Believing that the bond of trust is broken, the teachers of the Cégep de Saint-Hyacinthe ask for the resignation of the director general, Emmanuel Montini.
Gathered in a general meeting on Wednesday, the teachers voted unanimously to withdraw their confidence in the director general and the chairman of the board of directors, and demand their resignation.
“The CEGEP’s image is tarnished, there is an obvious breach of trust and the work climate is toxic,” explains the Duty Selma Bennani, president of the Cégep de Saint-Hyacinthe teachers’ union. “We have to rebuild ourselves, and we will not succeed with the current DG”.
The Minister of Higher Education, Pascale Déry, had asked her ministry at the end of April for a “state of the situation” after having learned in an article from the Duty “worrying allegations” about the tense climate at CEGEP between employees and management, about the high dropout and failure rate among computer science students.
The teachers have sent a letter to the Minister to meet her and intend to exercise in the near future “pressure tactics until the departure of the Director General and the Chairman of the Board of Directors”.
An article from Courier of Saint-Hyacinthe also set fire to the powder among the teachers. This revealed the existence of a report dating from a few years ago on the work climate among executives at CEGEP which would report not very kind words towards the director general.
Injunction against a media
Emmanuel Montini and the cégep also tried to prevent the publication of this report in the Courier of Saint-Hyacinthe, by sending a formal notice and an injunction to the media. The Cégep describes the information as “false and defamatory” and speaks of “an intentionally malicious campaign on the part of certain Cégep executives aimed at dislodging him as Director General”.
“It’s an attempt to muzzle us. It’s intimidation pure and simple, paid for at state expense,” says in an interview with The duty the newspaper’s editor, Benoit Chartier. The weekly first received a formal notice on Wednesday morning last week. An injunction followed around 8 p.m. and the judge delivered his decision very late at night, as the newspaper was printed.
The judge agreed with the newspaper, and the distribution was finally able to begin. “If I lost, I would have had to reprint the newspaper. It’s quite incredible, launches Benoit Chartier, incredulous. We are printed at Transcontinental, and they print newspapers from it. At the printing office, they had rarely seen that. It’s downright abuse.”
The editor, Martin Bourassa, adds that this is not the first time that the Mail receives notices. “An injunction is a first,” he says. THE Mail has 171 years of history and as far as we can look in our archives, I have not seen a precedent”.
The newspaper has since received a further formal notice on Wednesday this week, asking it to remove the article from its platforms and destroy remaining copies of the newspaper.
Invited to comment, the Cégep de Saint-Hyacinthe had not replied to our email at the time of writing these lines.