Critic calls on AG to review UBC’s investment policies
Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008
Bruce Ralston, BC’s NDP finance critic, is calling on the Auditor General to review UBC’s investing policies following an $18 million on-paper loss connected to the subprime mortgage market.
The loss is tied to a $122 million investment in “asset-backed commercial paper” (ABCP) which is a type of fund that makes money by collecting interest on many debts collected into one entity. The entire $122 million investment is currently frozen.
“What is the obligation of UBC…when investing public money to follow directives, guidelines, or the considered investment advice of the BC Investment Management Corporation?” Ralston asked in his letter to the Auditor General.
“What due diligence did [UBC] do? That’s basically my question,” said Ralston. “Where are they getting their advice from and why didn’t they at least pick this up, in terms of their investment choice? I mean, generally, what I’ve been told is, people who did a little more careful analysis just decided that a little extra return wasn’t worth the huge extra risk.”
Many public institutions avoided excess risk by taking the advice of the BC Investment Management Corporation (bcIMC) to avoid the type of fund UBC invested in, now termed “non-bank backed” (ABCP), in favour of more stable funds backed by major Canadian banks.
The bcIMC was set up in the 90s by the NDP to oversee the finances of public pension plans. It is obligatory for for public pension plans in BC to follow the advice of the bcIMC, but not of other public organizations. “A number of other [public institutions] have chosen to use it,” said Finance Minister Carole Taylor. “But it is voluntary for UBC and it’s board of governors to make that decision about who will manage their funds.”
If the Finance Department had warned UBC to invest differently the University would have taken the advice, said Peter Smailes, University treasurer. “It wouldn’t be typical for the Ministry of Finance to comment on an investment that is rated by a third-party rating agency.”
The Ministry of Finance did offer advice to the University, but not until after they became aware of the problem this fall.
UBC is currently in negotiations to restructure its investment to stabilize the fund.
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Clayton Burns Jan 24
The NDP should hold public hearings on the UBC campus and conduct interviews on the UBC scam called the LPI and all practices in relation to English that disadvantage students. The English department should be held to account for its slovenly habits in tolerating the LPI and in bungling first year English courses. How can students be failed for “plagiarism” when UBC instructors cannot teach students how to handle evidence from texts and instead rely on such methods as American school rhetoric, a disgrace for a university? The NDP should inform the President that requiring Asian students to pass the LPI before they start their regular English courses is clearly a racist practice, one for which UBC should be liable in a class action suit. At a minimum, the President should order Linguistics to develop tools so that students would have assimilated the sound system of the language and effective vocabulary learning in high school by employing the IPA and corpus tools such as the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary. The English department should be ordered to set an official first year grammar (the best is the COBUILD Intermediate English Grammar as backed up by the COBUILD English Grammar). English instructors should have to teach the structures of English–it is amazing how many students fumble counterfactuals, what “might have happened” if things “had been” different–and work intensively on helping students evaluate and interpret evidence. I suggest that the English department design courses in American True Crime/Fiction so as to focus evidence issues: “Barn Burning,” “In Cold Blood,” “The Turn of the Screw,” “The Brotherhoods,” “The Dreams of Ada,” and “The Innocent Man” would all be good choices. Being able to think about evidence would mean advanced understanding of the modal past perfect system and the logic of counterfactuals. Linguistics should establish a database of 100 poems from 1600-1900 (including “Paradise Lost,” Book IX, to teach the sound system of the language. I found it strange that in phonetics and phonology, the best subject areas in Linguistics, there was so little effort to teach through poetry. The English department at UBC has become clerical to the point that many of its first year courses could just be closed.
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