Conestoga College Executive Mismanagement — Lavish Spending, Illegal Severance, and a Provincial Takeover

Public colleges are publicly funded institutions governed by boards that are legally and ethically responsible for stewarding that public trust. The Conestoga board's job was to ensure the institution's resources were managed prudently and lawfully — especially during a period of severe financial strain. Instead, the board approved a 55% salary hike for the president while the college was shedding hundreds of workers, and then handed him a $3 million exit package that violated the law it was legally obligated to follow.

The salary timeline is damning on its own terms. Tibbits' pay rose from approximately $410,000 in 2022 to $636,107 in 2024 — a period during which the college was facing a foreseeable enrollment crisis driven by federal policy shifts. The board that approved this increase was the same board that presided over 500+ layoffs and the elimination of 80 programs. The people who lost their jobs — 181 faculty, 197 support staff, and more — subsidised an executive compensation structure that the board had no legal authority to award at the level it chose.

The $3 million severance was not a judgment call or a borderline case. The Broader Public Sector Executive Compensation Act sets a clear 24-month cap. At Tibbits' salary, the maximum lawful payment was approximately $1.2 million. The board approved roughly $1.8 million above the legal limit. That is not a governance lapse — it is the board approving an illegal transfer of public funds to an executive. The audit's finding that these decisions "lacked appropriate oversight" understates what occurred: the board knowingly or negligently authorised a payment that violated provincial law.

The audit's other findings — the $23,000 Italy trip, the alcohol-heavy staff dinners — are not peripheral details. They reveal a culture in which the board had normalised inappropriate spending and failed entirely in its oversight role. Governance failure at this scale does not happen overnight; it accumulates through repeated small failures to hold leadership accountable.

The provincial dismissal of the entire board is without precedent in Ontario college history. That signal matters. When a government has to fire a board because it cannot be trusted to govern lawfully, something has gone fundamentally wrong — and the workers who lost their jobs, the students who lost their programs, and the public whose money funded all of it deserve an accounting that goes beyond appointing an administrator and moving on.

The real cost of the Conestoga scandal falls on the people who had no part in the decisions that caused it. More than 500 employees — including 181 faculty and 197 support staff — lost their jobs during a period when their president's salary was rising 55% and the board was planning a $3 million exit package for him. Students enrolled in 80 eliminated programs lost the educational pathways they had enrolled to pursue. The president left with $3 million; the workers left with layoff notices.

International students who enrolled at Conestoga on the basis of its program offerings face particular disruption. Many came to Canada under the expectation of completing specific credentials; program cuts mid-enrollment can affect their immigration status, their financial planning, and their career trajectories. The collapse of Ontario's international student enrollment — a sector-wide crisis driven by federal policy — hit hardest at the institutions that had grown most dependent on that enrollment, and Conestoga was among them. The governance failures at the top of the institution made its capacity to manage that transition worse, not better.

The Sault College defamation lawsuit against Tibbits and Conestoga College remains unresolved. The reputational damage extends beyond one institution: Ontario's college sector is navigating its worst financial period in decades, and the Conestoga scandal — with its illegal severance, its Italy trip, its alcohol expenses, its board firing — reinforces public skepticism about how post-secondary institutions manage public money. That skepticism has policy consequences at exactly the moment when the sector most needs public and political support.

Linda Franklin's mandate as administrator includes developing a new governance framework for Conestoga. The open question is accountability: whether the board members who approved an illegal $3 million severance will face any personal or regulatory consequences, or whether the intervention ends with new governance structures in place and no individual reckoning. This scandal does not occur in isolation — it sits inside a broader pattern of post-secondary defunding and mismanagement in Ontario documented elsewhere, including the OSAP cuts: /scandals/osap-cuts-postsecondary-defunding.