It is said that history does not repeat itself, but that there are analogies, as demonstrated by the reactions to Minister Jean Boulet’s bill to regulate child labour. It should be remembered that there are numerous theses, articles and studies on the history of education in Quebec and its links with child labor and they illustrate the fierce battles that took place between, on the one hand, the Catholic Church and conservative circles, and on the other side, liberals, labor movements and women’s movements. A Jesuit will even go so far as to write that if everyone is educated, there will be a lack of scavengers and labourers.
Suffice it to recall that Quebec’s Compulsory Education Act only dates from 1943, and that the province of Quebec was the last to adopt such a legislative instrument. The law applied to children aged 6 to 14 and education was to be free.
Fights over compulsory education have always been linked to child labour.
Senator Raoul Dandurand, who was a staunch defender of compulsory education, was in 1909 appointed chairman of a commission of inquiry into the operation of the Commission des écoles catholiques de Montréal. His report not having received much support and faced with the obstinate refusal of the clergy, who feared that their influence on the organization of education would diminish, the government of Lomer Gouin (1905-1920) had a law adopted in 1919 which forbade any person directing an industry, a trade, or exercising a trade, a profession, from employing boys and girls under the age of 16 unless they could read and write fluently.
Dandurand, marked by the defeat of his father-in-law, Félix-Gabriel Marchand, Premier of Quebec from 1897 to 1900 who had unsuccessfully attempted to establish a Ministry of Public Instruction, affirmed in a conference in 1918: “The question of education should take precedence over all others in our thinking. It is on her that the future of our little people depends, as it does of all the other nations. Let’s not look elsewhere for our salvation: it is at school that we must prepare it. He also said that if children did not stay in school long enough, they risked not having the basics necessary to return when they became adults.
So let’s think seriously before expanding children’s access to the labor market too much.