The Legault government’s Girard budget revealed to politicians, the academic world and the press a reality that is now very difficult to deny: the income gap between French-speaking and English-speaking universities, especially in Montreal. Some representatives of the French-language academic world then intervened to defend UQAM, hit by the decline in its enrollment against Concordia University, to demand better government funding to enable it to continue its historic mission of ensuring access to higher education for French-speaking students. Paradoxically, these speakers carefully avoid naming the elephant in the room that is the disproportionate share of funding given to English-speaking universities.
However, the phenomenon is nothing new if we look back a bit in history, whereas until the 1970s, English-language elementary and secondary schools received a larger share of school funding than French-speaking schools. This financial inequality dates back to the Education Act of 1869 passed immediately after Confederation by the Chauveau government, which created a school tax levied on landed property, the revenues of which were divided between the two denominational school boards in Montreal according to the religion of the owners. Due to the higher level of wealth of Protestants, the Protestant Board of School Commissioners of the City of Montreal (PBSCCM) consecrated. at the end of the 19e century, for each of its students, double the sum of the Commission des écoles catholiques de Montréal (CECM).
It is therefore not surprising to note that, under these conditions, the Protestant school board was able to build more schools, better equip them, pay more for its teaching staff and offer a more diversified and innovative curriculum than the CECM. constantly short of financial resources. However, the biggest difference between the two school boards was in the development of public secondary education.
PBSCCM inaugurates public secondary education with its first high schools from the 1870s, while the CECM delayed until the 1920s to establish the upper primary course which, to avoid competing with the classical colleges, prepared its graduates above all for careers in engineering, administration, commerce and science. Moreover, at the end of the 1950s, the provincial government devoted ten times more money in grants to classical colleges than to upper primary schools, even though the latter had more pupils.
The late introduction of a secondary stream in Catholic schools – fifty years after the Protestants – and its underfunding have largely hampered the development of this educational sector as well as the schooling of the French-speaking population. In 1945, 26% of the students of the Protestant school board attended the high schools, compared to only 13% of French-speaking CECM students enrolled in upper primary classes.
Even at the dawn of the Quiet Revolution, financial inequality persisted between the two school boards. In 1960, the CECM spent $277 per student, compared to $382 for the PBSCCM. It was not until the educational reforms of the Quiet Revolution in the early 1960s, led by the Minister of Education, Paul Gérin-Lajoie, in the name of the democratization of education, to witness the end of a century of inequity and discrimination for Francophone students. The Minister and his successors very skilfully undertook to redistribute school revenues in favor of the CECM through a massive financial investment by the State and changes to the sharing of the school tax. However, it was not until 1973 that the same amount was spent on Catholic and Protestant pupils!
How can this absurd situation be explained, when the majority had a less well-funded school system than that of the minority? It is largely due to the political conceptions of the Quebec state at the time, which aimed to establish good relations between the French-speaking majority and the English-speaking minority. To do this, he entrusted the management of primary and secondary education to the French-Canadian and Anglo-Protestant elites, who established their own denominational school system characterized by almost complete administrative, financial and pedagogical autonomy. However, this formal equality recognized in educational matters by the State has only contributed to further widening the social disparities that already existed between Francophones and Anglophones and to produce real inequality.
The question of university funding that is in the headlines at the moment really gives an impression of deja vu, as if our society were returning to the old model of formal equality that produced inequalities, which made Catholic schools the poor relation. of the Montreal school system. It is urgent that political decision-makers draw lessons from the past to avoid repeating the same mistakes and that they undertake a great collective reflection to rethink the method of financing universities on fairer and more equitable bases for the whole of the population.
Otherwise, the status quo in this area could entail a very high social cost for the development of French-language universities and the accessibility of Francophones to higher education. If our political leaders persisted in turning a blind eye to the problem of university funding, Francophones could relive a painful past, from which they perhaps illusorily believed that they had emancipated themselves.