It will soon be three months since the board of directors (BoD) of the Justice and Faith Center (CJF) announced its decision to suspend all activities until further notice and to lay off its work team for a period indeterminate, citing very vague and unconvincing organizational, operational and financial challenges.
This incomprehensible decision, effective March 22, 2024 and announced with barely two days’ notice to CJF employees, sparked a wave of indignation and solidarity which greatly touched, even upset, us, the laid-off staff. so cavalierly by a Jesuit work supposed to have social justice and solidarity at the heart of its mission. […]
Silence on our part is no longer possible
So far, however, the laid-off team has remained discreet. It must be understood that the disrespectful way of treating employees — some of whom have accumulated up to 12, 17, even 25 years of service — was experienced as a real trauma, whatever the CA press release said, which assured that all this happened “smoothly for the employees”… While we gave the best of our time and talents for a mission that touched our deep values of justice and solidarity, we experienced feelings of devaluation, betrayal and of contempt. From one year to the next, the Board of Directors and the Provincial of the Jesuits of Canada congratulated us for the quality of our work and our commitment. […] The CJF has, moreover, been among the bodies most engaged in discerning the universal apostolic preferences of the Society of Jesus and in the process of appropriation necessary for their implementation in its work as in that of other Jesuit works. Canadians. This contribution has also been regularly highlighted and recognized. […]
The feeling of injustice is all the greater since at no time was the complete suspension of activities and the dismissal of the entire work team explicitly mentioned, neither by management nor by the CA, as being a possible option in the face of the budgetary challenges facing the CJF. Above all, at no time did the board or management offer the team precise and concrete solutions to remedy this situation. Let us be clear: there is no question of us denying these challenges, which are moreover similar to those experienced by many other similar organizations. The situation was known to everyone: since 2018, the Jesuits have considerably reduced their annual subsidy to the CJF. As a result, between 2018 and 2022, significant work had been carried out, and self-financing increased from just under 30% to 55%. If the support of the Jesuits of Canada is fundamental, they are far from alone ensuring the sustainability of the CJF, contrary to what could be deduced from the press release they released to the media on May 9.
In addition, the improvement in self-financing was made while preserving a substantial financial reserve which the CJF still has in part and which it could have used, if the CA had wished, to avoid layoffs against -productive and to put in place what is necessary to ensure the sustainability of the work.
In this context, what meaning can the abrupt interruption of activities and, consequently, of the 2024 fundraising campaign have? […]
Strategic planning with ambiguous contours…
While priority should have been given to continuing self-financing efforts, efforts to seek additional income declined after the departure of the former director, Élisabeth Garant, in 2022. Neither the people who succeeded her nor the CA have not been very proactive in this regard. Worse, last February, members of the team managed to submit a major grant request to the Department of Canadian Heritage for the organizational strengthening of the CJF; the initiative received a cold reception from the CA, which insisted that it reserved the right to refuse the sums if the grant was ever awarded to us.
In fact, much more than self-financing strategies, from the fall of 2023, what seemed to monopolize the board’s attention was rather the urgent holding of strategic planning in which we seemed to place all the hopes, but which the outlines and timetables have always been presented to us in a very vague manner.
Our team had nevertheless prepared seriously and had concrete proposals to ensure a future for this unique work that is the CJF. […]
Our proposals and ideas continue to be rejected
If we have been discreet until now, it is also because, despite this deleterious context, we have been very active in trying to save what could still be saved. From the moment we were informed of our layoff on March 19, we made numerous offers, requests and proposals to the board and management. Unfortunately, none of them were accepted. We detail them in the full version of this text. […]
The Board of Directors and management probably continue to want to carry out the reflection aimed at ensuring the sustainability of the CJF and the journal in isolation. Relationships, while it is the members of the team who know not only the functioning of the Center and its place in the history of the Jesuit presence in Quebec, but also its partners as well as its numerous collaborators. It is this team, with management, which has been carrying out collective analysis and joint discernment on the social issues of the day for many years. How can we understand such closure on the part of the board of directors, the current management and the Jesuit authorities? All this shocks us deeply.
What is the real issue?
We can question the official version presented by the Jesuits and the Board that it was financial and organizational problems that motivated the decision to lay off almost all the staff.
The significant costs resulting from the Board’s decisions — from the abrupt interruption of activities, which could result in significant loss of income, to the payment of additional unemployment benefits equivalent to approximately half of our salaries and which are paid by the employer non-retroactively for 15 weeks, to name just a few — clearly suggest that the organization still had room to maneuver to collectively find solutions. Moreover, when the board announced our layoff, some of its members admitted it straight away: “money is not really the problem,” we were told again.
So what is the TRUE issue ? […]
The position proposed by the Quebec Jesuit founders of the CJF consisted of investing in social debates based on the reality of impoverished people, of using meaningful and unifying language for women and men concerned about justice, and of make a contribution within the democratic bodies of Quebec society. This, by developing an organizational culture marked by synodality, co-responsibility and true partnership between Jesuits and non-Jesuits, Christians and non-Christians, intellectuals and social activists, men and women, members of the historical majority and Quebecers from the immigration.
Since its founding, the mission of the CJF has been carried out by people driven by an ideal of social justice and rooted in diverse convictions. We, members of the current team, have learned to translate the Ignatian foundation of the work into secular, audible and admissible terms, internally and externally, so that the mission of the CJF not only has its full meaning , but also a reach in Quebec society. It seems that we were doing well, since our work and professionalism were widely appreciated and recognized, notably by some of the same people who today exclude us from reflections on the future of the CJF.
We only ask to support the new management in this exercise. Remember that the latter, still on probation, has only been in office since June 2023 (not counting three months of absence), and that she has no anchoring in the Jesuit and Ignatian world. How can we not find that our expertise is not respected, seeing that the Jesuits feel obliged to publicly indicate their support for a new direction which would, it is said, have a “vision” and “ideas” — of which we are unaware everything — and which, visibly, require our exclusion in order to impose themselves? All this raises many questions. […]
Thus, we are of the opinion that any solution to the crisis currently facing the Center can only come from what has always been its strength, namely its ability to collectively discern the issues and challenges to be taken up. If the Board of Directors is serious when it says it wants to reopen the Center by the end of the summer and remains faithful to its mission, it cannot hope that we return to work as simple executors of a mission decided by others. others behind closed doors; to do so would be to distort the spirit at the very foundation of the CJF. The team must be at the heart of the discussions.
Without which the CJF will perhaps survive, but it will be nothing more than an empty shell in which its mission of social justice will ring very hollow… And we can only conclude one thing: the decision of the CA was from the start aimed at make a clean slate by pushing the team to resign in order to relaunch the CJF without it, in a watered-down version.
* This text is an abridged version of a text available here.