More than ever in our postmodern (or “post-truth » as we say in English), the truth is — presumably — in the eye of the beholder.
The phenomenon of echo chambers — where a group of people sharing the same ideological inclinations convince themselves of the same vision of things without encountering real opposition — is common across the world. Those who take refuge there end up seeing chimeras and crises where there are not always any, and they tend to opt for extreme solutions where respectful dialogue would have sufficed.
With its standoff over the funding of the three English-speaking universities in Quebec, the conclusions of which were confirmed on X by Pascale Déry, the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) has clearly sunk itself into a very deep echo chamber. Because none of this fuss was necessary.
McGill is home to 12 Nobel Prize winners, 147 Rhodes Scholars, nine Oscar winners, 13 Grammy Awards, four Pulitzers, 35 Olympic gold medalists, historic advances in medicine and science, and graduates such as Wilfrid Laurier , Hubert Reeves, Leonard Cohen, Madeleine Parent… as well as Eric Girard and Paul St-Pierre Plamondon. It is not only the best university in Quebec and Canada, but one of the best in the world.
It is also the birthplace of ice hockey.
Any other country or province would have chosen to support this flagship more to help it compete against the best universities internationally. In the Quebec of the CAQ, however, his legs are cut off.
Let’s look elsewhere to see. There are nearly 1,100 university programs taught in English in France. There are also some in Germany, Italy, Spain or China, in short, almost everywhere in the world. These programs do not insist that their students, who come to study on their own and pay and contribute to the local economy during their stay, learn German, French or Chinese before completing their programs. It would be like telling an engineering student that they need to complete a poetry course before they graduate.
Would Quebec be the only jurisdiction on the planet to insist on this absurd condition?
The last minute addition of a regulation requiring the francization of 80% of international students, even if they have no intention of remaining in Quebec after obtaining their diploma, was immediately described as unattainable by McGill Principal and Vice-Chancellor Deep Saini.
The reasoning behind these maneuvers is based on a decline in French which, despite strong media coverage, does not achieve consensus, even among linguists. The bilingualism of English speakers is at its peak. Downtown Montreal, particularly west of Saint-Laurent Boulevard, was once much more English-speaking than it is today. Spare me the “Montreal has become too English-speaking”, please. I live there and that’s not what I see.
I would add that the renowned linguist Jean-Pierre Corbeil, of Laval University, speaks outright of a “moral panic” surrounding the linguistic question, and that the term “decline of French” was relatively little used before 2017.
However, 2017 is more or less the time when the CAQ began to use this concept to make political gains. What followed after his election in 2018 was widespread neglect of critical health and education issues, coupled with a series of populist laws of questionable necessity, such as Bills 21, 96 and now increases in tuition fees for English-speaking universities.
Whatever you think of these laws, you must admit that this is a lot of energy and resources devoted to projects that do nothing to improve our health and education networks. This does nothing to help the economy, nor the housing crisis, nor the environment.
I can confirm to you how stunned, disappointed, saddened, worried and, yes, angry the English-speaking community of Quebec is about these frontal attacks. These universities have contributed enormously to shaping modern Quebec. All we want — both English-speakers and the majority of Quebecers, I believe — is to see our society prosper and finally put aside all our old exhausting tribal conflicts.
I already know the lines that await me. Many nationalists, freshly invigorated by the return of linguistic hostilities, are rubbing their hands with malignant joy. But I will not budge, this way of governing is deplorable. Zero consultation with the main targets and, despite potential financial losses of hundreds of millions of dollars, a final announcement made abruptly on the social network X. Has our political culture really reached this point?
The conclusion of this file is incredibly sad and absurd. It’s not just these universities that are losing out. All of Quebec loses if downtown Montreal, our economic engine, empties and becomes less prosperous. The recessions of the 1980s and 1990s clearly demonstrated this.
The CAQ is a government in free fall which, wounded, is beginning to flirt with disconnected authoritarianism. Because one fact remains: the belittling of any university will always remain, and in any society, an attack on the education system.