The Legault government struck a major blow by substantially increasing the tuition fees charged to university students coming from elsewhere in Canada or from abroad. And here is Quebec back in the dock. Seen from Toronto, the perfect metropolis of living together and decorum, the CAQ effrontery is further damning proof of the decline in the rights of the English-speaking minority in Quebec.
It would not occur to anyone in Quebec to tell Ontario how to adjust the tuition fees of its students. At most, we let out a modest cry of indignation when Laurentian University eliminates dozens of French programs. West of the Gatineau River (and also in New Brunswick), the linguistic rights of the French-speaking minority are constantly violated with the only reaction being a shrug of the shoulders from English Canada. Here, the English-speaking minority retains access to education and health care in English. It only takes a vote of the municipal council to maintain the bilingual status of a municipality, even if it is now predominantly French-speaking, if only out of nostalgic attachment to the past. The Anglos of Quebec are well protected, contrary to the alarmist speeches made by some of its representatives.
We have selective outrage in Canada. Despite the outcry caused by the new policy of the Minister of Higher Education, Pascale Déry, let’s put things into perspective. No English-speaking person from Canada or the rest of the world will be deprived of studying at McGill, Concordia or Bishop’s. They will just pay more. The “scandal”, if there is one, is limited to that.
This is an accessibility issue for less fortunate students who would like to study in English-speaking universities in Quebec. Again, is it really the role of the Quebec government to ensure the well-being of students from other provinces or the rest of the world?
The responsibilities of the Quebec government are mixed: ensuring the protection of French, which is in decline, while maintaining linguistic peace, promoting access to higher education first in French, without encroaching on the linguistic rights of the English-speaking minority, ensuring the equitable funding of Quebec universities, attracting talent from abroad and transmitting to them a passion for the richness of French-speaking culture.
From this angle, Minister Déry’s policy does not deserve an A+. The Office québécois de la langue française (OQLF) recently highlighted that 40% of university students in Montreal attend an English-speaking establishment. This goes well beyond the question of students from English Canada or elsewhere in the world.
Furthermore, the increase in tuition fees will have little or no impact on the protection of French. So what is the problem that we want to treat with this measure? It is the government’s responsibility to ensure that there is a rational link between its policies or laws and the objectives pursued in terms of public policy. Minister Déry, nor Prime Minister François Legault, have been persuasive in this regard.
The debate on the financing of English-speaking universities is far from sterile, as Deep Saini, principal and vice-chancellor of McGill University, stated this summer in our Ideas section. However, this debate cannot be carried out in haste, without convincing data and using measures with uncertain effects. The Legault government hardly consulted English-speaking universities before acting. He does not care about the impact of his policy on Concordia and Bishop’s, two universities that do not have the stability of McGill, whose endowment fund is close to two billion dollars.
The criticism does not only come from the English-speaking world. The president of the National Federation of Teachers of Quebec (FNEEQ-CSN), Caroline Quesnel, emphasizes that the policy reflects a disengagement from the government in financing the university network. “He is not going to finance it himself, he is going to rely on students to fill inequalities,” she observes.
A policy that makes students from English Canada and abroad the funders of the French-speaking network is not likely to generate collective support. It even risks being counterproductive because English-speaking universities and their staff, among whom we also find French-speakers, will be destabilized. Already, McGill announces the suspension of a 50 million French teaching program which was intended for its students, staff and professors, so that they can “fully integrate into Quebec society”.
The French-speaking university network suffers from chronic underfunding. French-speaking university research is losing influence in Quebec and elsewhere in the world. These are two national projects that must be tackled in a lasting manner. For the moment, the proposed measure, provisional and controversial, seems more punitive than visionary. We are capable of better.