The Masters of Community Planning program at Vancouver Island University is looking for a new home after being cut as part of the university’s efforts to balance its budget.
Mark Holland teaches at the program and says he and his colleagues are working to move it to a different university on Vancouver Island.
“We have now started actively meeting regularly with some of these universities to see what we can do to move the program because we have all the instructors, we have all the courses, we have all the material, we have a great reputation in the country. We get lots of applications so we are going to try to salvage the planning school but it’s really truly most unfortunate and our planning school was very financially successful,” he says, adding it was essentially self-funding.
He says the planning school graduated 20-25 students each year for most of the last decade and nearly all of them are working in B.C. communities for local governments and development companies. With the program closing, that supply of educated planners will be gone.
“There’s a lot fewer planners now being graduated and every municipality is now going to have to compete for planners from other provinces and elsewhere to bring them in,” Holland says. “Many of those are not trained in the B.C. system in the way we train our planners.”
The planning program offered a unique education, according to Holland. He says nearly all the instructors were actively working in the field, either for municipalities or development companies while teaching.
“We focused on small communities and we focused on Vancouver Island’s communities so the students often got involved in real projects in those communities. We have a research institute that was associated with it and they were doing about two million dollars a year worth of projects with first-nation communities and other communities on Vancouver Island with students do real work for them on their plans,” Holland says.
The program was structured to give students a broad understanding of the practice of planning, while focusing specifically on B.C. Holland says cancelling the program is a big loss to Nanaimo, the province and the housing industry.
“The students came out with a broad understanding so that they could walk straight into a municipality or into a development company from day one, pick up their tools and go,” he says. “None of the other planning schools in Canada are built that way so it’s not just a loss of the number of planners. It’s a loss of this very unique program that was built around how we build and plan small communities, especially on Vancouver Island.”
