze on tuition fees in Ontario since 2019 explains that province’s absence from the list.)

It’s true that tuition has been on the rise. According to Statistics Canada , between 2006-2007 and 2024-2025, the average undergraduate full-year tuition fee at a Canadian university grew from approximately $4,900 to $7,360.

But do the students really know what’s behind the increases?

University administrators looking to deflect responsibility like to blame provincial government cutbacks to post-secondary funding. Here, the evidence is unconvincing. Going back two decades, nationwide full-time equivalent (FTE) student transfer payments from provincial governments have remained essentially constant, after accounting for inflation. While government grants have remained flat, tuition fees are up.

The issue, then, is where all this extra money is going – and whether it benefits students. Last year researcher and consultant Alex Usher took a close look at the budgeting preferences of universities on a nationwide basis. He found that between 2016-2017 and 2021-2022 the spending category of “Administration” – which comprises the non-teaching, bureaucratic operations of a university – grew by 15 percent. Curiously enough “Instruction,” the component of a university that most people would consider to be its core function, was among the slowest growing categories, at a mere 3 percent. This top-heavy tendency for universities is widely known as “administrative bloat”.

Administrative bloat has been a problem at Canadian universities for decades and the topic of much debate on campus. In 2001, for example, the average top-tier university in Canada spent $44 million (in 2019 dollars) on central administration. By 2019 this had more than doubled to $93 million, supporting Usher’s shorter-term observations. Usher calculated that the size of the non-academic cohort at universities has increased by between 85 percent and 170 percent over the past 20 years.

While some level of administration is obviously necessary to operate any post-secondary institution, the current scale and role of campus bureaucracies is fundamentally different from the experience of past decades. The ranks of university administration used to be filled largely with tenured professors who would return to teaching after a few terms of service. Today, the administrative ranks are largely comprised of a professional cadre of bureaucrats. (They are higher paid too; teaching faculty are currently paid about 10 percent less than non-academic personnel.)

This ever-larger administrative state is increasingly displacing the university’s core academic function. As law professor Todd Zywicki notes, “Even as the army of bureaucrats has grown like kudzu over traditional ivy walls, full-time faculty are increasingly being displaced by adjunct professors and other part-time professors who are taking on a greater share of teaching responsibilities than in the past.” While Zywicki is writing about the American experience, his observations hold equally well for Canada.

So while tuition fees keep going up, this doesn’t necessarily benefit the students paying those higher fees. American research shows spending on administration and student fees are not correlated with higher graduation rates. Canada’s huge multi-decade run-up in administrative expenditures is at best doing nothing and at worst harming our universities’ performance and reputations. Of Canada’s 15 leading research universities, 13 have fallen in the global Quality School rankings since 2010. It seems a troubling trend.

And no discussion of administrative bloat today can ignore the elephant in the corner: diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). Writing in the National Post, Peter MacKinnon, past president of the University of Saskatchewan, draws a straight line from administrative bloat to the current infestation of DEI policies on Canadian campuses.

The same thing is going on at universities across Canada that have permanent DEI offices and bureaucracies, including at UBC, the University of Calgary, University of Waterloo, Western University, Dalhousie University and Thompson Rivers University. As a C2C Journal article explains, DEI offices and programs offer no meaningful benefit to student success or the broader university community. Rather, they damage a school’s reputation by shifting focus away from credible scientific pursuits to identity politics and victimology.

With universities apparently unable to restrain the growth of their administrative Leviathan, there may be little alternative but to impose discipline from the outside. This should begin with greater transparency.

Former university administrator William Doswell Smith highlights a “Golden Rule” for universities and other non-profit institutions: that fixed costs (such as central administration) must never be allowed to rise faster than variable costs (those related to the student population). As an example of what can happen when Smith’s Golden Rule is ignored, consider the fate of Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario.

In early 2021 Laurentian announced it was seeking bankruptcy protection under the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act, under which a court-appointed manager directs the operations of the delinquent organization. Laurentian then eliminated 76 academic programs, terminated 195 staff and faculty, and ended its relationships with three nearby schools.

Ontario’s Auditor-General Bonnie Lysak found that the primary cause of the school’s financial crisis were ill-considered capital investments. The administrators’ big dreams essentially bankrupted the university.

The lesson is clear: if universities refuse to correct the out-of-control growth of their administrations, then fiscal discipline will eventually be forced upon them. A reckoning is coming for these bloated, profligate schools. The solution to higher tuition is not increasing funding. It’s fewer administrators.

The original, full-length version of this article was recently published in C2C Journal.

Jonathan Barazzutti is an economics student at the University of Calgary. He was the winner of the 2nd Annual Patricia Trottier and Gwyn Morgan Student Essay Contest co-sponsored by C2C Journal.

Sam Cooper

Officials testified that Chinese state-backed grow networks have created a $153 billion black market in Oklahoma alone, with suspicious activity reported near the nation’s largest munitions plant.

In chilling testimony to Congress, law enforcement officials warned that Chinese organized crime groups, operating with Beijing’s support, have transformed America’s marijuana boom into a $153 billion black-market industry in Oklahoma alone — an enterprise marked by execution-style killings and grow sites planted near sensitive U.S. military infrastructure.

Suggesting that this Chinese crime wave — largely unrecognized by the American public — is part of a trillion-dollar enterprise embedded in multiple states, legislators heard that the epicenters include Oklahoma, Maine, California, and Michigan. Thousands of Chinese-run farms have proliferated under lax state laws, with workers smuggled across the Mexican border and forced into slave-like conditions. Properties are acquired through real estate and legal fraud, while the operations feed a nationwide criminal network tied to the Chinese Communist Party, fentanyl trafficking, weapons smuggling, prostitution, and global money laundering.

The Subcommittee on Oversight, Investigations, and Accountability hearing — entitled “Invasion of the Homeland: How China is Using Illegal Marijuana to Build a Criminal Network Across America” — heard first from Donnie Anderson, Director of the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs Control.

Anderson testified that Oklahoma’s loose medical marijuana framework inadvertently opened the door to transnational syndicates, fueling what he described as a $153 billion black-market industry. After more than three decades in public safety, he said, “the impact of black-market marijuana in Oklahoma is unlike anything I have encountered in my career. What is even more alarming is the growing influence and involvement of the Chinese Communist Party in this illicit industry.”

Anderson explained that Chinese nationals dominate the operations, concealing control through straw buyers, fraudulent licenses, and shell companies, often backed by attorneys, real estate agents, and consultants. He warned that the CCP also maintains control by leveraging encrypted apps. “Because WeChat is based in mainland China and encrypted, U.S. law enforcement cannot serve legal process or conduct electronic surveillance as we would with domestic platforms,” he said, “making them a major obstacle in our investigations.”

—

—

Anderson testified there is “no doubt” the Chinese government has shown interest in Oklahoma’s marijuana industry, citing documented financial transfers to the Bank of China and connections to Chinese state-owned businesses. He further warned that the CCP is leveraging its global influence apparatus to maintain control of these sites. “It is my belief that the CCP maintains access to the criminal marijuana site operations, particularly through its known practice of controlling expatriates via so-called ‘police stations,’” he told lawmakers.

He also highlighted national security risks from the physical location of these grows. In one ongoing investigation, the Department of Defense flagged suspicious activity at a marijuana grow run by an ethnic Chinese group next to the McAlester ammunition plant — the nation’s largest munitions facility, home to nearly one-third of the Pentagon’s stockpile and responsible for producing the MOAB bomb.

“Alarmingly, many of these grows are located near critical infrastructure, including military bases and pipelines,” Anderson added, warning that the proximity of foreign-run criminal operations to sensitive U.S. defense assets raised extraordinary risks.

Pressed by a Georgia legislator on why Americans remain unaware of this foreign crime wave, Anderson stressed the scale and sophistication of the operations. “When I say sophisticated, I mean at a level that law enforcement across the nation has never seen before — that complex, that layered. They hide themselves under many layers of LLCs and ownership structures,” he said.

As an example, Anderson described how Oklahoma registries might show a “John Smith” listed as the 75 percent owner of a marijuana business. “But when you dig in, you find John has never put up the $3,500 required to put his name on that license. The money comes from elsewhere, because Chinese nationals cannot directly do that in the state of Oklahoma. Meanwhile, the real organizers are often people in places like Flushing, New York, or California. They control operations across the United States but may never step foot in Oklahoma, except to occasionally visit.”

He added: “And this isn’t just an Oklahoma problem — it’s global. Chinese nationals are doing similar things in Latin America and the Caribbean, where they are building infrastructure, even roads, as part of larger investments. There’s always a reason behind it, and it connects back here to the United States. At its core, this is about national security, not just Oklahoma. And you’re right — most Americans have no idea this is happening.”

The panel’s second witness, legal scholar Paul Larkin, argued that Chinese organized crime groups cannot be separated from the state whose nationals dominate them. “The Chinese organized crime elements are working with the tacit agreement of the PRC and CCP,” he testified, stressing that U.S. conspiracy law provides the tools to prosecute these networks as such. He pointed to the long-established legal principle of willful blindness: juries are entitled to infer intent from patterns of conduct, even without express agreements.

One legislator asked: “Earlier this week, we discussed how foreign adversaries see U.S. agriculture not only as an economic target but also as a homeland security vulnerability. Mr. Larkin, how significant is land acquisition to the broader strategy of Chinese criminal groups operating in America?”

“First, it gives them property to grow and process illicit drugs, which can then serve as distribution hubs,” Larkin said. “But beyond that, certain sites — especially indoor grows — could also be leveraged for espionage. They could be positioned to monitor nearby American communities, military bases, or other sensitive facilities. That makes land acquisition not just a criminal concern, but a serious national security threat.”

If Larkin pressed the legal case for direct CCP accountability, the next witness, retired DEA executive Chris Urben, supplied the operational picture. He stressed that federal task forces must deploy the RICO Act — once used against the Italian mafia — to give under-resourced state agencies the support to combat what he called the new dominant crime element from China.

Drawing on his 24-year career, Urben testified that Chinese money laundering networks have quietly transformed the economics of the global drug trade, emerging around 2016 as the predominant launderers for criminal groups worldwide. China’s value to the Mexican cartels, he explained, goes beyond supplying synthetic opioid precursors; its laundering services have supercharged cartel profits, boosting proceeds by as much as five percent.

Asked by a legislator how China had seized global dominance in money laundering, Urben was blunt: the advantage is WeChat. Controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, the encrypted platform cannot be tapped by U.S. law enforcement.

“No other global crime network has a state-protected, trusted communications system like that,” Urben said. “WeChat needs to be disrupted. It cannot continue to function as a secure platform for criminal money laundering. There must be a state-level, legislated solution with the Chinese government — one that ends WeChat’s role in these networks.”

He warned that dismissing marijuana grows as “just weed cases” is a dangerous mistake. “They are harmful in and of themselves, and they also help fuel Chinese money laundering networks and other Chinese transnational crime-linked activity such as human trafficking, fentanyl distribution, and other dangerous and harmful activities.” Such cases, he urged, must be treated as RICO-prosecutable money-laundering conspiracies tied directly into the global fentanyl and trafficking economy.

At the outset of the hearing, Chairman Josh Brecheen of Oklahoma framed the issue in broader terms. “We are here today to talk about an important issue, significant national security implications,” he said, making clear that the problem was not confined to his home state but stretched “to Maine, California, and all across our homeland.”

Brecheen laid out the scale of what lawmakers were confronting: thousands of Chinese-run marijuana grow operations, not isolated in backwoods counties but dispersed nationwide — embedded in tribal lands, national parks, and suburban communities. He stressed that these are not simple drug cases. “Many Chinese illegal operations serve as fronts for a wider criminal enterprise, including human and drug trafficking, prostitution, weapons smuggling, and money laundering,” he said. These networks, often with direct or indirect ties to the CCP, have built a sophisticated underground criminal infrastructure in the United States.

The national security implications, he warned, were profound. “We’ve enabled these foreign organizations with potential links to the CCP to build up a sophisticated network throughout the United States, which facilitates a wide range of other criminal activity and presents a national security threat.”

Some of the foreign nationals running these sites, Brecheen added, are more heavily armed than the sheriffs and deputies who might stumble onto them.

After sketching the scope of the threat, Brecheen turned to “paint the picture” of how the operations unfold on the ground. He described how groups of Chinese nationals, affiliated with transnational criminal organizations, cross the southern border and fan into rural states like Oklahoma. With them are vulnerable workers, lured under the false promise of legal employment. Once in place, the crime groups recruit a local resident, offering several hundred thousand dollars to use their name and identity to purchase farmland. It is a proposition the resident “cannot refuse.”

The arrangement moves quickly. Within days, a seemingly ordinary property is converted into a sprawling grow site. Workers are forced into 14-hour shifts, confined to cramped quarters with little water or ventilation. Toxic pesticides — banned in the United States — are burned on-site, creating fumes that poison both the laborers and the surrounding environment. Armed guards oversee the operation, ensuring obedience. The marijuana produced is high-potency and contaminated, yet within weeks it is trafficked across the country, from Oklahoma to New York, feeding an illicit market worth many billions.