People are throwing around words like “unprecedented” to describe what is happening at Laurentian. I’m always careful about that because before WWII a lot of wild things happened in Canadian universities (the Honorary Bursar making off with the entire University of Manitoba endowment at the height of the Depression is my favourite). And Acadia got pretty close to this position in the last decade, though it engineered a behind-the-scenes bailout and hence never had to go to face the courts in quite this way. But maybe we shouldn’t be picky: this is still a big effing deal and we should treat it as such.
There is a great deal of history of poor management of Canadian Academic Institutions. That would be a pretty cool area to include in research!