SUDBURY -- Meeting online with students Thursday evening, Laurentian University president Robert Haché said the university had balanced its 2020 budget just as COVID-19 hit.

"We were actually on track for a budget that was within a couple hundred thousand dollars of being balanced at the end of 2019-20 and then the pandemic hit," Haché said.

"We went from a situation where we had a needed balanced budget to … a $10 million additional expenses result of COVID-19."

Haché, who was hired in February 2019, said he was aware LU had fiscal problems when he took the role, but didn't know how bad things were.

"Before I came to the university, I understood that the university was in a position that it could not afford to run any future deficits," he said. "I after I arrived, and as I learned more about the university … you learn a whole lot more than when you're looking at it from afar again to discover you know the full extent of the financial challenges."

Haché said last fall they hired an external firm to probe the school's finances to "help me understand the true state of the finances of the institution." That probe revealed the depth of the fiscal crisis, with the school facing more than $300 million in long-term debts and liabilities.

Ultimately, he said it was the combination of actions "over the past 10 or even 15 years" combined with the pandemic that forced him to declare the school insolvent Feb. 1 under the Companies' Creditors Arrangement Act.

"This was not a process of choice," Haché said. "This was a process of necessity and the alternative, of course, would have been to close the university and nobody wanted to do that."

Under that process, LU has cut 39 per cent of its programs – which it says only affects 7.5 per cent of students – terminated its agreements with federated universities and now is reviewing its real estate holdings.

Reviewing real estate holdings

"We need to make sure that the infrastructure and then the real estate that we have matches the activities that we have as a university," Haché said. "There are ways that we can create efficiencies by reducing some of our footprint. We certainly need to look at that and that will actually, you know, it will be a subtraction for an addition in the sense that it will be a way to make the campus more efficient and better serve the students at the end of the day."

He also said they are looking forward to welcoming students back on campus in September, something he's optimistic will happen as more people are vaccinated.

"With vaccination rollout allowing projections for a face-to-face return to classes in the fall, we would be pleased and honoured to offer you the warmest return to campus that we can come to September," Haché said. "I … look forward to the opportunity."

In response to a question about how long the CCAA process will last, and whether more program cuts will come, he said the next step comes at the end of August, with LU hopefully emerging from creditor protection before the end of 2021.

And Haché also said they don't expect to cut any more programs, and in fact, are in a position to add new ones based on student demand.