Opinion pieces carrying bylines of senior officials at the University of British Columbia have been featured prominently in the print and online platforms of the Vancouver Sun this fall. There have been four op-eds in the newspaper in September about either UBC’s Covid response or, in one instance, the university’s new Indigenous Strategic Plan. Each has been identified simply as “opinion.”
What was not disclosed to readers was that the op-eds were published as part of an arrangement in which UBC agreed to purchase between $10,000 to $15,000 in advertising from Postmedia Inc., which owns the Vancouver Sun and Province newspapers.