Quebec at the breaking point! It was very clever for the Legault government to brandish the meteoric rise in asylum seekers in Quebec to position itself in the debate of the week on immigration.
Challenge the Trudeau government, denounce its negligence in the matter. Everything to give the answer to the leader of the Quebec Party who criticizes him for his double talk.
But this exit remains a smokescreen to hide the fact that the CAQ has done nothing on the front of temporary foreign workers and international students. They are the ones who form the vast majority of the 500,000 temporary immigrants in Quebec.
And on foreign students, the verdict is implacable. They are the government’s business. They are the cash cows of an underfunded university system.
In this regard, we must thank the red squares.
The Maple Spring will have cost a lot more than we imagine. Our universities are paying the price now.
Cheap, cheap
University studies have always been seen as a public good in Quebec.
The policy of very low tuition fees was intended to make up for the under-education of Quebecers. It has become one of the foundations of our welfare state.
- Listen to the Latraverse-Dubé meeting with Emmanuelle Latraverse via QUB :
But Maple Spring made sacred the idea that all Quebecers should subsidize the studies of all university students. No more nuance is possible.
Subsidizing teaching studies to ensure competent succession in our primary and secondary schools is defended in the same way as subsidizing the finance studies of a future banker or the medical studies of a future specialist who both will be part of the wealthiest 5% of society.
We can boast of the fact that Quebec guarantees the 2nd lowest fees for university studies, but at the same time we are ensuring that our post-college network is impoverished.
Goose that lays golden eggs
The compromise? It was the Couillard government that found it by deregulating tuition fees for international students.
Quebec universities therefore roughly charge for their studies in amounts ranging from $30,000 to $70,000 per year, depending on the program.
Unsurprisingly their numbers have jumped. There were 58,675 in December 2022.
At McGill, they represent 45.7% of students. At Concordia University, they make up 24.7%.
You understand of course that the majority of them are in English-speaking universities. They pay so much that even HEC and Laval University now offer programs in English!
But we don’t talk about that, neither in the debate on the preservation of French, and especially not in the debate on temporary immigrants.
If we tighten the screw, certain university programs would have to close, warns the Minister of Immigration, Christine Fréchette.
If we tightened the screws, we would especially have to debate the financing of universities and the unique tuition fees that Quebec students pay.
Too explosive, too divisive, with the results we know.