Jean Charest pleads in favor of the richest universities, starting with Bishop’s University, located in the heart of his former electoral district. To give weight to its release, announced on the front page of The gallery, the former prime minister indicated that he had left politics for “more than ten years”. It is true that we have only seen him enter the race for leadership of the Canadian Conservative Party twice since.
Mr. Charest has also just commented on the report on “reconstruction” of the Liberal Party of Quebec. He only had good words on this subject, without specifying that it is a document endorsed by his son, Antoine Dionne Charest, and carried by the former senator André Pratte, the same one who supported in his race among the conservatives. Jean Charest also saw fit, in recent days, to rebuff another health reform project from Minister Christian Dubé. Let us admit that there are more discreet political retreats.
Mr. Charest argues that it is not a good idea to increase university tuition fees for foreign students. In 2012, however, the same man was in favor, quite the contrary, of a massive increase in fees for all students, disregarding the risk run by the less fortunate of finding themselves unable to gain a foothold in this education system. Jean Charest had sparked one of the worst social crises experienced by Quebec.
Are we seeing, a decade later, a turnaround in the situation?
The Minister of Higher Education, Pascale Déry, hopes that Quebec will no longer subsidize students who are not from Quebec as before in order to contribute, she says, to correcting the enormous imbalance which is growing between the financing of establishments French-speaking and English-speaking ones. Clearly, the rich English-speaking universities are lining their pockets, while the French-speaking universities are struggling to increase enrollment. The network of Quebec universities in particular has continued, since its creation, to be underfunded and, in doing so, remains only an unfinished promise in a system that we refuse to rethink. With the amounts saved, the minister says she can correct the imbalance a little.
The rectors of the richest educational establishments, starting with McGill, are opposed, like Mr. Charest, to the increase in tuition fees for students from elsewhere. This money helps to boost their income even further. Do you remember a single rector of these same universities who opposed the increase in fees requested from the majority in 2012?
In other words, increases which encourage the private accumulation of the better off and the maintenance of their prestige are considered good and defensible. But when they aim to serve the social mobility of an entire people, they are considered detestable and condemnable. Subjected to this logic of the commodification of knowledge, French-speaking universities have found themselves, in recent years, offering courses in English to better finance themselves.
The national conservatives of the CAQ, far from changing anything in this sad way of seeing education, affirm that this approach towards foreign students will allow it to redistribute 100 million dollars to French-speaking universities. It is true that this network needs to be better funded. But it is reasonable to wonder if, to achieve this, it is enough, as they say, to undress Peter to dress Paul.
Last August, columnist Michel Girard explained, in the pages of Montreal Journal, that the Legault government misappropriated the money it obtained from the federal government to finance the financial aid program for post-secondary studies for Quebec students. The “caquistan” government, which boasts by repeating that education is a priority, has thus embezzled some 940 million that it obtained from Ottawa, rather than using it, as it should, to help Quebec students. The same Michel Girard has also just shown that the tax arrangements put in place by the CAQ have resulted in depriving the State of some 6 billion dollars. What could education grow in a rain of millions?
This is without mentioning the dodges with public money. History will have a hard time considering the $500 checks sent to voters everywhere other than for what they are: despicable electoral maneuvers. Total cost of these pitiful seduction operations: 6.7 billion. While teachers in the public network rightly shout that they are among the lowest paid in Canada, it is reasonable to think that all this money would have better served the future of the community by investing it in education.
Should we also talk about the billions that continue to evaporate under our noses to condense under the sun of tax havens? Quebec, like Canada, turns its eyes away from these thefts perpetrated against society. The public debate on these questions is constantly alienated, to the point of seeing right-thinking people asking if, after all, the billionaires of the whole world, these unloved poor, are not taxed too much…
In this context of abandonment of common reason, is it really by stripping English-speaking universities that we must rethink education? We come from so far away. In the farmers’ newspaper, The Land of Home We, journalist Émilie Parent-Bouchard has just summarized, in a beautiful report, the history of state schools. A few decades ago, this was all that a large part of the population could count on in terms of education.
To suggest that it is foreigners and Anglos who are responsible for the decline of French and the common culture is something outrageous, considering the Quebec system’s own turpitudes in terms of educational management. But, “in Quebec, that’s how we live,” François Legault confines himself to telling us, once again looking only at Ontario.