Premier François Legault recently declared that the public education network would once again experience a significant change in terms of governance under the pretext that certain local decisions do not please his government. He illustrated his point based on cases in the school service centers of Montreal and Pays-des-Bleuets, in Lac-Saint-Jean, where I live.
On our territory, we understood that the positive outcome of the discussion on the heartbreaking file of four-year-old kindergartens between Minister Bernard Drainville and the director general was irrevocable, but the exit of Mr. Legault surprised. There is reason to wonder about the mode of communication between him and his Minister of Education.
Logically, appointing or dismissing the incumbent of the position at the head office will not change the obligation to respect the Education Act based on the equitable distribution of services and on the obligation to admit all students in any time of the year, unlike the health network, where the demand for a family doctor regularly ends up on a waiting list.
The operation will not change, either, the obligation to respect the budgetary rules dictated annually by the government which, for the most part, are circumscribed in non-transferable envelopes. The same goes for compliance with collective agreements or the consideration of demographic factors.
Years of budget cuts and small-time management of education have left the network in an unenviable situation. In addition, the gains made in terms of school perseverance over the past twenty years, thanks to the mobilization of many researchers, unions, a community of players in the education network and the business community are in the process of decreasing, in particular due to the labor shortage, the consequences of the pandemic and other factors of various kinds.
However, faced with this brief observation, Mr. Legault proposes another structural change rather than dwelling in depth, with rigor and benevolence, on an inventory and the development of a collective vision for the future of the training of young people and adults in Quebec.
For former school officials, this imperial declaration was highly predictable. Since the creation of the Coalition avenir Québec (CAQ) in 2011, the framework has been clearly emerging. At the time, her association with the president of the Fédération québécoise des directions d’enseignement establishments, as a close adviser, was already laying the foundations for governance without an electoral process by universal suffrage where establishment directors would take the shift towards independent schools, partly freed from [leur] supervisory authority (A collective for education. The school as an educational institution and successFQDE, 2009).
I conclude that for the CAQ, the vision of a more efficient network is embodied in a more centralizing management, following the example of big business. With its overwhelming majority, what will this government leave behind?