Good morning. Universities across the country have been straining under budgetary pressures for years. Now, after slashing academic programs and staff, administrators have begun to cut what some students and alumni consider a sacred heart of the postsecondary experience: varsity sports. That’s in focus today along with the power of wind in Nova Scotia.

Alberta budget: The province is forecasting a $9.37-billion deficit, while also projecting oil prices far higher than other analysts predict

Trade: Negotiations between Canadian and American trade officials are “business-like, cordial, amicable” and even “very friendly,” says Dominic LeBlanc

Artificial intelligence: OpenAI says recent policy changes would have flagged Tumbler Ridge shooter’s messages to police

Hi, I’m Simon Houpt, and I cover the business of sport.

Last November, McGill University stunned its student body, announcing it was getting rid of more than half of its varsity and competitive sport clubs to save money. Among the cuts: golf, tennis, squash, fencing, figure skating, Nordic (aka cross-country) skiing, men’s baseball, women’s field hockey, women’s rugby, and the school’s 125 year-old track-and-field program.

Students weren’t the only ones taken aback. Olympians such as Beckie Scott, Andre De Grasse and the Montrealer Bruny Surin, who had used some of McGill’s facilities when he was training, along with thousands of alumni and community members, signed petitions and called on the university to reverse its decision.

Days later, a couple of editors here at The Globe – Rachel Giese, who oversees our higher education coverage, and Jamie Ross, the Sports editor (and my boss) – received an e-mail from a student at Western University pitching a story on the system under strain. Jessica Kim, the co-ordinating editor of sports at The Gazette, the campus-wide paper there, proposed a feature that would include the voices of athletes, universities, sport organizations, and experts on the importance of sport for student success and well-being. Jamie suggested I work with her.

We wanted to understand how widespread the problems were.

In her pitch, Jessica had noted that McGill wasn’t the only university cutting sport: Simon Fraser University (SFU) had just announced it was getting rid of five teams, as the department of Athletics and Recreation there looked for more than $1-million in annual budget savings, and Bishop’s University was leaving the Atlantic University Sport conference after eight years to return to Quebec’s RSEQ because of what a press release called “significant sector-wide financial constraints and increasing travel costs that are affecting the sustainability of all programs involved.”

Jessica and I began to pepper universities across the country with queries.

One of the people I got ahold of was Bob Copeland at McLaren Global Sport Solutions, an industry consultant who had written the report that had recommended SFU’s action. (SFU’s motivations weren’t only financial - it was moving from the U.S.-based NCAA system to the Canada West conference of U Sport in part because of increasing concern over student travel to the United States.) He said that, while he didn’t think the sky was falling, there were “definitely some storm clouds forming on a few campuses.”

But he also said that he believed the move by McGill – one of this country’s most storied institutions, with an international reputation – would give the greenlight to administrators at universities across the country to at least begin to consider cuts to their own sports programs.

Still, he thought it was really important to point out that we in Canada often compare ourselves to the U.S., where the college sport landscape seems to be awash in cash: coaches earn millions of dollars and athletes are inking rich sponsorship contracts. But that’s largely a mirage: Most U.S. college sports lose money, subsidized mainly by football and a little bit by men’s basketball.

That glitz can blind us from the thrill of watching our own homegrown athletes. And that can make it harder to have urgent conversations about the role that amateur sport plays in our own country.

In the end, though Jessica and I spoke with plenty of experts and other sources, and we dug deep into the finances of universities across the country, very few of the schools engaged with us on the record.

Even some of those who had spoken out about cuts seemed hesitant to participate in our story: Looking to illustrate the piece, I thought it might be nice to get some photos of the SFU softball team in action.

In late January, I saw they were playing a weekend tournament in Conroe, Texas. I figured they’d be interested, since the team had put out a video on Instagram, after SFU’s announcement, speaking about how important it was for them to play in the NCAA. But no one responded.

Nevertheless, I got in touch with the folks running the tournament and secured access for a Houston-based freelance photographer, Mark Felix, who was assigned by our photo department. His pics captured a squad of hungry Canadian athletes playing their hearts out, repping the maple leaf deep in the heart of America, bathed in the golden light of a Texas winter sun.