SFU Wants Only Non-Union Faculty at New Medical School
Sid Shniad
Press Progress December 10, 2025
SFU Wants Only Non-Union Faculty at New Medical School
Simon Fraser contends that the med school is so new and different that its existing collective agreement with university faculty doesn't apply
When it opens next August, the School of Medicine at Simon Fraser University will be Western Canada’s first new medical school in 55 years. With an investment of nearly $75 million from the government of British Columbia, the school, based at SFU’s Surrey campus, will have a special focus on family medicine and Indigenous healthcare.
The new medical school will also, if the university’s leadership has its way, be free of any unionized faculty.
That has the SFU faculty union ringing alarm bells.
In an October bulletin, the Simon Fraser University Faculty Association (SFUFA) warned members that, in excluding medical school faculty from the union, the university would be “creating a two-tier system for terms of appointment, tenure, workload and more.”
According to its collective agreement with the university, the SFUFA represents everyone employed by the university full-time or part-time as faculty members, including lecturers, professors and practitioner faculty. This is rooted in a 2014 certification order by BC’s labour board.
But in a statement to PressProgress, the university contends that, because the medical school is “an entirely new undertaking and functions very differently from SFU’s other faculties,” the SFUFA’s existing certification “does not apply to the medical school, and the existing employment categories and language in the collective agreement do not fit the medical school model.”
Brian Green, SFUFA’s executive director, told PressProgress that exempting an entire faculty from the collective agreement makes it unclear how those faculty members are going to be evaluated, how much they will be paid, who sits on the hiring committees, and what their other terms of employment might be.
“That’s how people get evaluated, how people get tenure, how people get hired in the first place,” explained Green.
SFU declined requests to speak with president Joy Johnson or another member of the university’s leadership team. In a statement, SFU said that faculty recruitment for the School of Medicine was aligned with accreditation requirements for Canadian medical schools and that the university “has developed policies for some hiring categories (clinical faculty and medical research faculty) and continues to explore others as the school matures.”
Announcements about the School of Medicine state that it will host a three-year program that mirrors the core content of a typical four-year medical school program, but “accelerates completion by running through the summer.” Students will also begin clinical training just one month into the program.
When a plan for the medical school came before the university’s governing bodies last year, the SFUFA was optimistic.
According to the union’s recent bulletin, a business plan approved in the spring of 2024 by SFU’s board of governors and senate described a medical school at which the bulk of the non-clinical instruction would be handled by regular tenure-track professors.
It proposed that the school would have 35 to 40 tenure-track professors, 35 to 40 faculty with leadership responsibilities, and 1000 to 1500 part-time clinical faculty, who are typically doctors or other healthcare professionals who take on short teaching appointments and mentor students in teaching hospitals and clinics.
But some time after the approval of that business plan, something seemingly changed.
Green said that as the university has proceeded to establish the medical school, members of the SFU senate have noticed that the staffing plans “depart in some significant ways from what was presented” to them for approval.
When asked how the School of Medicine’s business plan evolved, SFU media relations told PressProgress that the business case for the medical school presented in May 2024 had not included a “formal staffing plan,” but just a “faculty estimate” for budget purposes.
“What has evolved, since that time, is the development of specific categories of faculty appointment policy subject to Executive Committee and Board of Governors approval. This is a normal progression from initial planning estimates to operational implementation.”
According to the bulletin, the new staffing plan for the School of Medicine was approved solely by the executive committee, a subcommittee of the board of governors that does not include any faculty.
SFU’s Surrey Centre Building at its existing campus in Surrey. (Photo by Rumneek Johal / PressProgress)
This past July, SFU posted a range of medical school faculty positions that appeared to place them all outside of the SFUFA bargaining unit.
The next month, the SFUFA filed a grievance.
It alleged that SFU’s failure to follow the collective agreement when hiring faculty for the School of Medicine, “despite ample and repeated warning by the Faculty Association, is an egregious violation of the union’s bargaining status as well as the University’s contractual commitments.”
As remedies, the union seeks: immediate recognition of the SFUFA’s jurisdiction over all faculty positions, including clinical faculty, in the medical school; hiring committees that are in line with the collective agreement; and union language added to all medical school faculty postings.
In a statement to PressProgress, SFU says that it “values its relationship with the Faculty Association and has been in conversation about the medical school since 2024 with the hope of working together collaboratively on this new endeavour. We remain open to discussing further and look forward to continuing the conversation as we approach the opening of the medical school to the first cohort of students in 2026.”
The matter is expected to be heard by an arbitrator in the new year.
According to the union bulletin, SFU president Joy Johnson told a senate meeting on Sept. 8 that there was a “real desire” on the part of her and the board of governors to move research faculty into the collective agreement.
But three days later, the bulletin said, the university presented its position to the union in writing: that “all employees hired into the School of Medicine are outside the scope of the SFUFA bargaining unit.”
SFU media relations did not respond to a question from PressProgress concerning this apparent shift.
Green said that in early conversations, university representatives had told SFUFA that they would be open to including the small number of non-teaching research faculty in the bargaining unit, on the condition that they would be the only medical school faculty within it.
Anna Karwowska, vice president of education at the Association of Faculties of Medicine of Canada (AFMC), said each of the country’s 18 medical schools is “structured quite uniquely” when it comes to the make-up of scientific-research and clinical faculty, as well as patient and community partners.
SFU’s medical school is set to become Canada’s 19th, and only the second in BC.
The province’s only current medical school is at the University of British Columbia, where all non-clinical faculty are members of the University of British Columbia Faculty Association.
The AFMC doesn’t collect data on the membership of medical school faculty in associations or unions, which Karwowska said can vary.
At the Northern Ontario School of Medicine University, for example, all faculty, including clinical faculty, are covered by an agreement between the school and the Ontario Public Service Employees Union.
At the other end of the spectrum, faculty at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, are represented by the McMaster University Faculty Association, which is not a certified union and does not have a collective agreement with the university.
Green speculates that one reason SFU might want to exclude medical faculty from the collective agreement is that they want to pay higher salaries at the School of Medicine than are offered in other faculties.
“They have a sense that the salaries that they pay to other people are not sufficient to attract people to medicine, but that’s a relatively easy thing to sit down and negotiate around,” said Green.
When asked about this, the university told PressProgress that compensation at the School of Medicine “must be aligned with prevailing market rates” in order to “recruit and retain highly qualified physicians.”
This is far from the first time that SFU has opposed the efforts of its workers to unionize. Last month, the university lost a multi-year battle against the Teaching Support Staff Union (TSSU). The union successfully organized research assistants twice, once in 2019 and again in 2023, but SFU opposed the unionization of graduate-student research assistants, arguing that because they are paid through scholarships or stipends, they’re not workers. The BC Labour Relations Board ruled in favour of TSSU, affirming that all research assistants are employees of the university [pdf].
When teaching assistants represented by TSSU went on strike in 2023, SFU hired Lions Gate Risk Management Group (LGRMG), a private investigation firm, to surveil picket lines. LGRMG had previously been hired to protect the Trans Mountain Expansion pipeline project and surveil Indigenous land defenders at the Fairy Creek old-growth forest on Vancouver Island. SFU ended the contract shortly after PressProgress reported on it.
SFUFA’s grievance also cites an arbitration award from the spring in which SFU was found to have breached the collective agreement in the search for and appointment of an endowed research chair.
In a statement to PressProgress, Bridget Barker, vice-president of CUPE 3338, which represents workers in clerical, technical and library positions at SFU, said that the union “is keeping a close eye on the plans to open the new medical school and will continue to work with SFU and other campus unions to ensure workers have appropriate union representation.”
Convocation Mall at SFU’s main campus in Burnaby. (Photo by Rumneek Johal / PressProgress)
Another element of the dispute involves clashing interpretations about who gets to have a say in the hiring of faculty, on a legal level.
Under BC’s University Act, SFU, like most of the province’s universities, is overseen by both a senate, that is responsible for academic governance and where faculty make up the largest contingent; and a board of governors, that manages other operational affairs and is dominated by provincial appointees. The union believes that the plan to staff the new medical school falls within the senate’s jurisdiction; the administration asserts that it’s the exclusive domain of the board.
The differing interpretations became apparent in a tense exchange at a senate meeting last month, when one of its members, archaeology professor Mark Collard, challenged President Johnson regarding the authority for medical school staffing. Johnson made a point “to remind Senate that the authority to employ employees of the university, including teaching staff, rests with the board.”
Collard responded that he thought he and Johnson had a “profound disagreement” about how to interpret the law.
(In response to questions from PressProgress, the Ministry of Post-Secondary Education and Future Skills said that the University Act doesn’t require a university’s senate to approve individual hiring decisions and that its involvement is dependent on an institution’s own policies.)
Collard then questioned who was included on the hiring committees, pointing to the SFUFA collective agreement, which stipulates that while each search can differ slightly, hiring committees must be dominated by faculty. He and the SFUFA allege that the hiring committees for medical faculty have instead been dominated by administrators.
“First of all, I think it is important you mentioned the collective agreement,” Johnson responded, “but it is important to note that currently, we are not yet in a position that our faculty in the School of Medicine are part of this SFUFA collective agreement, so it does not apply.”
Johnson said the hiring committees include members of the Science and Health Sciences faculties, as well as a number of administrators who hold faculty appointments. (In a statement, SFU told PressProgress that, “At this early stage, most hiring committee members are administrators who also hold faculty appointments.”)
After two questions, Johnson informed the senate that they had run out of time, and suggested that Collard and his colleagues submit their remaining inquiries in writing.
Collard told PressProgress that he received responses to his written questions a week later but did not find them satisfactory.
“I’m trying to decide how best to proceed from here,” he said in an email, “given that the senior administration aren’t listening to the concerns of many faculty-senators regarding the School of Medicine.”
In a statement, the university said, “As the School of Medicine moves into full operation, the Board of Governors will have approval for faculty hiring in [the] School of Medicine, as they do with all SFU faculties.
“This is a new era for primary care education in BC. The SFU School of Medicine is not a replica of traditional models — it is a deliberate departure.”