During the last two election campaigns, the Coalition avenir Québec (CAQ) listed the renovation of elementary and secondary schools as an “urgent emergency” and a “priority priority”, in the name of the importance of providing a healthy and quality environment for students. The dilapidated state of the schools has been documented for ages, half of which are in ruins. It has been repeatedly pointed out in broad strokes that this housing decline, the result of decades of neglect in maintenance, is a national disgrace.
Difficult, therefore, to find a file where the political and social consensus is not so… concrete. What’s got into Prime Minister François Legault and his Education henchman, Bernard Drainville, to suddenly question this? On the sidelines of the Girard budget, where we learned from the last Quebec Infrastructure Plan that 61% of schools are now in “bad” or “very bad” condition, the two men expressed “doubts” as to the approach used to rate schools, to give them a grade from A to E depending on the state of the structures. Mr. Legault even asked the Minister responsible for Infrastructure, Jonatan Julien, to dig under these ratings to find out what they really mean. Subtext: would there have been exaggeration?
This reversal is strange, not to say disturbing. It hides the government’s ill-disguised impatience with school service centres, towards which manifest dissatisfaction is directed. It would be wrong to criticize the government for ensuring the good governance of these service centers, between which huge sums of money pass, but the strategy of “denial of obsolescence” is strong in coffee, to say the least. .
And if you want to break away from perceptions to dig into official documents, just go for a look at the Auditor General of Quebec, who in 2019-2020 produced an entire chapter on the burning issue of schools with roofs. , dilapidated walls and structures, which cause serious air quality and fungus problems in classrooms. It noted that with 54% of school buildings in Quebec in poor condition, the asset maintenance deficit for school buildings (in short, the work that should have been done to maintain their good condition) amounted to $4.5 billion, the second largest deficit after the road network. A second observation directly targeted the school service centres, which were criticized for not having used all of the sums earmarked for the renovation of schools over the years. This, on the other hand, would totally deserve the attention of the government.
What about four years later? In her last annual report, the auditor was surprised at the “little progress” in the school building file since 2019. […] recommendations have a direct impact on providing students and teaching staff with a healthy and quality environment, and the little progress made could mean that the shortcomings observed persist beyond a reasonable period of time”, wrote- She. The CAQ may well claim better accountability from school service centers, but it will be difficult to transform ruins into castles.