Dear Ministers Déry, Roberge and Lacombe, I am a Quebecer of Montreal origin, French-speaking and sovereignist, descendant of Pierre Lefebvre, who arrived in Quebec around 1618. I am therefore what is commonly called a “pure wool, tightly knit” Quebecer. . I am also the director of the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema at Concordia University, where I have taught since 1998, after having taught at Laval University in Quebec and at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. I am writing to you in reaction to the new pricing model for students outside Quebec proposed by your government.
Concordia University has been offering training in the field of cinema since its creation, almost 50 years ago. Today, we offer training in 3 sectors: film production, animation and film studies (where we teach film history and theory). Do you know that, simply with regard to film production, our department has trained a significant part of the workers and creators of the cinema industry in Quebec for 50 years?
Names ? Louise Archambault, Alberic Aurtenèche, Pierre Bastien, Yves Bélanger, Ibticeme Benalia, Nicolas Bolduc, Myriam Bouchard, Manon Briand, Sandrine Brodeur-Desrosiers, Pascale Bussière, Eric Canuel, Stephen Campanelli, Miryam Charles, Karen Cho, Alexandre Nour Desjardins, Sophie Dupuis , Alain Fournier, Pierre Gill, Maxime Giroux, Eric Gravel, Ivan Grbovic, Katherine Jerkovic, Félix Lajeunesse, Hugo Latulipe, Jessica Lee Gagné, Guillaume Lonergan, Katerine Martineau, Pablo Alvarez Mesa, Sara Mishara, Kaveh Nabatian, Carol Nguyen, Kim Nguyen , Martin Paul-Hus, Benoît Pilon, Simon Plouffe, Nicolas Renaud, Chloé Robichaud, Laurence Turcotte-Fraser, André Turpin, Salomé Villeneuve, Stéphanie-Anne Weber-Biron, Mariloup Wolfe, Aziz Zoromba, etc.
Among them: selections at the Oscars and the Cannes Film Festival, awards at the Berlinale, the Mostra, awards and mentions at the Toronto International Film Festival and the Festival du nouveau cinéma, awards at the Gémeaux, the Écrans awards Canadians, etc., not to mention the favorite cinematographer of the late Jean-Marc Vallée and Clint Eastwood’s cameraman on around twenty films. This is an important part of the cultural life and influence of Quebec. And few professional shoots take place in Montreal without the set having five, six or more former Concordia students.
Undress Paul to dress Jean
However, this is what your new pricing model for students outside Quebec threatens, because no other university in Quebec trains as many Quebec students in cinema, a vital field for our culture. Rather than funding the entire university network to meet its needs – already, during the Maple Spring, the lack of funding for Quebec universities was estimated at 600 million – your government decides to undress Paul to dress Jean.
Your measures will lead to an unprecedented financial crisis at Concordia University — a significant portion of whose funding comes from the presence of foreign and Canadian students — which will therefore jeopardize training and the level of excellence achieved in a very expensive field of education, and from which generations of Quebecers have benefited, while the training of new talents and workforce in this field should rather increase in order to meet the growing demand from platforms of all kinds. Nearly 60% of students enrolled in film production at Concordia are French-speaking and they will be directly affected by the effects of the new pricing on the entire university.
Your model will also impoverish intellectual life in Quebec and will even harm research. High-level research in graduate studies (master’s and doctorate) draws on international perspectives and exchanges. Do you have an idea of how often full-time tenure-track professorships in the field of film studies open up in Quebec universities? That’s about one position every six to eight years.
In the absence of a position in Quebec, I myself began my career as a professor at the University of Alberta where I taught from 1990 to 1995. As for the recruitment of Quebecers in French-speaking universities in Europe , it is negligible, or almost zero. In recent years, however, the PhDs we have trained at Concordia in film studies have found full-time, tenure-track positions in Japan, Scotland, the United States, English Canada, and the Netherlands.
Foreign student researchers are attracted to centers of excellence, but they bring traditions and methods that enrich research and teaching here. However, funding for graduate students (whether from Quebec or abroad) is based on the financial health of the university. The new pricing at 1er cycle, by impoverishing the university, will have the effect of preventing graduate exchanges by limiting our ability to attract foreign students, despite the excellence of our programs and our faculty. This will impoverish the pool of ideas circulating here and with which our Quebec students, whether French-speaking or English-speaking, are in contact.
An entire intellectual ecosystem weakened
It is therefore this environment of excellence which is at risk with the new pricing. Our Canadian competitors already have many more resources to attract students to their programs, including several tens of thousands of dollars per year for each doctoral researcher throughout their studies. Our graduate programs will disappear in the short term and our department will move from an internationally recognized research unit to a teaching unit at 1er cycle.
It will become more difficult to recruit professors and those who are here and who are engaged in research — and whose work, funded by the FRQSC or the CRSH, requires the hiring of graduate students — will leave Montreal to work in research universities: it is then an entire intellectual ecosystem, and fragile, which will be affected. In reality, it is the university as a whole which risks seeing its status change from a research university to a teaching university in the 1er cycle. It will be an inestimable loss for Montreal and for Quebec and a considerable setback for intellectual life here.
Your proposal suggests that French-speaking universities will have access to additional funds thanks to the deduction that will be made from the tuition fees of foreign students. If necessary, they could then fill the training void created by the shambles that a university like Concordia will have become. But it’s wrong. The new pricing will generate very little money for French-speaking universities, because foreign students will simply head to other universities in the country. As a result, there will be no funds to pay for the massive investments — new space, equipment, hiring of professors and technicians — needed to fill this void. It will be a race to the bottom, and it is Quebec culture and, as far as I am directly concerned, everything that concerns film production here, which will pay the price.
As a committed Francophone who is saddened to see the French language in decline in Montreal, I partly understand the spirit of your measures. But the game is not worth the effort. If this is the main issue, there are better solutions than impoverishing teaching and research institutions, and centers of excellence in numerous university disciplines, from which Quebec society as a whole benefits.
As for the challenge of parity in the university network, there are also other ways to proceed. It is not just the rectors, teachers and students of English-speaking universities who should be rebelling against your plan. I dare to hope that their counterparts in French-speaking universities will refuse a financial package that comes from the intellectual impoverishment of Quebec and Montreal, or at the very least, if they accept it, that they will do so with shame.