It’s terrible. The main Anglo-Quebec lobby informed us, 18 months ago, of the CAQ “eradication” operation of the English-speaking community. Accelerating the pace, the government has just deployed, write the editorialists of the auguste Montreal Gazette, a “punitive, destructive, political and parochial strategy, aimed at demolishing the institutions of the English-speaking community”. One of the newspaper’s columnists outbid: it’s “ Kill McGill “. Big names in Toronto commentary speak of “vandalism” and “tyranny”. Inspired by a Monty Python sketch, the most colorful presented the CAQ as “farting in the general direction of Canada”; he calls on Ottawa for a punitive fiscal response.
Are we to understand that the CAQ was so petty that it withdrew from McGill the gift of half a billion granted last year, by offering it the former Royal Victoria Hospital for its expansion? Has she decided to install social and affordable housing there instead? No, that’s not the point. Would she then have canceled the funding of 475 million that comes with this donation, approaching a billion dollars in total? There is no question.
This must, in a period of shortage of doctors, mean the end of the practice allowing that, last year, 303 English-Canadian students occupied a total of a quarter of the places in medicine at McGill, paying each year for this training of world class than $2800, rather than $23,000 at the University of Toronto? I am informed that no.
Has the CAQ decided that McGill will now not be able to invest a penny more in the education of each student than the amount available for those at the University of Montreal? To achieve this, according to calculations by economist Pierre Fortin, it would have to reduce McGill’s budget by 48%. No way.
Oh, I found it! The CAQ has finally decided to no longer subsidize the scions of the French bourgeoisie who come to study at our expense at McGill and will redeploy this sum towards French-speaking institutions. Failed again.
Perhaps she decided to “decolonize” McGill? She benefits like no other in Quebec from her status asalma mater Anglo-Montreal elites who, for generations, exploited the territory, the Aboriginal people, the French Canadians (and discriminated against the Jews), accumulating crazy fortunes and giving unimaginable sums in alms to the big house backed by Mount Royal. her young French-speaking neighbors. Would the CAQ have applied a progressive principle of redistribution of wealth (“reparation”, we would say in this environment), reducing, for example, 25 cents in public funding for McGill for each dollar it receives in donations? I’m joking: it’s not in the CAQ mental universe.
Let’s keep looking. This should be a common sense decision. McGill graduates are for the most part destined to work in Quebec, in this corner of America where the “usual and usual working language is French”, right? The government must therefore have realized that unless it forced McGill to provide, say, 10% of its teaching in French (or French classes), then verify the acquisition of this essential skill at the time of graduation, it is absolutely certain that a large number of its graduates will be unable to write, or even read, the memo received in the common language once they enter the job market? (We learned last year that 35% of Anglo CEGEP students would fail a course given in French.) We are not there.
The Minister of Higher Education, Pascale Déry, instead announced that she would now bill English-speaking students outside Quebec the estimated cost of their training, i.e. $17,000, which will put an end to our global subsidy of 100 million in heads of these (very) dear neighbors. To those who cry about a brain drain, let us clarify that the measure will not apply to master’s and doctoral students, where lower-cost English monolingualism will continue to dominate.
The application of doubling for the first cycle — and a floor price of $20,000 for foreign students — should theoretically allow the minister to send 100 million to underfunded French-speaking universities. McGill and company claim that on the contrary there will be a slaughter of admissions and, as a result, the goose that lays the golden eggs will become sterile.
Using the $17,000 figure gives them something to grind for. It’s an average. A price shock for followers of theology or literature, but a bargain price for future doctors or engineers.
All in all, McGill has nothing to fear. Concordia and Bishop’s, however, are not sitting on such a gigantic jackpot. Why did the minister not create a fee schedule inspired by the University of Toronto for McGill, an average Canadian university for Concordia and a minor house for Bishop’s? And why did she not apply this grid to the second and third cycles? In all cases, for equivalent tuition fees, the costs of housing and electricity give Quebec universities a spectacular comparative argument.
There is an advantage in being accused of destroying English-speaking universities when, as Minister Déry does, we only address one aspect of their overfunding. It should take advantage of this to apply the hypotheses mentioned above. Nothing will be destroyed except an edifice of iniquity and privilege. The noise level of the opponents will remain the same.
Jean-François Lisée directed the PQ from 2016 to 2018. He has just published Par la bouche de mes crayons published by Somme tout/Le Devoir. [email protected]