Last Friday, at the very end of the afternoon, as the long Canada Day holiday began, the Ontario government announced, almost on the sly, that it would not fund the University of Sudbury. The Franco-Ontarian community, incredulous, wasted no time in expressing its anger at this inadmissible decision.
A brief summary of the events is in order. In the spring of 2021, Laurentian University in Sudbury, which had become insolvent, unilaterally terminated the federation agreement that had linked it since 1960 to the University of Sudbury, whose origins date back to the Collège du Sacré-Coeur founded by the Jesuits in 1913. Laurentian University, bilingual in principle, made this decision in the wake of the drastic cuts it had just made in its study programs, but which disproportionately affected its offer of language programs French. Obviously, it had found nothing better than to sacrifice its Franco-Ontarian mission to try to remedy the disastrous crisis that deficient financial management had continued to exacerbate over the years.
Overnight, hundreds of French-speaking students were made orphans program, forced to go into exile or continue their studies in English. Dozens of teachers, including several Anglophones, were being fired unceremoniously and without notice. And the Franco-Ontarian community was losing an institution which, despite its shortcomings, had served it for sixty years as an intellectual, cultural and political springboard.
Laurentian’s gesture, the result of a cold and alienating accounting calculation, was of unprecedented violence in the annals of the university institution in Canada. She was only able to do so by resorting to the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act, which was designed for private companies. This is how it was able to disregard its legal, administrative and contractual obligations towards its students, its professors and its support staff, not to mention its moral obligations towards the Franco-Ontarian community.
Government funding
For the University of Sudbury, the break with Laurentian meant that it lost access to all government funding, forcing it to suspend its own programs and lay off most of its teaching and administrative staff. Under the skilful and dynamic leadership of its new rector, Serge Miville, the University of Sudbury took the courageous decision to begin the process of its own refoundation. It did so first by abandoning its bilingual and Catholic status to transform itself into a fully French and secular institution, then by handing over its native studies program, one of the oldest in the country, to the Kenjgewin Teg Educational Institute, a gesture of reconciliation which concretely recognised, according to the president of the institution, Stéphanie Roy, the autonomist aspirations of the indigenous communities of the Middle North.
Since then, the University of Sudbury, whose financial management is irreproachable, has worked tirelessly to meet the requirements of the Ministry of Colleges and Universities, without the slightest support on its part. It updated its educational project, laid the foundations for partnerships with other institutions, commissioned market studies and produced a business plan.
The Franco-Ontarian community pays the price
The Franco-Ontarian community as a whole has rallied to the principle of the full and complete autonomy of the University of Sudbury, as again shown by an Ipsos–Ici Ontario poll conducted in the spring of 2022. And yet, the Ford government has preferred to ignore its legitimate demands by favoring the status quo, a decision that rewards, in fact, Laurentian, whose mismanagement has generated a financial slump that will have cost, in all and for all, more than 80 million dollars to taxpayers . A decision for which the Franco-Ontarian community is now paying the price, because the government is thus depriving the University of Sudbury of some ten million dollars it was asking for for the first year of its revival. The province’s reasoning is all the more inexplicable since an independent impact study has concluded that the economic benefits of the University of Sudbury at the regional level will amount to $90 million per year!
French is currently in crisis in the Mid-North, and Laurentian University, which has become essentially English-speaking, has neither the means nor the necessary legitimacy to remedy it — nor even the will, obviously . In this context, the financial completion of the University of Sudbury, an institution “by and for” the Franco-Ontarian community, is an imperative and obvious necessity.
The urgency to follow up on the University of Sudbury’s project is all the greater since it is called upon to make a decisive contribution to making Sudbury a leading center of social and linguistic integration for Francophone immigration. in northern Ontario. It will also make it possible to offer a response to the increasingly serious problem of the shortage of Francophone labor in the province. The autonomy of the University of Sudbury is an eminently societal issue that involves the very future of the Francophonie in Ontario. In terms of post-secondary education, the funding of Ontario universities has been seriously neglected, further minimizing the French fact in the province. At a time when a new law on official languages in Canada has just been adopted, the Ford government, whose inconsistency is incomprehensible, exceeds the measure.
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*The following signatories, all professors at the University of Ottawa, support this letter:
Jonathan Paquette, Director of the College of Research Chairs on the Francophone World and International Francophonie Research Chair on Cultural Heritage Policies
Louise Bouchard, University of Ottawa and Institut du Savoir Montfort Research Chair on the Health of Francophones in Ontario
Marie-Hélène Chomienne, Research Chair in International Francophonie and Health of Immigrants or Refugees from Sub-Saharan Francophone Africa
Marie-Ève Desrosiers, Research Chair in International Francophonie on Political Aspirations and Movements in Francophone Africa
Sylvie Grosjean, International Francophonie Research Chair in Digital Health Technologies
François Larocque, Canadian Francophonie Research Chair in Language Rights and Issues
E.-Martin Meunier, Quebec Research Chair, Canadian Francophonie and Cultural Mutations
Jacinthe Savard, University of Ottawa and Institut du Savoir Montfort Research Chair on the Health of Francophones in Ontario
Marie-Claude Thifault, Research Chair in Canadian Francophonie in Health
Luisa Veronis, Research Chair in Immigration and Franco-Ontarian Communities
Sanni Yaya, Senghor Chair on Health and Development in Sub-Saharan Africa